Opening Line
The book opens, in its first line, with metaphorical language. “Behind the veil of trees, night’s voices shimmered.” The rest of the opening paragraph will proceed to explain this cryptic image somewhat. The voices turn out to be a metaphor for a metaphor. The voices are the waves of the sea crashing onto the Jamaican coastline located twenty miles away through a snarl of woods. The two-level metaphor suggests that on an island, everything that happens eventually comes down to the threat of water and the ability to control it.
Babylon
Babylon is the metaphorical nickname applied to the state of minority white British rule of Jamaica. “It was the state’s boot at the throat, the politician’s pistol in the gut. The Crown’s whip at the back.” The Crown is a special type of metaphor known as metonymy in which one small aspect of a thing represents the larger concept. In this case, the assertion is that Queen Elizabeth herself was whipping Jamaicans because the entire British culture tacitly approved of the oppressive measures and she is the symbol of England. The image of a soldier standing with a boot on a person’s neck and the politician directly threatening violence with weaponry also serves to cement this comparison of modern England to biblical Babylon.
White Racism
Racism is either front and center or a simmering undertone on nearly every page of the book. At one point, things get extremely personal for the first-person narrator. “Here in America, I am a caged curio, a beast shaking the bars of her otherness.” This assertion arises from the fact that the narrator is a black immigrant woman attending a graduate program in writing in America surrounded by white students. The stark difference between doing the exact same thing in Jamaica and doing it in America is characterized in this metaphor aligning herself with seeming to be an exotic spectacle on display.
Black Racism
The story does not shy away from presenting racism directed toward white people by Jamaican natives as it comments upon the nature of racist thinking. Her father asserts that “white people were devils who did everything in their power to prevent Black people from prosperity. They were bloodsuckers.” These pejorative metaphorical terms are directed by the narrator’s father toward white people based on his own quite negative personal experiences. Notably, the very same sort of metaphorical language he uses to describe white people is commonly used by white racists to describe black people. Racism is racism regardless of the direction seems to be the message the narrator is sending with this portrait of her father.
Vanity
When the narrator loses her virginity, her father engages an unexpected metaphor. “Vanity is a reckless sin.” The focus of her father’s outrage with this language indicates, at least for the moment, that he is less concerned with her purity than with her eagerness to sacrifice it. The loss of virginity is merely the consequence of the behavior. The real sin is her desire to be desired and putting herself up for display.
