Moving Beyond Borders Analysis

Thus, the British and the American treat the colonized as the other, this treatment causes an identity crisis throughout the construction of the colonized otherness, this binary opposition puts the colonizers in the inferiority position Hall states that ''Not only, in Said's 'Orientalist' sense, were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the West by those regimes. They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as other'' (qtd in Cultural Hybridity 187).
Even though the early life with one's family served as foundation for the early identity as Alana Butler shows in her article Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora that ''the early family socialization was pivotal for each of these women. The family served as a foundation of their
early identity formation and also as a source of resistance against colonial oppression and inequality'' (160). But Clare's life with her family in Jamaica was the source of contradictions to her, she lives with a dark skinned mother reminds her with her slaves ancestors and with her light skinned father who resembles the history of colonization over the Caribbean. Clare is a Creole because she belongs to the Caribbean and she has black and white ancestors, Clare contains all the contradictions in her character she is ''A light-skinned woman, daughter of landowners, native-born, slave, émigrés, Carib, Ashanti, English'' (Cliff 5). These contradictions of being Caribbean and in the same time English with European blood make Clare Creole. Aimé Césaire states that '' Creole is a word that has popularly been used, in the Francophone Caribbean, to refer to Bekes[who are]the white descendents of the French colonizers'' (qtd in. Race, Culture, and Identity 96). In other words, Creole means that'' people who 'look black' take a position that they are 'not really black' but something other'' (Lewis 96). Even though Clare has born in Jamaica for a Jamaican family but her light skinned was a curse in her homeland because her skin color makes her outcaste in her homeland ''de ones who mixed, de ones who talk ' my white grandmother' or ' my English father'—does ones carry Satan in dem blood. Jus' so … Jus' like dem would carry typhoid … cancer … for it eat at dem '' (Cliff 38). Clare's light skinned reminds the black Caribbean with their struggle against the British colonization. Therefore, Clare can't hide her skin color and she can't also identify herself as Caribbean woman because of the white people's history of slavery, violence, and colonization against the black people ''Christopher was de pure Black man who lead de Black people of Haiti dem against de mixed-up ones who want fe control de Africans dem. Jus' like ya so in Jamaica'' (Cliff 38).
For that reasons, being out cast in her society, abandoned even though she was from a middle class family, and threatened by the indigenous people Clare's father decides to move with his family to America.
The savage's family leaves Jamaica to the United States in 1960 when Clare was fourteen years old. Clare's life in America was the turning point in her life and the place in which was the eye opener for her, America was for the Savage's family and Clare the land of new life ''This was a new start in a new world'' (Cliff 54). The family escaped from the violence and racism, and they expected that they left racism behind. America was the new world for them, the greatest country in the world, the land of opportunities, boy reassures to his daughters that their life in America is a great chance for them ''he told his girls, was a grand chance to find out about this country firsthand. The greatest country in the world'' (Cliff 54).Eventhough Kitty (Clare's mother) and Jennie (Clare's sister) were dark skinned but they thought it was a chance for them to live in the new country ''we're blessed to have such a chance at a new life'' (Cliff
54).