Part 1: Personal Narrative

Write a personal narrative (300-400 words) about one particular time in your life that reveals something about your culture, your background and your values.

Any specific time will do. This time might be from your childhood or from your adulthood.

Write about this time as an experience that reveals something about you and your culture: it might be an incident that occurred in Canada or in your country of origin that reveals your values and beliefs. It might be a description of the way your family celebrates one particular holiday. It might involve parents, grandparents, siblings.

Part 2: Analysis of Personal Narrative (300-400 words)

After you write your personal narrative, re-read it, and think about it. Answerall 4of the following questions with specific examples, using a paragraph for each question.

1. What insights did you gain by looking at this past event?
2. What two aspects of your culture did it reveal?
3. In what two ways has your culture influenced the way you are today?
4. In his essay on "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," Stuart Hall, a cultural theorist and sociologist, wrote that our cultural identities emerged from the retelling of the past. But Hall argues that cultural identity is a matter of "becoming as well as being." Our cultural identities belong to the future as much as to the past. "They undergo constant transformation. They are subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power." (Hall, 1990) Do you agree or disagree with Hall's interpretation of the formation of our cultural identities? Please use your own experience to support your position.