To Da-Duh in Memoriam is a short story about a nine-year-old girl going to visit her grandmother (Da-Duh) in Barbados and “Her struggle to integrate the two sides of her heritage (Washington 2010).” The story is set in 1937. A nine-year-old is narrating the story as she looks back on her experience. She has just arrived in Barbados from New York where she is there with her mother and sister to visit her grandmother. Her father did not take the trip. She creates a lasting relationship with her grandmother which she calls Da-Duh. This relationship involves competition and contrasts of the two worlds they are from. Dah-Duh sees the narrator as strong and competitive, a copy of her.
She describes the place that they are meeting as the “disembarkation …show more content…
She describes it as this slow little town with women with baskets on their heads, slurring the dust at their feet indicating that everyone there is way behind the times. As the lorry heads out of town they go into the countryside Da-Duh begins to relax. She is now in her element with the sugar cane and the fruit trees. She begins to talk about how large the cane is where she lives. At the same time the narrator becomes uneasy seeing all of the sugar cane. She describes it as this dangerous place where the cane is closing in on them. At this point the narrator wishes she was at home with her father. Again this is another example of the contrast between Da-Duh and the narrator (Le Few). It seems that everything that makes one comfortable makes the other …show more content…
Dah-Duh continues to attempt to show the narrator how her world is better than the narrator’s. But slowly Da-Duh is in awe of life in the big city. The narrator tells her about all of the conveniences in New York. She tell her about inventions like the refrigerators, gas stoves, elevators, trolley cars, washing machines, movies, airplanes, Coney Island, subways toasters and electric lights. She explains to Da-Duh about electricity and how it’s just like turning on the sun at night (To Da-Duh). “Her cultural triumphs are taken from the world of modern technology. If she was scared by wild tropical nature, Da-duh fears the world of steel, concrete and machines that her granddaughter meticulously recreates for her. Yet she is simultaneously somehow fascinated by it (kolar