“Daffodil Gap”: Reading Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy as Intertextual Interrogation of the Postcolonial Condition

Abstract

In Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy, the narrator grows up with the burden of colonial legacies embedded with Englands' imperial disciplinary projects, its language, educational institutions, discourses. Colonial education interpellates the narrator into a colonial subject through its multiple ideological discourses and systems. Teaching the literature of England is the most insidious form of the Empire's disciplinary colonial projects, more powerful than military enforcement: Its mode of operation is creating phantasy and instigating and planting desire for such phantasy. As Homi Bhabha aptly theorizes as colonial mimicry and ambivalence, the narrator as colonial subject grows up split and confused as an ambivalent subject, simultaneously mimicking and desiring for the phantasized England as real, while resisting and criticizing such up-bringing and mimetic desire. This paper explores Kincaid's rhetorical strategy of employing Wordsworth's poem, "I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud," especially her use of the flower "daffodil." Employing the concept of "daffodil gap" suggested by postcolonial critics, this paper closely examines two episodes involving the flower daffodil in the novel, one in a colonial classroom and the other in a garden in a new world and suggests that Kincaid accomplishes intertextual critique of colonial education and imperial projects.