They say ignorance is bliss and I suppose that is precisely what Jamaica Kincaid is frustrated by. As an outsider, you will never know nor care to know the depth of the pain exhibited by people.

But I can’t help disagreeing with her assumption that all tourists are bad. And that their lack of awareness makes them bad. I could understand your frustration if these people are to permanently impact your community. If they decide to move in or stay for an extended period of time. But they are not here to truly engage in your society and your culture. They don’t want to make any changes. And that’s okay. They have every right to take in as much or as little as they would like.

I think what Jamaica in upset by lies more in her explination of Antiguan medical care.

“Will you be comforted to know that the hospital is staffed with
doctors that no actual Antiguan trusts… when the Minister of Health
himself doesn’t feel well he takes the first plane to
New York to see a real doctor”

It is in this quote we are shown that the island truly is not as easy and blissful as it is marketed to be. Having a less luxurious home or strangely subsidized cars is understandably easy to overlook. An inadequate healthcare system is not. So I don’t think Jamaica is upset by the tourists who buy into the island’s marketing. I think she’s upset that there is for her an obvious disparity between that marketing and the reality staring them in the face. The fact that it’s not a good place to live yet it is their home. The residents don’t have the luxury of overlooking or forgetting their life circumstances.

After getting beaten up and mugged, Julius begins to experience what is typical for an assaulted individual. He disassociates, stating that he begins to stop feeling the pain and just take it. He tries to minimize the experience by telling himself it could have been worse. Then he starts to turn his experience into an existential one. His body is no longer his and his experience was something observed but didn’t feel. Once he gets back to his apartment he stares out onto a woman praying. Julius states explicity that he dosent have a form of ‘davening’. For people who do have it, it grounds them. Brings them back to reality. I think this is Juliuses form of meditation. It forces him to look at whats happening in the present. For a situation like the one he just came out of, a little bit of grounding could do him a lt of good. It was only after the expereince of watching the woman pray that he was able to reflect and return to his normal stream of conciousness.

I haven’t lived in New york City my whole life. But for the time that I have been here, I can attest to the loneliness an overwhelming population can bring. And that’s the same experience Julius has throughout almost every interaction. It begins with the standard experience of being on the street, seeing people, and being more isolated than you would be at home. It then extends to his interactions with a mentor. The mentor lectures to him and responds to his prompts. But it never gets personal. And the relationship almost has a professional quality to it. Exiting this interaction, he is faced with the NYC marathon and finds himself talking to a runner. Again, the runner has no one. Here is an individual who performed an incredible feat and was left alone. He had no family or friends. Julius begins to make comparisons between the marathon, his walks, and the subway. You can go at any pace, absorb any quantity of information, accomplish a lifetime’s worth of achievements, and still be left alone. There’s no one here for you. A city full of people whose existences are almost inconsequential to one and other.

“Grace feels her head shaking, back
and forth, feels the shame rising from her scalp as if each hair
is being uprooted, one by one, leaving her bald as a baby. Itis,
dear God, just as her mother said: from airs and graces comes
disgrace.”

Throughout this story, I gound graces overanalysis of everything to be very odd. On the one hand, she’s probably right in many of her assumptions. On the other hand, that’s a lot of thinking for a mundane interaction. It seemed a lot like deep-rooted insecurity. That was solidified for me when the last line of the passage basically confirms that she’s embarrassed by her existence: Her skin, hair, way of speaking, way of doing things. And it all stems from her mother telling her she is a disgrace to the family. It makes me wonder why her mother was so embarrassed by her own child to the point of making a rhyme about it.

There were a couple of things that stood out to me upon reading this play. The first was the overt dynamic between black men and white woman. The roles in which we stereotypically regard man and woman are completely reversed. And that has everything to do with the character’s skin color. Black men are not exactly treated well in media. But in this story, the black man is a doctor whose job is to work out others’ mental issues. He’s not very pushy and listens intently. When a stranger walks into his office, he sits down and listens. The woman takes on the role of the white colonizer. She walks in uninvited, pushing boundaries, looking to trip up the innocent. Essentially looking for a reason to punish. She plays strange mind games and tells stories the reader can’t confirm or deny. It is revealed later on that they did indeed know each other and that this power imbalance had existed since the beginning of their relationship. The second thing was a specific habit that is seen amongst white-skinned people and their treatment of non-whites. When Gloria enters the office she talks about how she has read all about Dr. Kerry and asks how it feels “to be the first eminent psychiatrist of your race”. He responds by saying that’s not necessarily true and then she makes a point that his race will imbue his practice with personal warmth. We’ve seen this so many times. Putting non-whites on a pedestal and then using racist assumptions in a ‘positive’ way.

“Because what will others inherit from me?”

As expressed by Bhanu Kapil, generational trauma is not about you. You are a conduit for your ancestors trying to enforce certain rules or values.

“If even one drop is spilled.
You will be punished so severely you will not be able to leave
your home for many days”

Your punishment will be given by both your family members and yourself. You have been conditioned to hold the trauma close and pass it on. It can be disguised as culture or tradition. You might not ever notice it or notice that others don’t have it. However, when confronted with the question of what will others inherit from me, you pause. Because you have been put in the unique position of deciding if you are going to pass it on.

When Kapils son asked her about colonization, she says to ask his grandmother and pauses. She was flooded with traumatic imagery of her mothers experiences. It was this imagery that lead to her casting her spell. The spell is not about forgetting what had happened. It’s about acknowledging and forgiving. We all want to remember our family’s histories. But we don’t have to live in fear or pretend that these wars are still going on. Kapil wants her son to know without experiencing the pain.

I thought it was odd that “Sorry” was so short. I figured there would have to be a lot of information packed in, or that the poem( an assumption made based on the formatting of the original passage) would provide context to the longer story. However, the poem spends more than half of its time describing where a person drags his/her knife. From this, we can derive three things. The first is that the person holding the knife has the proximity and control to take a short object and pull it through the contours of a person’s body. The second is that the location of the initial incision is incredibly relevant to the perpetrator’s motivation. The third is how gender plays a role in this short poem. Terms such as belly and mid-drift are not specifically gendered but are typically used to describe either a pregnant woman or an elderly man. So when the sentence concludes with a male gender reveal. It is a surprise to the reader. Apparently, it is also a surprise to the perpetrator. Upon looking down and seeing the penis he exclaims with surprise and guilt “Oh no, no! … that was a mistake!”. This line specifically confirms for me that this person is not a surgeon or a mortician. A surgeon, mortician, or forensic examiner would have been given enough time to examine the patient/body before making any cuts. It also confirms that this man either saw a vagina and was wrong about the gender (which is highly unlikely) or he saw a circumcised/uncircumcised penis. In many religions circumcision is a requirement and you are not considered to be part of the religion if it is uncircumcised. Given that this story took place in India, it could have been about a man who was part of a larger group going around killing people who were not of his religious beliefs. Once he realized he was wrong, he expressed remorse.