The Analysis of Gloria Naylor's and Kyoko Mori's Literary Pieces

Fawad Khan

WRI 102

May 5, 2008

There have been times where many of us might have experienced someone make a comment about us. Disregarding the fact whether it was a compliment or an insult, those set of words were meant to make us feel in someway. When one thinks about the importance that words have, the idea is hard to comprehend since words independently hold no meaning. It is the way people feel about those words, which makes us feel accordingly. We as humans care about what others think of us, and therefore are either offended or pleased by someone’s comments. If one reflects on this idea, there are very few words out there that make us feel nothing. Every word has an emotion and reaction attached to it, which essentially gives them meaning and significance. In Gloria Naylor’s (2005) “Mommy, What Does Nigger Mean” and Kyoko Mori’s (2005) “Language”, both authors discuss the idea of how words and language can mean different things based upon the concept of how individuals view it.

Naylor (2005) begins her narrative by describing an incident when she was a child and recalled bragging about her grade to the white boy who sat behind her in her third grade; upon hearing her boasting he replied by using the word “nigger”. This wasn’t the first time she was exposed to the word; it was however the first time she felt she needed to know what it meant. Since she was part of an extensive family, the word nigger had been used in front of her before, but when uttered it was for different reasons, all of which were positive. Naylor continues to explain that when the word nigger was used in her household, it was said within a context where it stood for something completely different. It was used to recognize close friends, while also used in the possessive sense as it became a term to describe a loved one. The word that whites used to demean African Americans was converted into a word that was constructive and exclusive to them.

In Naylor’s (2005) essay, she...