Joseph Zobel

 I read Black Shack Alley this week, and here are some of my reading experiences.

For me, Amantine, little Joseph’s grandmother, is the unique character in the article, with a tragic but extraordinary fate. The author describes how his grandmother correctly made little Joseph’s life ordinary and warm in such a poor situation. Despite the hard work on the plantation and how the clothes on his body were worn, little Joseph never touched the ruthless side of reality under the care of his grandmother. As a result, grandmother Amantine’s image of a loving, simple, and hard-working black worker jumped on the page. Later articles tell the story of Joseph Jr. and her grandmother living a poor and miserable life on a sugar cane plantation. Nevertheless, The assertive Little Joseph’s grandmother, Amantine, understood that knowledge was the key to the broader world. She worked hard to get a better life for Little Joseph.

By looking up relevant information, we can learn that Black Shack Alley is set in the French colony of Martinique in the 1930s. In this context, the meagre income and hard life of black workers and various painful histories are described in the book, which makes people move and think about it. In this case, the children in the plantation have always maintained their innocence and childlike fun; the brave struggle to find a wider world and the future expectations that the future grandmother and little Joseph still have. This tragic background has formed a sad and touching life and expressed a kind of awe-inspiring concept. The book’s rhetoric is not gorgeous, but just describing the background of this protagonist is enough to make the reader experience a dull feeling in this heavy and straightforward experience, a reflection on history based on people’s empathy.

In the book, childhood is always cheerful and straightforward. Those children who do not have a clear understanding of the nature of life do not care about rudimentary food and clothes that cannot cover privacy; everything is innocent and funny as if adding a sunny filter to the hard life. Looking at the author’s life from the perspective of his childhood, the cruel life we can feel is softened by such a filter. So this misery, which should have been stinging, became a continuous dullness. My question is: Is it easier for the reader to have the courage to continue reading than to bluntly analyze this tragic experience from an adult’s point of view?