Lucy

Moving to a new neighborhood is difficult enough, but imagine moving to a new region of the world, without the familial ties and the luxury of being around those  who you've always known, who has always known you. Essentially,  you become a stranger to your surroundings, growing from a child into an adult makes you a stranger in your own skin, especially when you have been displaced. In Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy, a young woman follows her lifelong dream of leaving her small room and childhood bed and moving to a place that she has always dreamed of. A place filled with buildings, streets and bridges that she read about in her school books. It is only after she gets to this new place that she questions exactly why she had dreamed of leaving all she ever knew to live in a cold, dismal, ordinary place where the sun shines without making it warm out. As Lucy struggles to make a place for herself in North America, she also fights an inner emotional battle with herself to recreate the person she once was into the person she is learning to be. This is even harder than it has to be since Lucy is so far away from home.

Lucy experiences American culture with child-like zest initially. What she had before regarded as things beyond her wildest dreams soon became a reality to her. “Everything I was experiencing—the ride in the elevator, being in an apartment, eating day-old food that had been stored in a refrigerator—was such a good idea that I could imagine I would grow used to it and like it very much, but at first it was all so new that I had to smile with my mouth turned down at the corners” (4). And since reality can never live up to the idealized imagination, she was often disappointed by what she found and saw. This brought her to, at times, long for the familiar smells, tastes, sights of her past. When she receives letters from her mother she is eventually unable to open or read them because the words would cause a wave of homesickness to wash over her. Lucy's story reaffirms something that I have always believed, you need the comforts of home, in some degree, in order to just be ok sometimes. I'm learning this as well.