What is Literature?

Literature is a term used to describe written and sometimes spoken material. Derived from the
Latin word literature meaning "writing formed with letters," literature most commonly refers to
works of the creative imagination, including poetry, drama, fiction, nonfiction, and in some
instances, journalism, and song. 

As man started to walk the earth, he developed a system of recording down things around him
and interpreting them according to his own perception.

This act of documenting may have been the start of the medium. Not all written material may
be considered literature. Only those that closely emulate the human experience, emotion and
thought are regarded as literature.

Afro-Asian Literature:

is a term for writing; Written by people from mixed African-Arab ethnicity, or African-Asian
ethnicity

- in modern times, part of world literature, Afro-Asian literature is a separate segment of

writing of experiences in Africa and Asia for further

- Afro-Asian Literature mirrors not only the customs and traditions of African and Asian
countries but also their philosophy of life which on the whole are deeply and predominantly
contemplative and hauntingly sweet.

- Afro-Asian Literature is the reflection of the storm and the stress of developing nations
seeking a place under the sun which every student must understand so he may know how this
literature affects the history and culture of a nation.

So when it was started?

The background of Afro-Asian literature dates to the very beginnings of when the first mixed
race individual began writing.

An exact harder to come by given wide topic to the question ask to be answered. Like most
literature you can be assured that earlier written in documents were based on stories past by
word of mouth.
Teacher: According to the teacher, the black people didn’t evolved as fast as the white ones,
so the palms without tan is a memory about the times when they were walking on their
four like monkeys.

Priest: The priest gives much prettier explanation, but it still looks fake. He says that God left
the hands of the black people light-colored because they hold them together during the
prayer so often that the skin has no time to become tanned.

Dona Dores said to the boy that though the black people are destined to be slaves, their
hands were deliberately made white by God, so that they won’t soil anything they bring to
their masters. Another version was that the palms were bleached during the constant
picking of white cotton or doing the laundry from day to day.

Some of the adult men play a stupid prank on the boy, telling him the outright silly story
they came up with on the spot. One of them told the narrator that the whites were created
first and then they made black people by themselves from clay and second-hand forms
previously used by them. But due to the lack of space and their neglection, the whites
overbaked the clay and it became ashes.

Analysis:

The full story “The hands of the Black” by Bernardo Honwana takes only a couple of
minutes to read, but it needs much more time to think it over. The story starts from the
simple question a schoolboy he asks just out of curiosity, but the answers turn it to
something much more complicated. The comprehension of the questions the adults ask in
return and the answers they give can say a lot about the world of racial discrimination.

The only story that satisfies the narrator is the story of his mother. Several times we, as
readers, see that Bernardo Honwana draws our attention to the fact the woman is crying
while telling her story. She starts from the words that persuade the boy more than
everything else: “God made blacks because they had to be”. This single phrase makes
everything right: the very existence of the black people is the natural and legitimate thing.
They are not meant to be the instruments, they don’t exist on purpose, they just are,
because God wanted the Earth to be populated with people of different skin colors.

So, to remind that inside all the people are equal and the real value of a person is
determined not with their skin color but with the deeds they do with their hands,
God made the hands of the black people lighter than the rest of their skin. The
story ends with the words of the narrator that he has never seen someone crying
so much as his mother, without being hurt.

We can conclude that the story of the discrimination of the black people is
something very personal for the narrator’s mother, though we learn that she is
clearly a white woman. Still she cries and emphasises several times that the black
people just need to exist because God wants it. The woman chooses the exactly
right words to give to her son the most right, though biologically incorrect answer.