BLOSSOM
The story telescopes on the most common problems faced by female black migrants- thwarting of hopes and expectations for which they migrated from their homeland to a foreign country, watching the “white people live” while they sink deeper and deeper in the pit of poverty, stagnation n deprivation and encountering the “double jeopardy”(to quote Tony.C.Bambara from The Black Woman) of racial discrimination and sexual exploitation. The exploitation arises from multiple quarters for Blossom. In the words of Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands, “the males of all races hunt her as prey”- the 'white' master who tries to abuse her sexually and the 'black' husband who exploits her economically, “drinking Blossom liquor” and having a “good time”, while she slaves day in and day out, until one day. All the dejection and subjugation that she “put up with”, ‘storms’ out in the form of violence and seething rage, tearing down the apparently calm “domesticated” exterior with vengeance.
Blossom’s seeking refuge in Oya, the deity she “know from home” is her way of reconnecting and re-membering with the “the place she miss”(a line from Brand’s first novel In Another Place, Not Here). This relocation happens in dreams, where her suffering merges with the “black people suffering”, where her sordid present entangles with that of her dark ancestral history, until the act of “mourning “ transcends into the act of “borning”, of rebirth, of ‘blossoming’, of breaking away from entrapment n suffering n of breaking into a dance of “freeness” n joy . The rising of Blossom, phoenix-lie from a voiceless, impoverished Black woman to an economically empowered Obeah woman is an envisioning of Band’s emphasis on the urgency of resistance and survival, embodied by Oya, the warrior spirit of rebirth and rejuvenation.
CANADIAN EXPERIENCE
The nihilistic wail of a failed Barbadian immigrant transforms into a reverberating laughter as he lives the “tale told by an idiot” in a hostile foreign soil, in the story of Austin Clarke. Estranged from his roots, living in a decrepit house in Canada, he can only laugh at the enormity of his fallacy, laugh because he is “afraid to cry” as Sam Selvon says in The Lonely Londoners, or because there is nobody to hear his cries . He has left the ones who would behind, far behind, across the Atlantic, in the “stinking dirt” of his plantation that was his own, for a life of “advancement” in Canada. He constantly gauges himself from the white man’s perspective, an ‘expertise’ that he has acquired from his long “Canadian experience”, comparing wistfully his unusual, rather colourful attire with that of a white man’s formal black suit, making mental notes of the expensively dressed men and women and his obvious distinction from them. This pervasive viewing of oneself from the perspective of the ‘other’, which denigrates one’s own worth in one’s eyes, much in the manner of Prufrock, leads to the inevitable ‘Prufrockian Paralysis’ that the Barbadian encounters in the lift. Unable to step out, “He stands his ground”, even a simple word “BANK”, seems threatening, “cheerless and frightening”. Austin Clarke through his protagonist chronicles the psychological “decrepitude”, suffered by migrant identities in self-inflicted exile, the life of the unaccomodated man in an unaccustomed earth.
PG I
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