I'm reading this book "A Small Place" by Jamaica and I was shock. The way she express herself about the tourist. I never read something like this (is not a bad thing). I can feel her anger in the pages of the book. Is not hate is more like despicable. She wrote this book with a strong tone. She is blaming "you" for the bad thing that you don't understand how is the real Antigua. Your point of view of this place is not the real one and you will never know how hard is to live in here like me. You will never be under my black skin, because you are white and a tourist. Woah! strong feeling right. Is incredible how she can exprese this feeling so well.
I did a research about Jamaica and now I can understand little bit more why she is so angry. She was so young when she had to leave the school and dedicate to the work because her family was so poor that need help from a child. Obviously she did not have the perfect childhood and I cant imagine how hard it was. However is nice to have this new point of view about her because I can understand more the book. If you read A Small Place you can tell that she suffer too much and that is the reason why she so angry, or maybe she saw her people suffer even more, or maybe she is just a good author.
Hahaha, I was also shocked reading the book. More than once I felt slightly attacked, but I had to remind myself "She's not talking about you, you've never even traveled in your life so; no way at all she's meaning you don't worry".
ReplyDeleteI definitely think she's a great author; the way she would start you off describing the beautiful beach, you're there relaxing, having the time of your life, but... oh... is that pristine water really all that clean... are those natives over there laughing /with/ you or /at/ you. She definitely has a way of building your mood up high up on a mountain and then pushing you down a rocky pit.
Yeah, definitely this lecture is very impacting by the tone she uses! The use of the word "you" is very shocking, and you feel like she is talking to you and blaming you. In contrast, if the lecture was in spanish, it will be shocking too if she uses the word "tú" instead of "usted", which everyone knows that the last one is used for respect to other people. Nice blog!
ReplyDeleteOh, WOW! I did not know that part of the author. I liked the blog, but I think that the letter is very small, try to increase the size, so we can read it better.
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts exactly. It's like there was a sort of heat radiating from the pages and it wasn't my iPad heating up.
ReplyDeleteI think that the author definitely took out her anger and inserted it into her writing. I felt attacked as well.
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