Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...characters grow calmly into a happiness that is, inevitably, cut short by war and its aftermath, "the Lent that was to endure all our lives." One measure of West's skill is her ability to make private suffering seem moving and memorable, even when set against a background of public cataclysm...
...Brezhnev became Andropov became Chernenko. Last week the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, strode under Western eyes in the now easily recognizable setting of a Moscow funeral for a head of state: Soviet citizens lined up and bundled up in what seems an eternal freeze; Chopin thudding in the background; gray-coated soldiers marching stiff legged like a row of A's; a body laid out like a doll atop a hill of red and white flowers. Familiar sites: the House of Unions, the Historical Museum, the Lenin Mausoleum. Familiar rituals: foreign dignitaries solemnly shaking hands with...
...ourselves than of the Soviets. For nearly half a century, the West has been a people of gate watchers in regard to the Soviet Union. Once more we address our questions to the gatekeeper: Does his relative youth signal flexibility or merely a longer reign of adamancy? Does his background in agriculture suggest less emphasis on the military? Is this changing of the guard merely plus ca change? No one on the other side answers, of course, so the questions bounce back to us who pose them, rattling around in their own echoes while we stand outside like the relatives...
...SARAH'S BACKGROUND does parallel Lee's; she too, is a child of middle-class Philadelphia Blacks. Her father is a preacher in the prosperous and ironically named New African Church. Reverend Phillips is also active in the civil rights movement. Sarah recalls Sunday sermons punctuated by Baptist baptisms with the same uneasiness she feels about the historic March on Washington, in which her parents participated. To the young Sarah, the civil rights movement seems "dull, a necessary burden on my conscience, like good grades or hungry people in India." For a girl whose most dramatic bouts with racism...
...given for Sarah, who is bent on defying the respectable expectations of her family. But even in Paris, when she lives with a Frenchman, Henri, and his two friends, Sarah is reminded of her roots in an ugly scene. Henri calls her "notre Negresse pasteurisee" and describes her background as a symbolic rape of an Irishwoman by a big, Black buck. In his insults, Sarah decides, Henri has summarized the heritage she must inevitably face by returning to America...