“Blackness” and Identity

In the first paragraph of “Blackness” by Jamaica Kincaid, the narrator describes a sense of blackness that she feels around her at all times. She begins to describe this phenomenon by saying that it is something that “can not be separated from her but she can often stand outside of it”. This blackness causes the narrator to begin to lose her own self identity. She claims, “In the blackness, my voice is silent”. This blackness is the central tension in the story, as the narrator struggles to accept how the concept of blackness has replaced her unique cultural and personal identity. 

The description of blackness in this story is important because it is being used as a metaphor by the author to explain how the narrator feels about her homeland being colonized. The people who colonized her stripped her of her culture and replaced it with this label of “blackness”. She feels that she has lost a sense of uniqueness. I arrived at this conclusion about the meaning of the “blackness” later on in the story. The narrator describes an incident in which she describes looking down at her foot and finding a spot of skin that was in contrast to the rest of her black skin. This moment brought the narrator joy as she discovered that she was not in fact only defined by the label of “blackness” that was given to her by her colonizers. She felt a sense of her own self identity rather than a stamp placed on her by others. Through this interaction, I came to understand that “blackness” as it was described in the first paragraph is a representation of her and her people that was forced onto them by others. It is something that the narrator struggles with throughout the story and eventually comes to accept in the end by claiming that, “I hear the silent voice; it stands opposite the blackness and yet it does not oppose the blackness, for conflict is a part of its nature”. In this quote, the narrator expresses that her inner self is still there despite the label that has been placed upon her. She learns that her own identity and the identity that is placed upon her can coexist. She has not completely lost her own identity, but rather it has evolved into something new.