Small island key quotes Flashcards
Hostility towards Gilbert in the cinema Chapter 17
•‘You’re nothing but trouble’
• ‘even in RAF blue my coloured skin can permit anyone to treat me less than a man’
• ‘’Enunciating as if talking to an imbecile’
Chapter 14 Gilbert in US Army base
‘All these words had been used to characterise me in the last few minutes. Insults every one’
Chapter 30 Gilbert working in the post office insults
•‘When are you going back to the jungle?’
• ‘We can’t use your sort’
• ‘Speak English’
• ‘There’s decent Englishmen that should be doing your job’
Chapter 30 Gilbert feeling ashamed after dealing with racism
•‘What a forlorn desire to seek indifference’
• ‘aching shame stooped me double’
Mr Todd/ British attitudes towards immigrants
• ‘this country no longer feels like his own’ Blanche Smith
• ‘Hitler invading couldn’t have been any worse’ Blanche Smith
• ‘We’ll have a devil of a time getting rid of them now’ Mr Todd
Hortense’s disillusionment chapter 2
• ‘You make me come here and live like an animal?’
• ‘her mouth gaping like a simpleton’s’
Hortense’s childish naïvety in chapter 1
‘ding a ling’ ‘But there was no answer’
Gilbert’s disillusionment about the Mother country chapter 12
‘how come England did not know me?’
‘Leave home, leave familiar, leave love’
‘Your finest, your best, everything you have that is worthy is sent to Mother’
Hortense gets rejected from teaching position chapter 50
Gilbert - ‘This is not the way that England work’
‘You’re not qualified to teach here in England’
‘Every organ I possessed screamed on this woman’
Chapter 51: Hortense’s realisation of the reality of England
‘Hortense reeling wounded after a sharp slap from the Mother Country’s hand’
‘I have found that this is a very cold country’
Hortense’s dialect, out with Queenie
•‘Tired of this silly dance of miscomprehension’
•‘At college my diction was admired by all’
•Wonders why the working clas speak so ‘coarse’
Chapter 59 confrontation between Gilbert and Bernard
(Gilbert about race) White. No better, no worse than me, just white
‘Am I to be the servant and you are the master for all time?’
Anecdotes chapter 12
• Curtis was told ‘his skin was too dark to worship there’
• Eugene was ‘taken away’ wrongly for ‘attacking an old lady’
• Louis believed ‘bloodyforeigner’ to be all one word
Chapter 12 Gilbert’s disillusionment
‘All us pitiful West Indian dreamers who sailed with heads bursting with foolishness were a joke’ (to his cousin)
Gilbert about taking the baby chapter 59
‘Leave that little coloured baby alone in this country, full of people like Mr Bligh. What sort of life would that little man have?’
Chapter 59 Hortense having hope
•Told she would have a ‘golden future’ with her ‘golden skin’
• Hortense then says ‘I intend to’
Choosing to stay and fight for their life together in the UK
Chapter 59 Celia Langley motif of disillusionment
‘Celia Langley’ would never have imagined something ‘so preposterous of this Mother Country’
Gilbert feeling angry chapter 30 after facing racism
I could have whacked his nose until it cracked and bled’
Chapter 32 Gilbert regaining hope after post office incident
• Englishwoman gives him a sweet - ‘it was a salvation to me’
‘I had become hungry for the good in people’
Mr Todd quote about NHS chapter 9
‘That National Health service - it’s pulling them in […] they were all cross eyed and goofy before they got here’
‘They would turn the area into a jungle’
Chapter 12 Gilbert orientalism
‘The entire village had come out to play dog with gecko’ (relating experience to home)
• ‘If any one of those people had a stick long enough, I swear they would have poked us with it’
Queenie white saviour complex chapter 17 at the cinema
‘I wanted to be so pleased this sweet Englishwoman was speaking up for me. But come, Queenie’s good intentions were entirely missing the point’
Chapter 22 Queenie infantilising Hortense
‘The impression I received was that she was talking to me as if I was an imbecile’
Chapter 22 confusion with language Hortense
Humour - ‘Cat got your tongue?’ ‘What cat was she talking of?’
Queenie Bligh racism
Ch1 stereotyping - ‘I hope you’re not brining anything into the house that will smell?’
Ch9 - ‘black as filth’
Queenie defending Gilbert Chapter 17
•Queenie to white men: ‘You can sit down, what’s it got to do with you?’
• ‘Queenie Bligh believed herself to be safeguarding me’
Chapter 22 (Hortense POV about Queenie)
• ‘The impression I received was that she was talking to me as if I was an imbecile’
• Queenie - ‘You’ll find I’m not like most. It doesn’t worry me to be seen out with darkies’
Ch58 Queenie begging Hortense and Gilbert to take Micheal and the baby
‘I trust you and Gilbert. I know you. You’re good people’
Ch33 Hortense harassed with slurs
Queenie tells her to ‘Take no notice’
Bernard hostility Chapter 52
‘I fought a war to protect home and hearth. Not about to be invaded by stealth’
Chapter 32 kind stranger
‘It was a salvation to me’
Chapter 59 Bernard from Hortense POV
• ‘Get your filthy black hands off my wife’
• ‘savage’
• ‘I just can’t understand a single word that you’re saying’
Blanche Smith hostility Chapter 9 (Queenie POV)
‘She warned me that they had different ways from us and know nothing of manners’
Decolonisation struggles in Small Island Elwood
Ch11 - describes WW2 as a ‘white man’s war’ and saying Jamaica’s independence ‘This is worth a fight’
Gilbert decolonisation struggles
Trope of the cynical immigrant, challenging Britain’s superiority in Chapter 32 to Hortense: ‘not everything the English do is good’
Gilbert appropriation of colonial discourse
Gilbert speaks Jamaican Patois - a Creole dialect shaped by African, Spanish, French, Portuguese and English Heratuve e.g ‘Cha’ - making the colonial language his own
Hortense appropriation of colonial language
Hortense perfecting Standard English and speaking it better than the colonisers - e.g white working class man looks at her ‘as if I was speaking in tongues’
Hortense valorisation of cultural identity
‘I took the far from home blanket and spread it on the bed’
‘The yellow with the red, the blue with the green commenced dancing in this dreary room’
Hortense and G relationship
Ch 31 ‘No wife of mine will be on her knees in this country’
ch 51 Hortense ‘laughed’ and the sky ‘opened on a sharp beam of sunlight’
