small island… a little disappointment
Hi,
sorry for the long hiatus, work and old fashioned tiredness had me flat out. One thing has been bothering me slowly over the past few months now, the adaptation of andrea levy’s small island.
Of course most bristish who are not familiar with west indian history and culture would not know of it, even though the west indies have been a part of the british empire for beyond 300 years plus.
The adaptation did not try and eduacte the viewer, so while i understood why hortense (our black female protagonist) was so cold, so harsh and unyielding, she just came across to many critics as two dimensional or rather a charactured woman.
I understood her because i have known women of that background, orphaned lonely women who were brought up in repressive societies. The black middle classes who despised the working class blacks. The middle classes who were brought up to despise their origins and long to be a better people, like people who were english. Women were not brought up to cook local food, who looked down on it as “peasant food”, not dressing themselves for the climate but for the custom and fashion of the colonial power because, anything else was considered foolish and frivolous. Nothing of this was explained. so instead of seeing that hortense was a needy, unloved soul searching for human affection and never having had any for her own, she is ill equipped to seek it in others, all we got was a stand-offish black woman who sent a man into the ready and warm arms of a stoic white yorkshire woman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atq4rpDm63Q
One other criticism is that in an effort to catch as many viewers and make it palatable to a country that is 92% white, the whole series became the Queenie show, please do not misunderstand Queenie is an important part, but she overshadowed all three jamaicans, when she is supposed to be the tenous sinewny link between them.
I felt let down by it, it’s still streets ahead of what we may have got if we had that hack of a producers Tyler Perry behind it, we’d probably have a gaping huge black man taking the piss out of black women. rant over
Siân Angela Martin said,
October 16, 2011 at 11:12 am
Yes! Finally, someone who understands! I’ve had so many arguments over this. I felt Hortense was unfairly demonised. I wonder if you can help me on something. Am I right in thinking that the English settlers in Jamaica, the only English people Hortense would have been in contact with before coming to England, were all middle/upper class?
lifeisannoying said,
February 10, 2012 at 9:14 am
correct!