Alyssa Wallingford
October 30, 2022
English 206
Professor Catherine Frank
Quotation: “He complains/ at my scent and does not think/ I comprehend, but I speak/ English. I speak Dutch. I speak/ a little French as well, and/ languages Monsieur Cuvier/ will never know have names./ Now I am bitter and now/ I am sick.”
Comment: I wonder what led the man to believe that she did not speak or understand him. But I would guess that it was a result of the time it was in, where these white colonizers viewed people of a different skin tone to be less than, or otherwise evolutionarily below “the white man”, coming up with false and misleading science to prove that the oppression of these “savages” was just. I wonder what led these colonizers to see these people, and almost automatically assume that they were inferior in some way, whether it was based on their skin color or customs. Additionally, from a point of intersectionality, would this man have acted differently in any way if he had been describing a man of color put on display? From this woman’s standpoint, she is only seen as a display, something to be gawked at and paraded around, but as she points out later in the poem, she is more than that. She has kids, a family, and people that she loves, but to this man, none of that seems to matter. And although she thought this would be a good opportunity for her, coming to this land, all she feels is bitterness and sadness at her current predicament.
Question: Did anyone in this time ever think differently in the way that would have been drastically different from this norm? Is this a combination of misogyny and racism, or one of the two? How does acknowledging her different roles affect how she is seen by the reader of the poem?
