Humanities Homework Help

For our last discussion, I would like to turn a critical lens on Rhys’s novel by examining an alternative portrayal of the formerly enslaved people in Jamaica in the fraught post-emancipation period in which the novel is set. Please read “In Celebration of Emancipation” by the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, Lorna Goodison. Then, since I am particularly interested in Rhys’s portrayal of the black women in Jamaica and Dominica, I would also like you to read this short but haunting poem “So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art”:

She was the nameless woman who created
images of her children sold away from her.
She suspended her wood babies from a rope
round her neck, before she ate she fed them.
Touched bits of pounded yam and plantains
to sealed lips, always urged them to sip water.
She carved them of wormwood, teeth and nails
her first tools, later she wielded a blunt blade.
Her spit cleaned faces and limbs; the pitch oil
of her skin burnished them. When woodworms
bored into their bellies she warmed castor oil
they purged. She learned her art by breaking
hard rockstones. She did not sign her work.

How does Rhys’s portrayal of the people and tensions in Jamaica during the long process of emancipation compare with Goodison’s? Are there parallels between the way Bronte portrays Bertha in Jane Eyre and Rhys portrays, say, Amelie, Hilda or Tia