Coming of Age -- Struggles

Coming of Age -- Struggles of Identity, Politics, and Ethics Coming of age is not merely a personal struggle, defined by changes in one's body and the structure of one's social life, as adolescence often is viewed in America. Viewed from an international and multicultural perspective, coming of age is also defined by an adolescent's cultural and political context.

For example, in her memoir Persian Girls, Nahid Rachlin depicts her young life in Iran as being defined by her gender and her culture's limiting view of femininity, despite the fact that Rachlin was born during the pro-Western reign of the Shah. It is not simply in the fundamentalist-controlled regimes, like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that female oppression can occur.

The horrors of this regime are compellingly depicted in the educational scenes of Mohsin Makhmalbaf's film "Khandahar" where young girls are told that they can no longer study, and upon puberty they must veil their faces, equating a silencing of the self with becoming a woman. But in her father's household, Rachlin is presented with an equally stark equation of being an adult woman and being a good housekeeper and little else: Mohtaram joon, when are you going to learn to run the household well?" he'd say.

"Look at the way you shop.

We either don't have enough fruit or we have too much of it; the porch is full of pigeon droppings, and can't you at least tell Ali to clean it? Or get Fatemeh to come and help out? You're a grown woman now, not that little girl I married" (Rachlin 47) Rachlin suggests that there are more pro-woman aspects to Iranian culture, as envisioned in her aunt's household, but ultimately she chooses studying in America to adopting the life of an Islamic wife and mother, which she regards as a return to an infantile state, rather than truly progressing into adult autonomy.

She is inspired by the American films loved by her sister, Pari, rather than the prospect of an arranged marriage and becoming a woman as envisioned in the cultural terms of her father. But to find her adult identity, the young author must leave her native land and family and redefine herself in the terms of a new culture.

Unlike, for example, the protagonist of the earlier autobiographical novel a Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih which casts the West as a corrupting influence for its male, African protagonist, specifically in sexual and violent terms, for the young Iranian Shiite Muslim Rachlin, Western influence is positive. Watching American films and receiving American influence through study defines the new sense of adult self in a positive way for Rachlin, while European cultural influences prove the undoing of the naive and pure African.

To come of age in Iran, Rachlin sees as no true maturity at all for a woman. Political influence upon adolescent development is not limited to the female experience. This illustrated in Khaled Hosseini's the Kite Runner. In this novel, the life of the young protagonist and his father is changed irrevocably by the instatement of the fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Once wealthy and respected, the family loses its status entirely upon coming to America.

Amir's early sense of privilege is lost, but he is also haunted by the way he behaved to a lower-class boy, Hassan, the son of his father's servant. Amir abandoned his kite runner and left the boy viciously attacked. This sense of cowardice in the face of evil creates a negative self-image that Amir internalizes and adopts as a part of his adult sense of self. "I became what I am today at the age of twelve," he says, brooding upon what he sees as his inherently fallen character (Hosseini 1).

Unlike his father, who turns his anger outward towards the Taliban regime, Hassan's adolescent experiences make him ambivalent about his lost, high-class status because of the political revolution in his homeland. On some level, Amir feels it was deserved and a just punishment of his character. Amir comes of age with a sense of loss, or one could say he never comes of age, for unlike Rachlin, he is unable to abandon the past at all, and sees his present identity only in terms of his childhood, not the future.

The protagonist of the film "Sugar Cane Alley," however, does not have the luxury of mentally dwelling in the past, because his present reality present holds little promise for him. An intelligent and talented Martinique boy, Jose is given a scholarship to study in a prestigious urban French school, and is forced to abandon the grandmother who is the only parent he has ever known.

At the school, his intellectual legitimacy is questioned, as his authorship of an essay is denied, even by a teacher, who cannot believe that a boy from such a humble background could ever be so articulate. But even though the film views the education of the young may by his people's colonizers with greater ambivalence than Rachlin views her Western experiences, there is no turning back in "Sugar Cane Alley" to the.