To Da-duh, in Memoriam

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To Da-duh, in Memoriam by Paule Marshall

Comment closely on the passage, focusing in particular on ways it presents the clash of two different worlds.

Firstly, the story is written in the first person narrative. The narrator writes about a memory and therefore it is autobiographical in nature. This is confirmed by the “in Memoriam” in the title of the story which shows that the story was written in memory of her grandmother, Da-duh. The story is told from the eyes of the writer’s nine year old self and we see the story solely through the child. While the tone is personal because the narrator is personally involved in the story, there is also emotional distance. It gives the impression that the emotional events are viewed through the eyes of an outsider or a third person due to the way the story is told: through facts and the narrator’s recollection of the event.

The passage begins with the narrator informing us about how Da-duh was the one who always brought up New York with “some slighting remark on her part.” It seems as though Da-duh voluntarily gave her granddaughter a chance to fight her case by making comments such as “they don’t have anything this nice” or “foolish people in New York” that was bound to get a reaction or a comeback from the narrator. This would then unravel into a back and forth game as Da-duh would be then allowed to try and prove her wrong. In addition, Da-duh’s comments about New York and it’s “foolish people” and her “faint mocking smile” show the superiority she feels her world has over her granddaughter’s.

As the narrator tells her grandmother about the everyday machines back in New York, she leans that one of Da-duh’s signs of surrender was “her fear, a fear nameless and profound.” The simplest interpretation we can come up with is Da-duh’s free of technology. The narrator observes that it was the same fear Da-duh felt “that day in the lorry.” This suggests that Da-duh has a “fear and distrust” of lorries and from that we can conclude that it applies to all forms of technology and signs of modernization.

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However, the nameless fear may not be specified to a single fear. We see from early on that we have not only stepped into the world of culture and tradition but also into Da-duh’s world. She’s in control, she’s “a monarch amid her court.” She knows her granddaughter the things that she believes makes Barbados better than New York. We get the impression that Da-duh attempts to enchant and influence her granddaughter into falling in love with her world and, being a strong character, she may have thought it to be a piece of cake. What she didn’t count on ...

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