SOURCE: Lalla, Barbara. “Leavings.” In Defining Jamaican Fiction: Marronage and the Discourse of Survival, pp. 104-14. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Lalla views “Country of the One-Eyed God” as “a study in marronage because it is a tale of leaving and being left and consequently of the cold logic behind seemingly irrational violence.”

Marronage results from fragmentation internal to the Jamaican setting and from a tension between local and imperial cultures.¹ The growth of a national consciousness sensitizes local writers to separation of communities within the island and to the consequences of abandonment as some Jamaicans select voluntary exile and others are left behind. Moreover, beyond the connection between the dispossessed woman and the deprived child lies a chain effect that links the abandoned child to the violently resentful and demanding youth and eventually to the adult as predator. The gathering hostility of Icy...