Unconditional Love Essay, Research Paper

Love is highly cherished. With all the committednesss and contracts and vows made, love continues to be cherished. Asha Bandele, the writer of and as The Prisoner & # 8217 ; s Wife: A Memoir, realizes that no affair if she is suspended from school or divorces her hubby or disappoints her parents, love will suppress and prevail over adversities and errors.

Asha was non a disadvantaged kid turning up in New York. She was able to go to respectable schools, live in a atomic place, and have exposure to & # 8220 ; the humanistic disciplines & # 8221 ; ( 25 ) . Her parents cared for her and gave her chances they did non hold life in a universe of choler and bias. Asha was exposed to love as a kid and seems to believe as an grownup that love does non hold boundaries. These boundaries disappear if the love given is unconditioned.

Unconditional love is evident in Asha & # 8217 ; s relationship with Rashid. There are two events when their relationship is dry. Asha & # 8217 ; s love allowed her, even after Rashid & # 8217 ; s confessions about his life to her, to & # 8220 ; lie, every bit fitted as possible, in the criminal of his weaponries & # 8221 ; desiring to be in & # 8220 ; no other topographic point & # 8221 ; ( 16 ) . She feels protected by Rashid & # 8217 ; s weaponries while he is protected, yet restrained, inside a gaol.

This protection both Asha and Rashid receive is dry because merely as Asha needs protection and comfort from the worlds of her life, the universe outside of gaol demands to be protected from Rashid & # 8217 ; s offense. And protection is found in gaol, a harsh, cold, and barbarous life style. Yet within this life style, Asha reaches into her bosom and psyche to expose non merely herself, but besides Rashid to love that abides no regulations or Torahs. The love has no strings attached. It is unconditioned.

The 2nd sarcasm is when Asha confesses that throughout her two dimensional relationship with Rashid, she & # 8220 ; didn & # 8217 ; t lose hope & # 8230 ; kept stretch, compulsive, like an nut & # 8221 ; ( 37 ) . Asha & # 8217 ; s relationship with Rashid is two dimensional because of this dependence she seems to hold. Previously to run intoing Rashid, Asha abused drugs and intoxicant as though the two were like eating confect and imbibing H2O. This life style is one dimension. Her 2nd dimension is this new dependence that she feels towards Rashid. She needs to speak to him. She needs to see him. She needs to experience him. These demands are non illegal such as her drug maltreatment, something she could hold been jailed for. This new dependence of love is the sarcasm. Asha is guilty of love, yet there is no sentence in gaol for this guilt.

The most dear pages that Asha writes are the 1s that are descriptive of her emotions, ideas and feelings. Her gap pages depicting love and its different facets are gripping as she puts her ideas of love on paper ( 13-17 ) . Then Asha writes a list of rolling ideas and skulking inquiries for Rashid such as & # 8220 ; what did you make on the twenty-four hours they came and got you, the twenty-four hours you were arrested? Was there some kind of predicting? Did you feel that it was coming & # 8221 ; ( 59 ) ? Last, reading about the agonizing process Asha has to digest every clip she enters the somberness of the prison walls to see Rashid becomes non merely a & # 8220 ; desensitising & # 8221 ; procedure to Asha, but besides to the reader. Asha eventually crosses over from voluntary to an inmate & # 8217 ; s associate. This is a passage that changes her life.

Asha and Rashid & # 8220 ; get down to be merely in the freedom of the imaginativeness & # 8221 ; ( 67 ) . The imaginativeness, though, is, or better yet, can be a unsafe instrument because to utilize imaginativeness freely can do injury and hurting. For case, Asha and Rashid imagine music playing in their caputs so that they can dance together during visits. Once they leave their inventive province, they are brought back to the barbarous world of prison life & # 8211 ; bland floors, unfertile walls, difficult chairs, and aliens staring on their personal minute.

Rashid has & # 8220 ; started and stopped in one minute & # 8221 ; harmonizing to his prison life ( 70 ) . Rashid is more stuck in this minute instead than being stopped. This is his minute in life when he would us his imaginativeness to get away world. Rashid would dissemble himself to confront a better universe than the prison universe, although, if it had non been for his prison experience, Rashid would non be the type of her individual he is now, nor wou

ld he have met Asha.

Asha, on the other manus, has & # 8220 ; disguise [ vitamin D ] & # 8221 ; her life and hid & # 8220 ; behind her head covering & # 8221 ; as Janie did during her matrimony to Jody ( Hurston, 84 ) ; she has masked her life really immature before she unveils herself through her metempsychosis during her relationship with Rashid ( 71 ) . Her cover was her concealment from the universe. Asha masked herself by mistreating drugs, imbibing intoxicant, and utilizing work forces as her shield to derive protection from the inhuman treatments of the universe she saw ; yet these work forces were non her shields, but her enemies because they used her organic structure for their pleasances, and they lied to her.

Asha views her life as though she has nil to populate for. She sees herself as a common noun and non a proper noun as she invariably writes her name as asha. As Ida B. Wells writes in Spell It with a Capital, many non-African posterities see the word Negro as a common noun and that it should be written as Black. Negro is a proper noun because it describes a group of people and who those people are & # 8211 ; African American. Asha implies that she does non count in life and, hence, should non be given adequate recognition to capitalise her name.

Even though Asha feels worthless after her childhood and adolescent old ages, Rashid & # 8217 ; s imprisonment causes both to be true to each other and to self ( 72 ) . Once Asha realizes that she has been sexually abused during her adolescence, her masks fall off with greater velocity. She becomes vulnerable and about as desensitized to work forces as Rashid has to prison strip hunts, to work forces because & # 8220 ; she felt wanted & # 8221 ; by so many work forces & # 8220 ; and human & # 8221 ; ( 85 ) . Drugs, intoxicant, nutrient, telecasting, people, household, friends, and anything else habit-forming harmonizing to Asha is non needfully habit-forming or unsafe, but an flight from her life. Asha & # 8217 ; s flight was puting her head and psyche outside her organic structure. She took the emotional out of the physical.

Between pages 65-67, Asha writes about when, and at what minute, life alterations. Does a alteration in one & # 8217 ; s life alteration the way one is to take in life? Does the way alteration, or could it merely be the way one is to be on originally? Did Rashid & # 8217 ; s life alteration the minute he killed a individual, the minute he was sentenced, or is prison life his fate? Asha ponders these inquiries because she besides wants to cognize whether or non it is her fate to be with Rashid or if it was a simple turn of destiny when her professor calls her to fall in in voluntary speech production at a prison, which leads her to run into Rashid, autumn in love with Rashid, and leave Rashid.

Asha & # 8217 ; s actions become disconcerting when she leaves Rashid ; yet a reader may sympathise. The minute Asha realizes she needs more, more work forces, more animalism in a relationship, she leaves Rashid to pick up all the pieces as she goes away to go to San Francisco to run into new people. Rashid is dumped. Yet, in order for Asha to be certain of her love, she has to see other people to do certain that Rashid is the 1 ; hence, a reader should non merely sympathise, but besides sympathize with her actions.

The last subdivision of Asha & # 8217 ; s memoirs engrosses a reader in what she writes and provinces. There is no clip for a reader to halt, reflect, and remark on Asha & # 8217 ; s experiences. Her experiences of her abortion, her uncertainties after, even before, her matrimony to Rashid, her emotions during the first clip she and Rashid make love, the emotions of go forthing Rashid at the prison, unable to take him place to be hers, are written squarely utilizing blunt vocabulary to do her points clear like Sojourner Truth does in & # 8220 ; Ain & # 8217 ; T I a Woman, & # 8221 ; composing, & # 8220 ; I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns and no adult male could head [ me ] & # 8230 ; could work every bit much and eat every bit much as a adult male & # 8221 ; ( Lines 11-13, 15-16 ) . There is no room for remarks in either writer & # 8217 ; s works because the authorship is direct & # 8211 ; no room for analysis. This is Asha & # 8217 ; s life. This is her narrative. She told it the manner it was and the manner it is. Period.

Bibliography

Bandele, Asha. The Prisoner & # 8217 ; s Wife: A Memoir. New York: Pocket Books. 1999.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyess Were Watching God. New York: Harper and Row. 1937. Revised Ed. Perennial Library. 1990.

Truth, Sojourner. & # 8220 ; Ain & # 8217 ; T I a Woman. & # 8221 ;

Wells, Ida B. & # 8220 ; Spell It With a Capital. & # 8221 ;