A Gathering Of Old Men Analysis

Struggling With Surviving

With some connections to the idea of struggle and survival, we can use The Inheritance of Exile by Susan Muaddi Darraj and A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines to show that a home may not always be a safe and secure place. Both stories represent the importance of a rooted home with the exceptions to the difficulties within that home. We will see the struggles behind the immigrant Palestinian women now living in America as they share their personal stories with their daughters, of living in refugee camps. As for the old men gathered at a Louisiana sugarcane plantation known as Marshalls. They await Fix Boutan’s arrival for the murder of his son Beau Boutan. They will share their personal and collective
Layla has a difficult time connecting with her daughter Hanan. Hanan is a unique character in the fact that she divides herself from the standard Arabic culture because of her embarrassment that her mother isn’t a typical American. From a young age she was upset about her name and even despised her mother for having an accent and inability to pick up on American culture. Even after settling in Philadelphia and escaping the war back home. An example of Hanan’s lack of understanding for Layla’s culture can be represented from Hanan’s callous attitude towards her neighbor as she fails to gesture any form of respect. Her neighbor’s reaction triggers Layla’s thought about the war back home. How the last time she felt this nervous was when she was running away from the soldiers not knowing why the world was collapsing all of a sudden. Thus realizing how “Back home, I would go after Hanan and slap her face… this was the only country where disrespect was enforced” (103). This results in the struggle in the differences between homes because Layla is unable to discipline her daughter in America as opposed to the culture of the way things are done back home in Jerusalem. Layla’s personal struggle to imbue some of her own culture into Hanan differs from Tucker’s personal memory of his brother Silas beating the machine. His ability to demonstrate his pain, suffering and regrets results in him asking for his peoples forgiveness as a way of passing judgment over him for his inability to help his brother. Unlike Hanan who is someone who will never understand the struggle that it took to live in Layla’s world before Philadelphia. Rufe, one of the old men gathered at Marshall compensates for everyone else’s understanding that “We had all done the same thing sometime or another; we had all