Salim character building

The lesson on the first day of October was our first character building exercise  which I found very helpful when focusing on my character Salim. In one of the exercises I created four square boxes and wrote the following headings in each box:

• Facts
• What I say about myself
• what others say about me
• what I say about others

After going through the scenes and writing down the various different bits of information that were required, I found little bits within the text that I did not notice from reading before. For example there is a scene where Salim has a conversation with Mahmoud about his heritage and also where Mahmoud comes from. Mahmoud says he has been to Somalia and makes a comment about his people who he calls the dhulbahante and describes them as "ferocious, relentless, disciplined and completely indomitable". I found this interesting as these are characteristics (minus disciplined) that I had picked up about my character from my first reading, so to do the exercise and pick up things that I had not noticed in the text before was helpful in finding out about my character. The most challenging thing I found about this task was realising my characters objectives through out the play. The reason I found this particularly difficult is because throughout the play my character does little to reveal anything about himself or his intentions in the play as hie is a very defensive character and is very quick to fly off the handle when he hears something he may not like. The only thing he seems to respond to seriously are things to do with somalia and his family (namely his mother). From these parts of the text I managed to come to the conclusion about his objectives :

• Super Objective- To have everybody respect him 
• Counter Objective - be the only dealer on his block
• The Through Line -  Sell his drugs