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... at school, “the Commies” at home, and the adultery in The Scarlet Letter”. (Lu 138-139). Her struggle in juggling these two languages was such an ordeal that for a review she had to write, she ended up writing two. The first one she wrote, she felt she could never hand it in due to her writing of the heroine of the piece, “Instead of illustrating her Revolutionary spirit, I [she] had dwelled on her internal conflict, which could be seen as a moment of weak sentimentality that I should never have emphasized in a Revolutionary heroine.” (Lu 140). The second review she wrote, which she handed in, she took the care to illustrate the “grandeur of her Revolutionary spirit by expanding on a quotation in which she decided that if the life of her son could change the lives of millions of sons, she should not begrudge his life for the cause of Revolution.” (Lu 140). She kept the first review in her desk. She continued to read only “because reading allowed me [her] to keep my [her] thoughts and confusion private.” (Lu 140). Her discourses in her life, she felt that she had to switch them on and off like a tool. She would still try to have her one language, English, with her family, and Standard Chinese in school. Mejia 3 In this juggle of each language, she still “regarded the discourse of home as natural and the discourse of school alien, [...] acquire both and switch them on and off according to the occasion.” (Lu 140). But in the end, these discourses helped her from “losing sight of the effort and choice involved in reading or writing with and through a discourse.” (Lu 144). For Malcolm X, his discourses were much different than Lu’s. He had the influence’s of the street and the education of only up to the eighth grade. The discourses that he had belonged to first, before prison ironically enough, is what I would call the “Street Class” or of being “street smart”. In the street, he “had been the most articulate hustler out there - I [he] had commanded attention when I [he] said something.” (Malcolm X 715). Once he was sent to prison, he taught himself and become more than that just being “street smart”. He had become someone, who if you heard him speak after his prison time, “will think I [he] went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my [his] prison studies.” (Malcolm X 715). He became a thinker, a philosopher, someone who was respected and idealized. His readings in prison helped him to understand the history of our attitudes and treatments of the African-American people. The education that he had in prison also taught him on how to be able to communicate more efficiently with the written word. The reason he first started his education in prison was to be able to communicate with his mentor, Mr. Elijah Muhammad. He had at first felt “frustrated at not being able to express what I [he] wanted to convey in letters that I [he] wrote,” ( Malcolm X 715). He went on to read books by numerous authors, such ass H. G. Wells, J. A. Rogers, and Gregor Mendel. He would read about genetics, philosophy, fiction, non-fiction, and newspapers. What learning to read in prison accomplished in him was to awake inside him “some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” (Malcolm X 721). The fact that he educated himself in prison, instead of graduating with a degree Mejia 4 from a university, is what mostly helped him become who he is. He says, “I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college. [...] Where else but in a prison could I have attached my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?” (Malcolm X 722). For Maya Angelou, her struggles in discourse are in a way the same as Malcolm X’s, in which they were treated differently due to their race. Even though Malcolm X does not state specific personal examples for himself, he does illustrate them in his feelings when reading the treatment of African-Americans throughout the history of America. For Maya Angelou, she states a very specific example of the discourse that she was going through, the expectations of the African-American during her childhood. The white speaker at her graduation, Mr. Edward Donleavy, Angelou felt what was expected of her to achieve in the community, a labor-type job. Even after all her studies, her accomplishments, her achievements in school thus far, she and her fellow class-mates could only aspire to be “maids and farmers, handymen and washerman, and anything higher that we [they] aspired to was farcical and presumptuous.” (Angelou 730). She had to grow up thinking that through all her hard work the highest she could get to be is a maid. For the men, they could at least become an athlete. Donleavy...