Bravery

In the words of Mary Tyler Moore...     “Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.”

Bravery is not a characteristic that I posses, but it one that I admire. I admire people who laugh in the face of adversity, who take life into their hands, and who, not matter what, don’t give up. It is the challenges and roadblocks that we meet in life that teach us our most important lessons. My mother has a debilitating illness that fuses her bones together and causes everyday life tasks to be extremely difficult. And yet, I have never met a woman that is so determined to scoop her own ice cream and work eight hours a day. There is something admirable to not wanting help, to having so much will power that you are able to with stand excruciating amounts of pain just to say that you did it. I can’t think of a better way to describe the person I want to become. I want to be able to look at the bad things that happen in life and use them to make myself a stronger person. Jane (she has multiple names, I will use Jane to keep it simple), in the novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, is woman of great character. She looks adversity straight into the eye and spits in it. I have never read about a woman so willing to endure all pain just to glorify the death of her husband. She remains dedicated to her mission even if it means rape, starvation, and death. Her determination to bring her husband’s items to the place he most wanted to be, the United States, is extraordinary.  

A key chapter in novel is based on Jane’s arrival to America. Her optimism and expectations are rudely awakened when she ends up at lonely dark hotel with “Americas finest”.  Her journey through the night will represent her strength and also her trip to her lowest point and back. Rape was an inevitable part of Jane’s journey to America. She was stuck on a ship with crude men that would require debauchery for small amount of food and drink. But the hell didn’t end there. In Jane’s arrival at the hotel room, came the real truth about being a foreign girl in America: you are not protected, in the words of her rapist “I got lots of other things I can do to you” (113). Jane has to survive this night to start the rest of her life. Rock bottom is as low as it gets, and it should only get better from there. It was during this horrific night that Jane saw true evil and hit rock bottom. She saw the evil in the man that had helped her on her journey: it was inhuman and from another world (116). Her experience left her praying for enough strength to get through this so that she could end her life. I consider this rock bottom. Her pride and culture were jeopardized as soon as she began the journey to America, and slowly she was falling.

Jane is stronger than this though. It only took getting through it and some serious scrubbing for her to realize that she is here for a reason and there is no reason why she should be taking this form of punishment. She didn’t do anything wrong. She was there to honor her dead husband and instead she was being stripped of her honor, “I could not let my personal dishonor disrupt my mission” (118).He ability to endure is truly amazing. I can’t say that I would be able to handle such a terrifying ordeal.  But it is Jane’s personality to take life into her own hands, to take death one on one and beat it. She had done it before: she cheated death twice, now three. Jane had come to America to make peace with her husband’s death and begin her new life. It was supposed to be the land of opportunity, but instead it ended up being the land of sex, lies, and death. Her first day in America she beat the odds. She decided to kill the man that was so willing to strip her of her pride and honor. Although this is not an admirable feat to kill, I would have to say that I am proud of her willingness to stand up for herself, and take her life back from a disgusting semi-human being.

Jane says that “for every monster there is a hero” (114). Jane is the hero that defeated the nasty monster even when the odds were against her. She came to a foreign land with nothing but hope and determination, and she used those characteristics to get through horrific life events. This chapter represents Jane’s willingness to be an active participant of her life. She lets no one live her life for her. Although people have tried, they cannot bring her down, and this event is just another defeat for Jane. My mother is my hero. Someday I want to tell her that I have never met someone as brave and enduring as she is. I want to ask her I become brave. How do I take the negative events in my life and use determination and will power to get through them? How do I fight back the pain enough to get through the hard stuff? How do I live my life as an active participant instead of a passive observer? I want to brave, but in the mean time I will admire those hero’s that are.