Identity

The author uses Zikora's labor to heighten her sensory experience, thus triggering an onslaught of questions about her identity. In the narrative present, Zikora is depicted in a state of extreme physical vulnerability. Zikora is crippled with a pain she says sits "like fire in my back, spreading to my thighs, squeezing and crushing my insides, pulling downward, spiraling" (2). While Zikora is describing her acute anatomical discomfort in this line, the experience also parallels Zikora's mental and emotional state. In the early stages of her labor, Zikora's pain makes her irritable and angry, snapping at her mother and the doctors alike. She refuses to "to endure [her] pain with pride, to embrace" it (4). Instead, she allows her emotions to be overtaken by it. Gradually, her verbal hostility begins to "curdle into a darkness close to grief" (5). The more pathetic and wretched she feels, her body bent...