Cultural clashes occur when members holding different cultural beliefs and values don’t integrate into the society. The resulting conflicts can range from discrimanation in day to day life or can reach ruthless heights of violence and hate-crime.
As we know, almost every country across the world is culturally diverse. A severe cases of culture-based segregation occurred during the 1941 genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany and first hand works of literature provide un-veiled understanding of the extremity of Holocaust.
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Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” would be an appropriate reference for this period. Frankl sheds light on his experience in Auschwitz and three other concentration camps while emphasizing how cultural conflicts uprooted his whole life.
Frankl lost both his parents, his brother and his pregnant wife in the camp but he endured the pain and clung on to the things he could never be robbed of: “the last of human freedom, to choose one's attitude in any circumstance and to choose one's own way” (Frankl, 1946).
Existential crisis occurs when individuals question whether their lives have meaning, purpose, or value. Frankl lost his entire family because of cultural domination and yet he didn’t succumb to losing himself. His book is a powerful tool to show that one can either submit to those in power or instead hold on to their inner freedom. He also kept other Auschwitz prisoners at sanity and helped them discover meaning in their lives, one day at a time.
A work of literature from a more recent period is “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan. The essay portrays the vast differences between the Chinese and American cultures and how being a migrant victimized her family to culture-based discrimation. Her mother’s “limited English” commonly subjected her to disrespect, and ill-treatment at places like hospitals and restaurants where they either didn’t treat her well or pretended not to understand her.
Tan could have easily lost herself or her pride in her culture amidst the cruelty she received, but yet she hung on to her values and used her literary platform to show that people of different cultures are no different and everyone must be treated and protected equally.
As she says, the “Power of language can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.” (Tan, 1990) and to this day she persuades people to develop love and acceptance.
Needless to say, there are numerous literary works on similar lines. For example, “Ethnic Angst” by Ajay S. Deshmukh highlights the struggle of the Parsis who are an ethnic minority in South Asia. When they migrated to India for safety, they instead faced conditional refuge. An autobiographical work is the “The Diary Of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank gives first-hand accounts of Frank’s hiding during the Holocaust, who was ultimately killed in a gas chamber.
Conclusion
All the works portray one theme in common: both internal and external conflict could potentially lead to an existential crisis.
When the cultural clash is internal, the protagonists struggle to choose between opposing beliefs within themselves, like Amy Tan in “Mother Tongue” who had to decide whether to hold on to her Chinese traditions or build a new American identity. When the cultural clash is external, the protagonists face external forces who stand against their way of following a certain belief, like Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” where the Nazis aspired to eradicate the Jewish culture.
In both cases, the protagonists could have lost their identity under opposing domination but they held onto their beliefs and didn’t undergo an identity crisis.
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