earticle

영어

This article examines the heroine's experience of diaspora and the process of her recognition about the neo-colonial relationship between western countries and the Caribbean region in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy. Lucy leaves Antigua for a metropolis in America and experiences diaspora. She lives with a white, middle class woman, Mariah, taking care of Mariah's children. Mariah, who becomes Lucy's surrogate mother, reminds Lucy of her real mother and her childhood memories in Antigua. From Mariah's life, Lucy perceives a colonizer's gaze charged with the ideology of European colonialism. Furthermore, most of the white people, including Mariah, regard Lucy a subaltern and outsider from a Third World country. The implication of their colonial gazes is perceived and reinterpreted by Lucy's keen eyes. Through Lucy's sensitive perspective, Kincaid exposes cultural colonialism embedded in the metropolitan urban culture. A postcolonial woman, Lucy becomes a subjective agent whose cultural consciousness is torn between the new culture emerging in the metropolis and the vanishing traditional culture of Antigua. Lucy appropriates and abrogates both her past mother/land and new metropolitan life only to reveal her own insoluble inner tension engendered by the two conflicting cultures.