Some Are Born to Sweet Delight Summary

A family takes in a young man. The house has a policy of not allowing Irish people to rent lodging, but there is no discrimination against other nationalities. The new lodger is polite and tidy. The family's seventeen-year-old daughter, Vera, takes an interest in the lodger.

Once, after a night of partying with friends, Vera returns home drunk and sick. She is embarrassed that the lodger sees her in that condition, but the lodger helps her and never mentions the incident afterward. Vera sees the lodger in passing, and in one meeting she introduces herself, and the lodger says that his name is Rad.

One Sunday, Vera encounters the lodger in the garden, reading newspapers. She remains in the garden and has a conversation. Vera spends less time with her friends and more time with Rad. One day Rad cooks a meal for the family, and all the family members...

But one of her most harrowing Some Are Born to Sweet Delight is the fictional fleshing out of one of the theories of how Pan Am Flight 103 came to be blown to bits over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December, 1988. Most of the tale is disarmingly tranquil. The horror of international terrorism lounges quietly in the background until the chilling finish.

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Another story I liked from Jump and Other Stories. In this story a family decides to bring in a little more money by have a lodger stay at their house.The family has a daughter named Vera who works as a secretary. One night when Vera comes home drunk after a night spent out with her friends she meets the lodger. He wipes he face with a cool cloth after she has thrown up. The next day as she passes him in the hall she introduces herself to him. Another day she sees him outside and they begin to talk. Vera begins to spend more of her time with lodger named Rad than with her old friends. Soon Rad and Vera are dating in their own way. She meets the friends her and he goes to movies with her. Vera gets pregnant and at that point Rad says he will marry her because he has "chosen her". Vera is happy to tell her friends that she is getting married and is going abroad to visit the groom's family. Just before she gets on the plane Rad adds one more package to her bag that he says contains plastic toys for his sister's kid. It is a bomb. Over the ocean the plane blows up because a new type of bomb that security systems can not detect has gone off.

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In his bookOrientalism, Edward Said wrote that the West judges the Orient asbeing peculiar and exotic. According to him, this often functions as a source for curiosityby the West. This is clearly visible in the short storySome Are Born To Sweet DelightbyNadine Gordimer and Witi Ihimaeras poemDinner With A Cannibal. Gordimer and Ihimaera are both post-colonial writers; Gordimer from South Africa and Ihimaera fromNew Zealand. Even though their background is quite different Gordimer is a SouthAfrican from Jewish descent and Ihimaera is a Maori both are concerned with the situation of the formerly colonized in their respective countries. Orientalism constructs abinary division in which the Orient is seen as the Other by the West. The colonized subject is characterized as primitiveand the Western colonizer as sophisticated. This theory of Orientalismand the related concept of the Other applies to both works offiction. It shapes the stories and even though their representations are different shows a clear connection between them.ForSome Are Born To Sweet DelightOrientalism works in two ways: via the main character and via the writer. The main character, Vera, falls in love with Rad. Rad is an Middle Eastern immigrant renting a room in Veras house. Vera falls in love with Rad for his mysteriousness and exoticism. According to John McLoad, the Orientspeculiarity is crucial to Orientalism The Orient is not just different; it is oddly different unusual, fantastic, bizarre The Orients eccentricity often function[s] as asource of mirth, marvel and curiosity for Western writers and artists (McLoad 44). This description fits to Veras idea of Radexotic, coming from an exotic faraway place: He must be thinking of where he came from; very hot, she imagined it, desert and thickly-white cubes of houses with palm trees. (p.449) Vera has a very one-sided view of Rad. This view is even though she is drawn by his mysteriousness that Rad is inferior. When Vera finds out she is pregnant of Rad, and decides to tell him, he says that they will marry:[Y]ou are going to be my wife.Because of this?a baby?because Ive chosen you.(In: Ross 453)Vera then thinks: Of course, being a foreigner, he didnt come out with things the way an English speaker would express them. This is very much in line with Orientalismsbinary division (McLoad 40). This is the division between what Bill Ashcroft et al. call the civilized and the savage (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 29); He is the savage, she the civilized. Rad, in this respect is the Other, and their relationship is unbalanced. Vera is unaware of Rads cultural background and his persona in general. She has a veryWestern way of looking at his culture, with admiration, but without respect.Besides via Vera, Orientalism also works via the author. She has created Rad as a racial stereotype, which goes hand-in-hand with Orientalisms binary division. Rads character fits rightly into the stock character proposed by McLoad as the murderous and violent Arab (McLoad 44). The narrative shows that Rad fits this stereotype.Throughout the story, the narrative

is told from the perspective of Vera. Vera takes Rad to show him the town, for a picnic and to the cinema. But it is he who takes her hand when she got sick marking their initial meeting and he who makes love to her impregnating her. Furthermore, returning to the example above, Rad says that he has chosen Vera. He seems to initiate her downfall. This portrayal of Rad as the murderous and violent Arab is in line with Veras perhaps unconscious separation between the civilized and the savage. This shows that not only the characters, but also Gordimer acts within the construction of Orientalism.As can be seen, both authors approaches towards Orientalism are different. Anexplanation for this can be drawn from their social backgrounds. Gordimer is a South African writer and political activist. During the time of the apartheid she fought against it. When she publishedJump and other stories in 1991, of whichSome Are Born To SweetDelightis part, the downfall of the South African National Party was in motion and apartheid was being abolished. In her book on Nadine Gordimer, Judie Newman quotes Gordimer: If you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself. People like myself have two births, and the second one comes when you brake out of the colour bar. (Newman 15). Orientalism is an institution that seems to be related to apartheid. Even though it does not go so far as to be part of racism, Orientalism does describe a preconception towards the Orient, which lies at the basis of apartheid. AsGordimer is an anti-apartheid writer, it is striking that she does not use the concept of the Other and racial stereotypes in her battle against apartheid, but rather as a means ofenforcing the racial stereotype of the Arab.

Pan Am Flight 103 (also known as the Lockerbie bombing) was a Pan Am transatlantic flight from London Heathrow Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York that was destroyed by a bomb on Wednesday, 21 December 1988, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members.[2] Large sections of the plane crashed into Lockerbie, Scotland, killing an additional 11 people on the ground.Following a three-year joint investigation by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, murder warrants were issued for two Libyan nationals in November 1991. Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi eventually handed over the two men for trial at Camp Zeist, Netherlands, in 1999 after protracted negotiations and UN sanctions. In 2001 Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was jailed for the bombing. In August 2009 he was released by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He died in May 2012 remaining the only person to be convicted for the attack.

In 2003, Gaddafi accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid compensation to the families of the victims, although he maintained never having given the order for the attack.[3] During the Libyan civil war in 2011, a former government official contradicted Gaddafi claiming the Libyan leader had personally ordered the bombing.[3] Despite these assertions, numerous conspiracy theories have developed regarding responsibility for the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103.To date, the atrocity remains the deadliest aviation incident, as well as the deadliest act of terrorism, to occur in the United Kingdom.Pan Am Flight 103 conspiracy theories suggest a number of possible explanations for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988. Some of the theories preceded the official investigation by Scottish police and the FBI; others arose from different interpretation of evidence presented at Libyan agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's 2000/2001 trial; yet others have been developed independently by individuals and organisations outside the official investigation.[1]The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) was the first suspect, in light of a threat it issued against U.S. and Israeli interests before the bombing. The state of Iran was also in the frame very early, with its motive thought to be revenge for the July 1988 shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by USSVincennes.[2] This theory was later reinforced by Abolghasem Mesbahi, former head of Iranian intelligence operations in Europe, who stated after defecting to Germany that Iran had asked Libya and Abu Nidal, a Palestinian guerrilla leader, to carry out the attack on Pan Am 103.[3] In his 1994 film The Maltese Double Cross, Allan Francovich suggested that rogue CIA agents were implicated in a plot that involved them turning a blind eye to a drug running operation in return for intelligence. Evidence presented at Megrahi's trial, together with concerns about the reliability of his conviction, spawned a theory that Libya was framed. Abu Nidal allegedly confessed to the bombing before his death, thereby triggering another theory, while Joe Vialls put forward his own explanation that relied on the bomb being detonated remotely. Finally, in December 1989, Patrick Haseldine suggested that the bombing was an assassination by South Africa's apartheid government of United Nations Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson.________________________________________________________________Apartheid (Afrikaans pronunciation:[prtit]; from Afrikaans[1] "the state of being apart") was a system of racial segregation enforced through legislation by the National Party (NP) governments, who were the ruling party from 1948 to

1994, of South Africa, under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained. Apartheid was developed after World War II by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party and Broederbond organisations and was practised also in South West Africa, which was administered by South Africa under a League of Nations mandate (revoked in 1966 via United Nations Resolution 2145[2]), until it gained independence as Namibia in 1990.[3]Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times under Dutch[4] and British rule. However, apartheid as an official policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. New legislation classified inhabitants into four racial groups ("black", "white", "coloured", and "Indian"; with Indian and Coloured further divided into several sub-classifications),[5] and residential areas were segregated, sometimes by means of forced removals. Non-white political representation was completely abolished in 1970, and starting in that year black people were deprived of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands called bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states. The government segregated education, medical care, beaches, and other public services, and provided black people with services inferior to those of white people.[6]Apartheid sparked significant internal resistance and violence as well as a long arms and trade embargo against South Africa.[7] Since the 1950s, a series of popular uprisings and protests were met with the banning of opposition and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders. As unrest spread and became more effective and militarised, state organisations responded with repression and violence. This, along with the sanctions placed on South Africa by the West made it increasingly difficult for the government to maintain the regime.Reforms to apartheid in the 1980s failed to quell the mounting opposition, and in 1990 President Frederik Willem de Klerk began negotiations to end apartheid,[8] culminating in multi-racial democratic elections in 1994, which were won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela. The vestiges of apartheid still shape South African politics and society. Although the official abolishment of Apartheid occurred in 1990 with repeal of the last of the remaining Apartheid laws, the end of Apartheid is widely regarded as arising from the 1994 democratic general elections.