Another Year of Zulus

When I found out that we were going to be reading Zulus in this class, I couldn’t tell if I was excited or annoyed. Maybe it was because I had read it before that I thought this was going to be a breeze or maybe it was the fact that I had read it before that I knew it was going to be a difficult book to get through, for a second time. But holding the same book in my hand that I did last year, reading the same words that I had done just a year ago, I feel as though I am reading a completely different book.

The last time that I read this book I was in a class titled “Jean Toomer’s Cane and Intertextualities” during this class we talked about racism, Greek plays, civil rights, death, and many other big concepts. Because of this, the way that we looked at Zulus really did relate to these topics. In an effort to remember how I and my classmates looked at this text, I returned back our Reader and Text blog to look back at what my classmates said. Sabrina Bramwell brings up what the text might be about by writing in her blog post titled Unleashing your Abecedarian, “Though the end of ‘Zulus’ was not stated clearly I think an important point to take away from this work is understanding the significance of knowledge and power in acquiring it”.

It is funny because just a year ago my classmates and I were looking at a story so differently just because of the books that we were looking at in the course. When we were reading this book we referenced words like “power” and “knowledge”. In this class, however, I feel as though we are kind of working on with the opposite spectrum, the idea that because of our society, sometimes there is a lack of knowledge and some people use their power to their advantage. Take for instance the scene when Alice is talking to Kevin about if Theodore Theodore is evil (p.141), I feel as though if I brought this up last year I would have mentioned how powerful Alice was at this time to find out everything she can about the people around her. Now when I read this, I can really only see how helpless Alice is. She just truly does not know who she can and can trust.

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