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Essay on Depiction of "Gender" And "Identity" In Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat and "Lucy" By Jamaica Kincaid
Very often Caribbean writing seems to work at two levels. It can be read purely within the available paradigms for reading that is, in terms of universal themes or, rather, Western ways of thinking about universal themes. At the same time we can read another, parallel narrative, using the same images and much of the same language, to develop a Caribbean way of constructing notions of self, uses of language, and ideas about desire. One author whose work can be read in both these ways is Jamaica Kincaid. When I taught a course on the Caribbean novel in the years during which Kincaid's novels first appeared, my students quickly picked up on how strenuously her American reviewers ignored the Caribbean issues she was dealing with, even though they all responded to her "universal" themes.
Thinking about Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat and "Lucy" By Jamaica Kincaid, I noticed that we covered a lot on the culture portrayed in the book and the injustices done. But I think that we neglected to look at certain parallels between our culture and the way that I think that it affects our lives to read and discuss a book of this nature. I think a good discussion question for our class would have to do something about how you directly compare the book to your own life or to the lives of the people around you that you know and talk to every day. I think that it would be important to go over all the dimensions in which this book is a direct parallel to our own lives. It would also be important to expand on the discussion and maybe go into how the culture has changed (or not changed) since it has moved to our country.
In other words do these things in fact still take place and if so to what extent and in what way?....
