Dead Woman Pickney: A Memoir of Childhood in Jamaica (Life Writing)

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Description

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles life stories of growing up in Jamaica from 1943 to 1965 and contains both personal experience and history, told with stridency and humour. The creator’s coming of age parallels the political stages of Jamaica’s moving from the richest Crown colony of Great Britain to an independent nation within the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, in conjunction with her astonishment at persistent racial marginalization, both locally and globally, the creator sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples. The creator’s quest to take into account the absence of her mother and her mother’s people from her life is at the heart of this narrative. The title, Dead Woman Pickney, is in Jamaican patois, and its meaning unfolds right through the narrative. It begins with the creator’s childhood question of what a mother is, followed by the realization of the vulnerability of a child without its mother’s protection. The term “pickney” used to be the name for slave children on sugar plantations, and post-emancipation the term used to be retained for the descendants of enslaved Africans and the children of black women fathered by slavers. The creator struggles through her life to discover the identity of her mother in the face of silence from her father’s brutal family.

A wonderful resource for teachers of history, social studies, cultural studies, and literature, this work could be used as a place to begin to speak about issues of diasporic identities, colonialism, racism, affect of slavery, and Western imperialism world wide. It’s also an engaging read for those interested in memoir and life writing.

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