s “started and stopped in one moment” according to his prison life (70). Rashid is more stuck in this moment rather than being stopped. This is his moment in life when he would us his imagination to escape reality. Rashid would mask himself to face a better world than the prison world, although, if it had not been for his prison experience, Rashid would not be the type of her person he is now, nor would he have met Asha.Asha, on the other hand, has “camouflage [d]” her life and hid “behind her veil” as Janie did during her marriage to Jody (Hurston, 84); she has masked her life very young before she unveils herself through her rebirth during her relationship with Rashid (71). Her masking was her hiding from the world. Asha masked herself by abusing drugs, drinking alcohol, and using men as her shield to gain protection from the cruelties of the world she saw; yet these men were not her shields, but her enemies because they used her body for their pleasures, and they lied to her. Asha views her life as though she has nothing to live for. She sees herself as a common noun and not a proper noun as she constantly writes her name as asha. As Ida B. Wells writes in Spell It with a Capital, many non-African descendants consider the word Negro as a common noun and that it should be written as negro. Negro is a proper noun because it describes a group of people and who those people are – African American. Asha implies that she does not matter in life and, therefore, should not be given enough credit to capitalize her name. Even though Asha feels worthless after her childhood and adolescent years, Rashid’s imprisonment causes both to be true to each other and to self (72). Once Asha realizes that she has been sexually abused during her adolescence, her masks fall off with greater speed. She becomes vulnerable and almost as desensitized to men as Rashid has to prison strip searches, to...
