The Polished Hoe, a story written by Austin Clarke, is revealed throughout a single Sunday nightfall and ceases at the beginning of sunrise; it starts in obscurity so to speak and finishes in the light. The novel is conveyed mainly through the interaction and conversation between two of the characters: Percy Stuart, known as Sarge, and Mary Mathilda, the protagonist, in addition to the flashbacks going through their thoughts when the conversation pauses. This event occurs not long after Mary Mathilda murders Mr. Bellfeels, her admirer ever since she turned thirteen and father of her son Wilberforce, a tropical medicine doctor. Mr. Bellfeels, the story’s antagonist and the supervisor of plantation Flagstaff, is omnipresent, if only due to a …show more content…
Bellfeels took her [Mary-Matilda] as his right, in his natural arrogance of ownership . . . “If it wasn’t you, Mary-girl” Ma told her, “it would be somebody else’s daughter. And even though it is what it is I still feel better to see you are getting some o’ the sweets that go along with it. . .” Ma had told Mary-Mathilda this two years after she had introduced Mary-girl to Mr. Bellfeels that Sunday morning in the Churchyard when he towered over her from the saddle of his horse. Mr. Bellfeels had had Ma too, for years; “taking what he wants”; and their affair; no, not an affair, for it could not be called that, since there was no bargaining power on her part" (426). About twenty pages later she restates the point: “It was common practice on plantations in Bimshire for a Plantation Manager to breed any woman he rested his two eyes on. As many as he could climb." “And so it was with me. And with Ma. And with Ma’s mother, until we get far-far-far back, get back on the ships leaving Africa. . .” (444). It is clear that whenever Mr. Bellfeels desired to have sex with Ma, he would give her a wink where she was laboring with the remainder of the group and she would have to immediately comply, otherwise she would be flogged. When Ma tries to let Bellfeels know that Mary-Mathilda is his actual daughter, he flogs her to prevent her from completing the statement and threatens her …show more content…
While he shows us Wilberforce, Mary-Mathilda and Bellfeels’s brilliant son, liberating his mother through the books he makes available to her and through the information he provides her from his travels, Mary-Mathilda articulates the ways in which his British education makes him overvalue what’s European and undervalue what’s Antillean. It is quite likely that Clarke expects us to read into Wilberforce’s name the fact that William Wilberforce, whom he is named after, was both a liberator and a racist, for this book is intended to correct much of the romanticized history of the Caribbean. Clarke goes to great lengths, for example, to show how the planters of Bimshire likened events taking place there to events in the US. Moreover, he shows us that the people of Mary-Mathilda’s generation were programmed to see the US as a land of freedom even while the most vicious form of bigotry was being enacted
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
The aforementioned topics of establishment in the New World and treatment of slaves on plantations were recurring throughout the book. The book did a good job illustrating why Caribbean countries like Barbados were central in the triangular trade between England, the West Indies, and America commonly comes up in middle school history classes. One of the hard to believe aspects of the book is the idea that merchants seemed to stumble into their fortune and were only where they were due to the work done by the slaves from before sun rise to after sun
An Empire Divided was different from the typical books on the American Revolution because it focused on the impact the revolution had upon the Caribbean. Throughout the book O’Shaughnessy argues that the Caribbean had nothing to gain from siding with the patriots during the revolution, and that after hearing such news of violence and war they even turned against them such as what happened in Antigua.
This week’s articles carry a couple related, if not common, themes of imagined, if not artificial, constructs of race and identity. Martha Hodes’ article, “The mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” offers a narrative based examination of the malleable terms on which race was defined. To accomplish this she examines the story of Eunice Connolly and her family and social life as a window into understanding the changing dimensions of race in nineteenth-century America and the Caribbean, specifically New England and Grand Cayman. While Hodes’ article examines the construction of race in the Americas, Ali A. Mazrui’s piece, “The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Sai, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond,” looks at the construction of African identity. Although different in geographic loci, the two articles similarly examine the shaping influences of race and identity and the power held in ‘the Other’ to those ends.
societies to reexamine their view of the Caribbean. In this paper the following topics in The
Because of these factors I can make the assumption that Mary is actually bi-racial and the child of Mrs.Bellmont and a past black slave. It is shown in the book’s glossary that such things, as expected, were taboo and looked down upon. Many mothers would never tell just who the father of their bi-racial child was. “Wilson underscores the politics of skin color under which enslaved and legitimate children in the same family resembled each other, while white women would rather not have the family resemblance spoken of.”
8. Shepherd, Verene. Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.
As the plot progresses, Sethe is confronted with elements of her haunting past: traumatic experiences from her life as a slave, her daunting escape, and the measures she took to keep her family safe from her hellish owner plague Sethe into the present and force her to come to terms with the past. A definitive theme observed in the novel is slavery’s dehumanization of both master and servant. Slave owners beat their slaves regularly to subjugate them and instill the idea that they were only livestock. After losing most of the Sweet Home men, the Schoolteacher sets his sights on Sethe and her children in order to make Sweet Home “worth the trouble it was causing him” (Morrison 227).
“The only Mary story we talked about was the wedding story-the time she persuaded her son, practically against his will, to manufacture wine in the kitchen out of plain water.”
Mary learned to read at an early age, probably from her grandmother also. Soon she was using this new-found ability to teach a favorite servant to read. It was illegal in South Carolina to teach a slave to read or write, but Mary was a favored grandchild and her grandmother was proud of her ability. In 1831, however, her grandmother died. Mary was twelve years old when the entire family moved to Mississippi, where they owned some other plantations. Most of the family fell ill, however, and within a year the family had returned to the South Carolina plantation to resume their lives there. Shortly after their return, the family was visited by Mr. Chesnut, owner of a nearby plantation, and his son James. James was twenty-one and had just graduated from Princeton. James and Mary began a courtship that ended with James proposing to Mary when she was fifteen years old. Her mother and father d...
England. In separate sections he describes the masters, servants, and slaves of the island. In addition to Ligon’s interpretations of the physical and cultural characteristics of the “Negroes,” he offers personal experiences to illustrate the master-slave relationships that had evolved on Barbados
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...
Mary Rowlandson was a pretentious, bold and pious character. Her narrative did not make me feel sorry for her at all, which is strange since she really did go through a lot. During the war, the Narragansett Indians attacked Lancaster Massachusetts, and burned and pillaged the whole village. During the siege Mary and her six year old child were shot, she watched her sister and most of her village either burn or get shot. She was kept as a captive, along with her three children and taken with the Narragansett’s on their long retreat. The exposition of the story is set immediately. The reader is perfectly aware of Missus Rowlandson’s status and religious beliefs. She constantly refers to the Narragansetts in an incredibly condescending way, to the point that you know that she does not even consider them human. She paints them as purely evil pe...
I think the scenes where the Europeans are discussing the fate of the island and the people who inhabit it--all for the sake of the British to have sugar for their tea--is an excellent representation of the exploitation that took place in the Caribbean. Early in the film, Walker says how Queimada means "burn" and was named such because of the time that it had been burned for economic gain by the Portuguese. This became ironic to me when Walker makes the decision to once again set the island ablaze. His decision is not fueled by individual gain, but from the influence that Britain and other European nations have on islands like Queimada. It is hard to see these scenes and realize that they are probably not too far off of reality, but I believe that Queimada does an excellent job explaining many of the realities of life on the colonized
Life made into a commodity to be bought and sold as an animal or machine, born to serve the dominant humans marked by white skin. In this way colonialism as a political entity was created to exploit the earth and its people in order to profit white Europeans. The economic dependency established by the slave trade established a stratified socio-economic hierarchy based on racism. The inequities inherent in this system caused the exploitation of less powerful resources to be established as the means of economic growth and prosperity throughout colonialism. The lack of representation of the oppressed black majority brought about a series of uprisings against colonialism. In Jamaica the Rastafarian movement brought to the forefront the pressing issues of deprivation upheld by the socio-economic structure of the island. The ideology of Rastafarians instilled personal liberation and autonomy at the time of Jamaican Independence, helping the population deal with decolonization. This paper will deal with the implications of this thesis throughout the history of Jamaica from the colonial to post Independence years (1962-1980). The rise of Rastafarianism can be seen in response to the history of inequity of colonialism. The mentality of humanization upheld in Rasta acted as force of mental liberation. The influence of this ideology upon society around the time of Independence was reflected in politics of the time. At the time of Independence serious historical issues of lack of representation of the black majority were articulated in the words and works of Rastafarians and their liberating ideology.