SOURCE: De Aruña, Laura Niesen. “The ‘Incredible Indigo Sea’ within Anglo-American Fiction.” In Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics, edited by Temma F. Berg, Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Jeanne Larsen, and Elisa Kay Sparks, pp. 125-50. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

In the following essay, De Aruña examines the treatment of racism and sexism in several fictional works that also deal with imperialism in the Caribbean.

I began to feel I loved the land and to know that I would never forget it. There I would go for long walks alone. It's strange growing up in a very beautiful place and seeing that it is beautiful. It was alive, I was sure of it. Behind the bright colours the softness, the hills like clouds and the clouds like fantastic hills. There was something austere, sad, lost, all these things.

Jean Rhys, Smile Please

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