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Jamaica Kincaid; A Small Place; Orphans with No Tongue; pp. 31–32

But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed this crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me. When I say to the criminal, “This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong,” or, “This deed is bad, and this other deed is bad, and this one is also very, very, bad,” the criminal understands the word “wrong” in this way: It is wrong when “he” doesn’t get his fair share of the profits from the crime just committed; he understands the word “bad” in this way: a fellow criminal betrayed a trust. That must be why, when I say, “I am filled with rage,” the criminal says, “But why?”…And so look at this prolonged visit to the bile duct that I am making, look at how bitter, how dyspeptic just to sit and think about these things makes me. …)

mod date: 2009-01-31T17:33:12.000Z