Amor

The Struggle to Identity
Hurtson, Mernissi, and Kincaid each wrote of troubling journeys in finding themselves and their true identities through hardships. Even though these three women were from all different places, their opinions of self pride all paralleled one another. These women were caught within the boundaries of different forms of slavery and rebelled against them to prove theirradiant self pride would prevail. In each story the identity of these women was challenged, and overcome by all, continuing to model the sense of pride all of the women felt for themselves and for their cultures.
In “How it Feels to be Colored Me,” Hurston eludes to her strong sense of self pride through a past of segregation and inequality. Hurston lived in Florida and never truly knew the downfallsof being African American in this time until she left for school in Jacksonville. She dives into the discovery of her identity and her own self-pride. She felt pride in being African American, even though she was deemed a second class citizen by the whites. She was not ashamed despite the hardships she felt later in her life due to discrimination. She was proud to be African American and alwaysfelt as though she were a part of American society. Back then, she was “everybody’s Zora” (191), she was free from the alienating feeling of inequality. When she moved, she immediately was labeled as "a little colored girl” (191). With this new label, she still rose above and said she was not “tragically colored” (192). She was too busy to stop to think about the pain and damage thatdiscrimination can cause, and as a “dark rock surged upon” (192) She ended up with feelings of being even stronger because of those hardships that she was forced to endure. 
Though her self pride is apparent, she does acknowledge moments when she is able to sense her racial difference. In the final metaphor she compares herself to a brown bag stuffed with random objects. She describes placing all people intodifferent colored bags that, and continues on to say that if these were emptied into a large pile and then randomly re-filled there would not be much altered. This suggests her thinking humans as essentially all the same, and that we are much more similar than what it seems. Hurston concludes by eluding to the “the Great Stuffer of Bags” (194) as the Creator. Her suffering and founding of selfpride came about through her ancestral struggle through slavery for equality in a harsh and hurtful world. She realized her position would only better herself and her positivity about the future.
Mernissi lived in New York and was originally from Morocco. Through, “Size 6: The Western Woman’s Harem” her writing depicts her journey through social standards and finally finding her self pride. Shefound her identity through a sense of beauty. In the United States, after Mernissi was told they did not have a size six in the department store, she felt empowered. Worth of women in the west is unrealistic and the standards of beauty are unattainable. She felt thankful those pressures were not placed upon herself and were not a part of her culture. Her whole life she was to be veiled and practiceher sacred Islamic customs. Being a woman with large hips meant an ideal candidate for having children and was deemed beautiful in Morocco. When she came to the United States she was taught the opposite, that she was not skinny enough nor beautiful.
Mernissi shows that our society’s rigid, harsh, and wrongful expectations of women’s bodies create an environment as restrictive and demeaning as aharem. She speaks of how women are negatively affected by body image, and how their self esteem suffers as they strive to imitate what they think society wants. “Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eyes of its beholder turns the educated modern Western women into a harem slave” (198).  Mernissi places the blame on both men and women.
She...