“Jamaica is beautiful. Jamaica is too beautiful” (Black). Throughout the semester, we have read multiple novels that describe an irresistible beauty found in the Caribbean: a beauty that conjures, entices, threatens, and ruins. This beauty has caused foreigners to capture, govern, fight for, and tour these islands for centuries. While the Caribbean may be a beautiful place geographically, authors have used this term differently in their literature. My argument in this paper is two-fold: I believe that Jean Rhys writes about this beauty attributed to the Caribbean as a rejection of European influence on the Caribbean and a declaration of the Caribbean’s independence over colonialism, and that his characterization of Christophine is his definition of true Caribbean beauty and identity. I will attempt to explain how this is significant to our understanding of these works, and the Caribbean in general.
In Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the reader is constantly reminded of the natural beauty of the Caribbean through the novel’s multiple narrators; I’d like to focus on Antoinette’s husbands’ (who I’ll refer to as Rochester for the sake of this paper) ideas about the island’s beauty, and the immediate effect is has on him when he arrives. Rochester states that he didn’t have “much time to notice anything. I was married after I arrived in Jamaica and for nearly three weeks of that time I was in bed with fever” (Rhys, 67). While it’s commonplace for a tourist in a very different environment than is normal to become sick, Rochester hints that this was not a coincidental sickness: “The road climbed upward. On one side the wall of green, on the other a steep drop to the ravine below. We pulled up and looked at the hills, the mountains and the blue...
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...eauty, she is making a claim that supersedes this fictional novel. Through both Rochester’s description of the island’s beauty and the person of Christophine, Rhys is proclaiming that the Caribbean does not need Europe’s assistance, nor does she want it. Rhys is saying that the Caribbean’s beauty is natural and organic, and can’t be created by Colonial government. Throughout this semester, we have witnessed many writers struggle with the notion of true Caribbean identity, as if the past has somehow manipulated its identity and conformed it to the shape of European and American ideal. Rhys, along with Christophine, challenges this by saying that the Caribbean is too beautiful: it can never be tamed or touched or understood.
Works Cited
Black, Stephanie. Life and Debt. June 2001.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1992.
Print.
Fluorescent turquoise waters, a vibrant city culture, as well as an unending supply of mimosas and sunburns within a resort, benefits the common wealthy couple looking for a swell time. When people imagine the Caribbean, they probably visualize the soft sands of the Spice Island Beach Resort. Many people see the Caribbean as relaxing paradise. What people don’t understand, are the years of history hidden behind the mask of many resorts. In the book entitled “Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day”, Author Carrie Gibson differentiates how people view the Caribbean nowadays, by altering their visualization with four-hundred pages of rich history and culture, that argues the ideology about the Caribbean
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Within Rhys’s novel, he incorporates the normality of the West Indies during the nineteenth and mid- twentieth centuries. Antoinette, the main character, who happens to be a white Creole, is mistreated and discriminated because of her identity. Throughout the text, characters are victimized by prejudices. For example, Antoinette and Annette become victims of traumatic experience as they face numerous kinds of mistreatment. Antoinette had to deal with an arranged marriage, which results her becoming distressed. Throughout this marriage, she was treated irrationally by her husband, Rochester and servants. She was unable to relate to Rochester because their upbringings were incompatible. She had to stomach the trauma of being shunned because of her appearance and identity. She was called names, mainly “white cockroach”, and was treated as an
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Jamaica Kincaid in her essay “In History” describes how Antigua’s language, as part of cultural imperialism, was made inferior in favor of western languages. Columbus framed the unfamiliar environment of Antigua with things prominent in his thinking and his Spanish
The ocean is what connects the people of the Caribbean to their African descendants in and out of time. Through the water they made it to their respective islands, and they, personally, crafted it to be temporal and made it a point of reference. The ocean is without time, and a speaker of many languages, with respect to Natasha Omise’eke Tinsley’s Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic. The multilingualism of the ocean is reminiscent that there is no one Caribbean experience. The importance of it indicates that the Afro-Caribbean identity is most salient through spirituality. It should come to no surprise that Erzulie, a Haitian loa, is a significant part of the migration of bodies in Ana Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt. Ana Maurine Lara’s depiction
The majority of the nearly 500,000 slaves on the island, at the end of the eighteenth century endured some of the worst slave conditions in the Caribbean. These people were seen as disposable economic inputs in a colony driven by greed. Thus, they receive...
8. Shepherd, Verene. Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.
“I like to repeat that I write neither in French nor in Creole. I write in Maryse Conde,”1 (“Liaison dangereuse,” 2007) is a statement that could not be less accurate for the Guadeloupean writer. Writing in French is especially problematic for post-colonialist Francophone authors; using the language of the colonizer while attempting to dismantle cultural and linguistic hierarchy seems to be an act of futility. To be sure, Conde, the author of Crossing the Mangrove, apparently writes in the French language but she capably deconstructs the notion that a language must be necessarily tied to the culture and history it traditionally represents. Through careful practice of intertextuality (the shaping of one text's meaning through reference or application of a previous text) and narrative experimentation in Crossing the Mangrove, Conde demonstrates that objectivity in every sense is impossible. Using the French language is not an act of capitulation to the colonizer and acceptance of all things “French” in the same way that one person's retelling of an event is not the ultimate truth. In Crossing the Mangrove, Conde presents the strange and dark history of Francis Sancher from multiple perspectives and simultaneously works in aspects of the Western literary canon (specifically, William Faulkner). This emphasis on literary and real-life incoherency is iterated by the symbolic motif of trees and their roots throughout the novel. In analyzing Crossing the Mangrove, it is evident that the amalgamation of intertextuality, shifting narrative perspectives, and the motif of trees and their roots contextualizes the fragmented nature of diasporic identity. Truly, it i...
...xtent will this essay bring about a change in Antigua? The Antiguan scene can only be modified by the government choosing to run the country in a more manner that will benefit everyone associated with Antigua, especially its natives. The native’s behaviours are related to their jealousy of tourists, and of the tourist’s ability to escape their own hometown to take a vacation. While a tourist can relate to the idea that the exhaustion felt after a vacation comes from dealing with the invisible animosity in the air between the natives and themselves, having this knowledge is almost as good as not having it, because there is nothing that the tourist, or the reader, can really DO about it! If Kincaid’s purpose is solely to make tourists aware of their actions, she has succeeded. If Kincaid’s purpose is to help Antigua, she may not have succeeded to the same magnitude.
Langley, Lester D. The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century; The University of Georgia Press (Athens, 1982).
societies to reexamine their view of the Caribbean. In this paper the following topics in The
Jamaica 1930 was not the picture of peaceful jungles and calm sunsets that we see in travel agents’ brochures. Jamaica 1930 was a time of economic, social, and natural disaster. As L...
In her essay, “Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean”, journalist Polly Pattullo presents an inside view of the resort industry in the Caribbean Islands, and how it truly operates. Tourism is the main industry of the Caribbean, formerly referred to as the West Indies, and it is the major part of the economy there. Pattullo’s essay mirrors the ideas of Trevor M.A. Farrell’s perspective “Decolonization in the English-Speaking Caribbean” in which he writes about the implicit meaning of the colonial condition. Pattollo’s essay illustrates that colonialism is present in the Caribbean tourism industry by comparing the meaning of it presented in Farrell’s perspective. In this essay I will explain how these two essays explain how decolonization hardly exists in the Caribbean.
The way in which Benítez-Rojo and Mintz tackle the question of Caribbean identity in their articles, is a removed, objective ideal, in contrast to Michelle Cliff’s portrayal of Jamaican identity. Cliff’s portrayal touches the heart and soul of Caribbean identity. While Mintz and Benítez-Rojo are investigating trends in the Caribbean as a whole, from an outside perspective, Cliff offers the personal, tactile imagery of what it is to live in the Caribbean, utilizing the objective account of history as a background. Furthermore, Cliff deals with Jamaica, one island in the Caribbean, while Mintz and Benítez-Rojo are dealing with the Caribbean on a grand scaled overview. The fact is neither article can be taken as complete truth. In fact, although Cliff uses history in her novel, I believe the account of history from someone who has completely accessed the interior of a place, is always going to be biased. Likewise, Mintz and Benítez-Rojo in making their hypotheses, are lacking an insider’s view. It is the difference between a Caribbean person and Caribbeanist, respectively. Therefore, while on a logical level, an analytical level, Benítez-Rojo and Mintz’s, conclusions as to Caribbean identity could rightly be accepted, these two authors do not possess the experience and intensity to make me as a reader, convinced of their conclusions.