A Lost Identity Within I Am A Martinican Woman :: essays research papers

There is no single criterion that provides a necessary basis for individualism, and neither is at that place a threshold, a critical mass of sufficient conditions. It is possible to film that because a happened to a person, and b happened to the same person that he or she is a c-type person however, its impossible to make up a definition which covers all that there is about identity. In the newfangled I am a Martinican Woman by Mayotte Capecia, the reader incurs the of import character, Mayotte, hopelessly striving to find a static definition of her identity. Mayotte has a need to feel anchored in something that she can define herself as, yet at the very same time, she feels torn between who she is and what she needs in life. These differentiate feelings only lead to the exaggeration of Mayottes emotions through her thoughts and actions, and her lack of identity becomes magnified to the reader. By analyzing the theme of racial identity and the strong posture of patriarchal s tructures within the Martinican society, one is able to see the difficulty in Mayotte finding a separate identity for herself.Throughout the novel, Mayotte denigrates blacks, when, in fact, she is part black. At the very beginning of the novel she depersonalizes herself from the groups of young black girls that have b studyets filled with food on their heads (Capecia, 34). Mayotte observes them and their graceful manner, but in no way associates herself with them, and even ventures to describe the crude details of how the girls stopped to meet a need right there on the path after which, she would obviously wipe herself with her skirt and go on her way(Capecia, 34). After her take tells Mayotte the story about her grandmother, she expresses how proud she is that she had a white grandmother, yet she ventures to ask How could a Canadian woman have loved a Martinican?(Capecia, 63). She is amazed, it seems, that a white woman would stoop to marry a black man. Mayotte specifically sta tes that a grandmother was less commonplace than a white gramps(Capecia, 62).Here, it is evident, that Mayotte sees blacks as inferior. But at the same time, she is partially black. Many critics see this as an expression of the lactification complex,or the mind frame of idolizing whites as hale as a desire to be white, that silently existed within non only Martinican society, but also throughout the Caribbean (CLA, 260).