Caribbean Mother

The colonial times in the Caribbean were though. They times that the family wasn’t how it is portrait today. The mother is the center figure in the family because the father figure was working or left the family. So the mother takes the role of mother and father the raise the family.

Throughout the short story part of the semester of Caribbean literature, almost all stories the mother plays an important prominent role in the society, community, family and of course the story. By personal experiences from was I lived when I was a kid there are mothers with different behaviors. There was the loving passive mother, the strict mother, the single mother, the crazy mother and the grandmother among others. So were the short stories there were mothers with different behavior.

In the story Brackley and the bed by Samuel Selvon even though Teena was not a mother she is a woman and plays the role as a mother to Brackley. A woman/mother possessive who change and bother Brackley’s life in his own words. In my opinion this kind of woman become undesirable like in the next story I will mention.

In the story Girl by Jamaica Kincaid the mother was conditioning her daughter to be servant to her husband, perpetuating machismo. In this story the father is a present figure. In this story the daughter would have to wish her mother was absent by imposing all those rules. It was a bad mother according now but, in that time that speech saves her from a few bruises because I think back then the husbands were more abusive than they are now with all the protective laws and the slow improvement in the mentality of the society.

In the story Mother by Velma Pollard the mother is an absent figure, the mother figure is taken by the grandmother. Her mother left her to emigrate in the search for a job. The daughter waits all years the arrival of her mother but all she get is a barrel of clothes and money. The classic escape from the homeland to the states and find out the life you think you would have is worse than the one you had before. The wish she had her mother instead of the money she was sending her.

In the story Mother by Jamaica Kincaid the story is crazy, man I cannot understand a bit only the part were the daughter wished her mother was dead. And that the daughter grew with her mother and they fine one moment and in the other they were separated, like they get along for periods of time and others don’t.

The mother figure in Brackley and in Girl is stricter mothers than in the others stories they both want to teach how to do things so the people around sees you with good eyes. The only story with the father figure present is in Girl cause in the other stories the father is gone. Beside the attitude of each one of the mothers there is an undeniable fact that is that mother figure is the most important figure in the formation of the person she have the hand to mold the clay that in the end of her work would be an adult.