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After examining her national and family history, Williams came to believe that the 1950's aboveground detonation of a nuclear bomb near her family's home could be the source of her family's struggle with cancer, as well as the cause of the community's propensity to contract cancer as a whole. Williams details her feelings about this fact in a personal as well as a clinical manner. This is not simply a natural and historical tragedy, but a tragedy she must live with for the rest of her own life -- she will never have another mother, just as many of the flooded-out birds will never have another home. The author admits that the bomb she remembers seeing explode as a young child, the bomb that could have caused the cancer that killed her mother, haunts her in her dreams.
Thus her search for a source of blame for an apparently random act of sickness and suffering is not simply fantasy on the part of the author. It is based in clinical evidence. Likewise, the difficulties the birds experience are not like a random flood that occurs 'naturally' at times in nature. If the government had not allowed the over-development, the wild creatures could have found a home. As with the nuclear testing, the government placed life as a lower priority than money -- it was more important to test the bombs for the military industrialist complex and protect people from the Russians in theory, than to protect the future...
Her mother and grandmother are dead. She cannot restore the developed land of Salt Lake, nor dry the basin, or bring her mother back from the dead. She cannot even protect herself from her own likelihood of developing cancer. She can only, Williams states, love the world as it is, and find refuge in protecting the environment of the present, whatever the future may hold.
Refuge is a powerful text because it connects human suffering to the suffering of other species and the suffering of the environment. It shows that human beings must think in the long-term rather than in the short-term about prolonging human and animal life and protecting the environment. It also reminds people that to be effective, government cannot simply think about the political and economic needs of the moment. Government too must think in the long-term, and readers and voters must think in the long-term when addressing environmental needs. And if they do not, the lives that are harmed may not only be animal lives.
Tempest Shakespeare's the Tempest and Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent Slavery Slavery is one of the central themes in The Tempest. However, there are many different levels of slavery included other than the typical master and servant relationship that is based on ownership. There are also instances of mental kind of slavery that it carried out by Prospero who can control the minds of others. The two forms of slavery are closely intertwined in a
Tempest In Act I, scene 2 of Shakespeare's The Tempest, the protagonist Prospero explains his case to both his daughter and his familiar spirit Ariel. Thus, the main themes of the play are elucidated in this one scene more than any other. The concept of power, of power overused and power usurped are evident and constant in Act One, scene 2 of The Tempest. This early in the play, before the
Tempest In the epilogue of A Midsummer's Night Dream, Puck speaks to the audience directly not as an actor or a character in a play, while in The Tempest, Prospero is still in character but begs the audience to set him free so he can return to Naples. For Puck, King Oberon and all the other actors are mere shadows, exactly as Theseus described the actors in the play-within-a-play, and his
Miranda even says, "My father's of a better nature, sir,/Than he appears by speech" (I.ii.500-501). Shakespeare may have been writing Prospero like this only to juxtapose his warm nature at the end of the play, which gives the play a "and they lived happily ever after" feel. Prospero uses his magic to control the spirit Ariel, which gives him a lot of power. Prospero knows of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculos'
This is, in fact, the basis of colonization as the natives are subdued and forced to abandon their language and traditions in favor of the colonizers'. Critics who supported the thesis of "The Tempest" being a description of the Spaniards' experience in the Americas considered Caliban to be a Native American despite the multitude of details that differentiate him from the Indians as they were described in the travelers' reports
The similar treatment of these very different minor characters highlight's Prospero's obsession with control, as well as his own return to the human world. Consider that although Prospero mourns his exile, he even uses captivity as an enticement for Miranda and Ferdinand's courtship, forcing the young man to carry wood like he does Caliban. The young man responds cheerfully, "There be some sports are painful, and their labor/Delight in