In Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid, the main character, Lucy, struggles with a constant battle of wanting to run away from her family and her home. Lucy leaves her home to live in the US, and throughout the story, readers learn of her complicated relationship to her home and her family who lives there. She speaks negatively of her mother and her family, but has a complicated connection to her family and her home, a connection she is constantly trying to run away from.
In chapter 3, Hugh says, “Isn’t it the most blissful thing in the world to be away from everything you have ever known – to be so far away that you don’t even know yourself anymore and you’re not sure you ever want to come back to all the things you’re a part of?” (66). When Hugh asks Lucy this question, he is putting into words a feeling that Lucy has been changing all her life. “To be away from everything you have ever known,” so much so that, “you don’t even know yourself anymore,” is a feeling that Lucy has desired since she was a child. However, throughout the story, readers learn that this idea is wishful thinking, and Lucy exemplifies the idea that distance alone is not enough to make one forget who they are or who they come from. In fact, distance can have the opposite effect, and remind one just who they are and how difficult it is to run away from that reality.
Lucy’s dreams highlight the idea that being “so far away,” from her home and her family is not enough to rid her of the connection to these things and the pain that comes with them. When Lucy encounters daffodils with Mariah, readers learn that Lucy had been forced to memorize a poem about daffodils, a result of her living in a colonized area. She speaks of daffodils haunting her in her dreams, “I dreamt, continuously it seemed, that I was being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils that I had vowed to forget, and when finally I fell down… until I was buried deep underneath them and never seen again”(Kincaid 18). Even in Lucy’s subconscious which she cannot control, the trauma of her past, of living in a colonized country, haunts her. Even when she is asleep, she feels trapped and suffocated by the colonizing force. The daffodils, which represent the colonizers, suffocate her until she is buried beneath them. She runs from them, but they chase her. This is a metaphor for the way her past continues to chase her despite how far she runs. She cannot escape her trauma by simply leaving her home, for these experiences have made her who she is, and continue to haunt her, even in her subconscious. In theory, the idea that Hugh proposes, of being away from anything Lucy has ever known, is a nice one. But Lucy cannot run from the experiences and trauma that she has experienced, as they

Works Cited

Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990.