The Power of Color
Author Dionne Brand emphasizes the use of color in her short story “No Rinsed Blue Sky, No Red Flower Fences”. The main character’s emotions, perceptions, as well as her social standing are demonstrated. The protagonist is an immigrant to Canada where she finds work babysitting children. All of her own children reside in her seaside hometown, leaving her alone in this foreign country. She is frightened by the whiteness of the walls in her apartment and the people surrounding her. Brand creates a stark contract between the main character’s blackness and the children she watches’ whiteness. Kara Goodwin’s paper “Narrating Silences: Voice and History in the Prose of Dionne Brand, M. Nourbese Philip, and Joy Kogawa” poses the argument that the main character’s “negative experiences in Canada [are associated with] images of whiteness” (116). The fear caused by white is best emphasized when compared to a different color, yellow, and …show more content…
Katie Mullins, in her article “’My Body is History’: Embodying the Past, Present, and Future in Dionne Brand’s Sans Souci and Other Stories”, believes that “the unnamed protagonist… appears restricted by her surroundings (11). She lives in a state of constant fear of her white walls and white country, her surroundings. Strangely enough, the narrator creates these restrictions for herself when she eliminates the bright yellow from her apartment. Glenn Ligon’s artwork Untitled: Four Etchings, 1992 features the words “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”. This phrase resonates with the actions of the narrator because she physically placed herself in front of a “sharp white background” when she whitewashed the walls of her home, further increasing the fears she has about whiteness. Despite having increased her own hardships, she remains confined due to her black skin in a white
Author Dionne Brand emphasizes the use of color in her short story “No Rinsed Blue Sky, No Red Flower Fences”. The main character’s emotions, perceptions, as well as her social standing are demonstrated. The protagonist is an immigrant to Canada where she finds work babysitting children. All of her own children reside in her seaside hometown, leaving her alone in this foreign country. She is frightened by the whiteness of the walls in her apartment and the people surrounding her. Brand creates a stark contract between the main character’s blackness and the children she watches’ whiteness. Kara Goodwin’s paper “Narrating Silences: Voice and History in the Prose of Dionne Brand, M. Nourbese Philip, and Joy Kogawa” poses the argument that the main character’s “negative experiences in Canada [are associated with] images of whiteness” (116). The fear caused by white is best emphasized when compared to a different color, yellow, and …show more content…
Katie Mullins, in her article “’My Body is History’: Embodying the Past, Present, and Future in Dionne Brand’s Sans Souci and Other Stories”, believes that “the unnamed protagonist… appears restricted by her surroundings (11). She lives in a state of constant fear of her white walls and white country, her surroundings. Strangely enough, the narrator creates these restrictions for herself when she eliminates the bright yellow from her apartment. Glenn Ligon’s artwork Untitled: Four Etchings, 1992 features the words “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”. This phrase resonates with the actions of the narrator because she physically placed herself in front of a “sharp white background” when she whitewashed the walls of her home, further increasing the fears she has about whiteness. Despite having increased her own hardships, she remains confined due to her black skin in a white