Things You Don’t Want to Know
Ever notice how often irony winds up being something you now wish you didn’t know? “Hope” is a story that to a minor degree is all about that sort of ironic content.
“In an irony the young man never came to appreciate, the cane forming the finest, sweetest sugar grew from a swamp of cow dung, mud and the burned ash of previously processed crops.”
Self-Empowerment
Throughout the collection, one achingly true irony arises over and over again. Self-empowerment is only possible for those working within a framework of oppression. For someone in the minority to attain empowerment on their own requires a majority setting itself to the task of the oppressing them.
School Symbol and Motto
“Shu Yi” opens with the narrator describing the gate on the local school. The gate features the school’s emblem—a kookaburra bird—and the school motto: PLAY THE GAME. The kookaburra is a bird with a raucous call that sounds like primate laughter and has comes to symbolize joy and optimism, much like what is expected from the sound of children playing. Ironically, however, the story will play out to show children playing games based on hateful prejudice which drains everyone of genuine joy.
Harlem Jones
The stories in this collection are independent of each other for the most part, standalone narratives that do not connect through character or plot. An exception does occur, however, in the story which closes the volume. “Harlem Jones” is the second story in the book and is a straightforward linear account of the title character told through a standard third-person narrative perspective. In other words, it is simply of non-experimental realistic fiction that is, in fact, lent a deeper degree of realism courtesy of it being set against the backdrop of actual historical events. This makes Harlem’s second appearance in the book somewhat ironic since after having used the Tottenham riots following the police murder of Mark Duggan to situate “Harlem Jones” as perhaps the most starkly realistic story in the novel, he next appears as a “character” in that story being referenced by an editor expressing concerns to a writer about the direction the story takes and its ending.
Communicating Racism
“Big Islan” is a first-person narrative conveyed through heavily—purposely difficult—dialect by a native of Jamaica. The use of patois immediately subjugates the reader into the position of being forced to work hard at parsing the communicative distance between the narrator and himself. Layered subtly over the many smaller ironic observations made by the narrator, Nathanial, is that the extra work a reader must do to understand the thoughts he is communication through dialect is that it was only very recently that his wife forced him to escape the bondage of his illiteracy by teaching him to read.
