The first unit of my English course was called The Caribbean. In this unit I’ve read three texts of Caribbean writers: A play called “Return to Paradise” by Cicely Waite-Smith, a short story titled “The two Grand Mothers” by Olive Senior and a poem called “A Far Cry from Africa” by Derek Walcott. Something important about today’s Caribbean society is its origin, because it is characterized by a clash of three cultures: The natives, the Europeans and the Africans and the consequences of this cultural mixture can be seen to date. The texts I’ve read show how black and white coexists and others images of the black Caribbean. Heather took advantage of that situation to propose one question as a title for an essay, the first one I did by the way. I answered it as follows: (The number between brackets [ ] indicates the references to avoid plagiarism):
What images of the black Caribbean are depicted in the examples we have read of Caribbean Literature? What problems do they face?
The texts “Return to Paradise”, “The Two Grandmothers” and “A far Cry from Africa” present five main issues which are the following ones: education, access to basic services like electricity, economical status, the problem of identity and the carelessness associated to the concept of family. In addition we can observe in each text that there is some level of disagreement between blacks and whites and the poem “A far Cry from Africa” shows us how violent the human being can be in the attempt to solve these kind of differences.
Concerning education, the characters that represent the black Caribbean have a low level. One of the most obvious examples is given in the play “Return to Paradise” because the character Annie, who represents the black Caribbean, talks with many errors, a great numbers of them associated with the concordance of tenses and others parts of speech, for example when she says “Him nine year old. Him give plenty trouble, Miss Jean”. She also offers her services as a maid as she didn’t have sufficient education to do anything else.
At the end of the play we can read that Annie’s grandson Carlton is nine years old and spends all his time “with the sailors on the wharf and in the brothel them”. He is not at school where he should be and hence is not getting an instruction either.
In the text “The two Grandmothers” the problem related to education is shown directly when the main character says “They don’t speak properly the way we do (…) Eulalie and Ermandine don’t go to church or school anymore”.
Another image depicted is the lack of electricity, shown in the text “The Two Grandmothers”. At the beginning of it the author describes a very rural community with no electricity. According to the United Nations this situation entrenches poverty, constrains the delivery of social services, limits opportunities for women, and erodes environmental sustainability [1].
Another image is related to the economical status. In the three texts we’ve read, the black Caribbean society is shown in a difficult economical situation in relation to the white community. In “Return to Paradise” Annie was looking for a job as a maid because she was unemployed and she also had the responsibility of a child with no parents. In the same play Annie’s Grandson Carlton had to work as well.
O. Senior shows that the black people lived in a rural environment. She shows that Pearlie lives in a “tiny house” and “all the children sleep together in one room on the floor”. The element of large families without the parent(s) is also presented. Both aspects are associated with poverty in every region around the world.
Walcott’s poem shows in its first stanza a war situation in Kenya in the attempt to achieve liberty from British rule. We can infer that the Africans lived an economic depression due to the war.
Another image depicted in the texts we’ve read is the problem of identity, presented principally in the text “The Two Grandmothers” and in Walcott’s poem “A Far Cry from Africa”. At the beginning of the first text Grandma Del tells her granddaughter that her skin is “beautiful like honey” that she is “a fine brown lady and must make sure to grow as beautiful inside as (she is) outside”. But after being in contact with her maternal family she feels uncomfortable in her own skin because she realized about all the enjoyments and developments of the white society in relation with the black one.
Walcott reveals his inner identity problem with a non rhetorical question in the third stanza of his poem “I who am poisoned with the blood of both / (…) how choose / between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” He doesn’t like the fact of having both bloods inside his veins because he cannot be part of one side, and both of them are inhuman in the war.
The final image depicted is addressed to the family. In the play “Return to Paradise” we can see that Carlton has no parents. His mother died but there are no references about is father: The problem of the irresponsible parenthood in the black Caribbean is shown. In contrast Jean Rogers lives with her mother and father in the same house.
In the text “The Two Grandmothers” we can appreciate that the parental ascendance of the main character doesn’t exist: When she goes to visit Grandma Del she spends her time with the neighbors and when she asks something about her grandfather there’s no answer, and her grandmother’s reaction is not pleasant at all: “I didn’t see a picture of Daddy’s father and when I asked Grandma she got mad and shooed me away”.
At the end of the story “The Two Grandmothers” the main character shows her concern because “everybody is just having babies without being married like Pearlie’s mother and they are not ashamed”. In Walcott’s poem the idea of family doesn’t exist at all. When he writes “The violence of beast is read / as natural law, but upright man / Seek his divinity by inflicting pain” he shows the human been as a race incapable of establishing any social relation no matter what. Moreover he describes a time of war and everyone has to fight to stay alive, this is not a time for inculcating family values.
In conclusion all the three texts show negative aspects of the black Caribbean society. All the characters that represent this society live in a very difficult situation but they take measures only to solve the problem associated with their economical status because they need money to survive. They don’t care about an improvement in their education because they abandon the system like Eulalie and Ermandine did. They are not concerned due to the lack of electricity and other basic services. In the three texts the concept of family as a fundamental cell of the society is not taken into consideration at all, and the fact that “everybody is just having babies without being married like Pearlie’s mother and they are not ashamed” makes me believe that this situation will continue. The reactions concerning the identity problem are presented. In the text “The two Grandmothers” the main character tries to live her life in a way that allows her to be comfortable with herself. In Walcott’s poem the question is formulated but he doesn’t have the answer he’s looking for.
REFERENCES
[1] UN ENERGY PUBLICATION “The Energy Challenge for Achieving the Millennium Development Goals”. 2005.
[2] SENIOR, Olive. “The Two Grandmothers”
[3] WAITE-SMITH, Cicely. “Return to Paradise”.
[4] WALCOTT, Derek. “A far Cry from Africa”. 1962.
