Riley focuses on the experience of the female Black British exile child who removes from the West Indies to come to Britain. This fractured childhood scenario is highlighted through the experiences of eleven year-old Hyacinth, who exiles from Jamaica to Britain to join her father. Her experience is far from a typical childhood experience. In this extreme portrayal, Riley documents the psychological displacement for these children whose literal inhabitation of a divided self becomes worsened by racism and abuse. She achieves this atypical childhood presentation through turning the typical elements of a childhood novel on its head. Home and school become the abusive zones of Hyacinth's life. Riley's portrayal of childhood issues gains credence from her occupation as a social worker in 1970's Britain. In her article, "Writing Reality in a Hostile Environment," she exposes her purpose as an educator for the British society: "To allow my readers to retreat into their comfortable world and not accept their part in resolving the issues that did not go away with the final full stop- this would be to have failed in achieving the purpose of the work." As such, Riley is not afraid to write of weak black female characters because her interest is to expose the truth, without getting caught in the competition between black and white fiction.

Hyacinth arrives into a situation with an unknown father, a new stepmother and two stepbrothers. Maureen, her stepmother, is deliberately cruel to Hyacinth and refuses to accept her as a daughter. Exile sunders the important mother-daughter relationship, and this loss of mothering is particularly harmful to Hyacinth. Hyacinth has a bedwetting problem (can this be a symbolic representation of the difficulty of transition?) and she needs the nurture of a mother figure. Maureen gets peculiar pleasure in emphasizing Hyacinth's biological disconnection to her, and uses Hyacinth's bedwetting problem as a cheap way to gain points with her husband. Hyacinth never recalls acceptance from her stepmother, she only remembers "Maureen telling her that her two children were the only two children of the house, and she, Hyacinth, only there on sufferance." (28) We get no record of Hyacinth playing at home, but we are told she cooks, washes and irons. This is particuarly odd for a young girl. It is her stepmother's wickedness that encourages Hyacinth's virulent hatred of her stepbrothers. She grows up disconnected from her siblings and in her yearning for mothering she often thinks of her loving Aunt Joyce who she leaves behind in Jamaica. Riley is writing of a 1970's time period when the black child is a rarity in the British school system:

Hyacinth had been at Beacon Girls Secondary School for only two months. Being one of eight black children she has become the butt of many jokes, taunts, and cruel tricks. Normally the breaks between lessons were the greatest nightmares of the school day, to be approached with apprehension and then endured when they finally arrived. (12)

Schooldays should connote fun times, playing and friendships. However Hyacinth's childhood in Britain unfolds divorced from the world of responsive interaction and childhood play. We are taken through one day at school with Hyacinth. Her isolation from the playground, the center of childhood interaction, is testament to her awareness of unbelonging: "She hated the cold, hated the playground and the screaming, noisy children. It was hard to believe they were at least eleven, the same age as her." (14) Fights replace extensions of friendship as we witness her involvement in two fights in one day. It takes little to trigger her classmates' animosity towards her. We are sensitized to British racism in the children's chanting, "Kill the wog!" when she is attacked. Hyacinth's cultural differences are a source of mockery, especially her accent and complexion. It is obvious that these childres's opinions reflect those of their elders. Hyacinth is told, "You should go back to the jungle where you come from." The teacher on duty does nothing to help her but instead "shook her head in amused tolerance." It is sad to witness Hyacinth deliberately hiding in secluded spots at school, opting to remain invisible. Her isolation makes her remember her times in Jamaica. These memory recollections become a characteristic of the exiled Black British child's divided self, while highlighting the awareness of losses they bear. Hyacinth's memories recall times she spent with her friends Florence and Cynthia: "They had enjoyed their recess breaks, the three of them, walking in the school grounds, sitting under the big spreading Bombay mango tree. There was always plenty to talk about, plenty to plan."(15) This marks her divided self and she no longer lives in the present. She is forced to retreat to her imagination and becomes entrapped in her nostalgia for her past. This proves a dangerous thing as Hyacinth enters adulthood forgetting that with the passage of time Jamaica is not what it was like in her childhood. She remains in a paralysed situation where time freezes as she desperately holds on to somewhere she can call home.

The most damaging thing to Hyacinth's childhood development is her abusive father. Riley makes the greatest insistence on this by giving detailed analysis to these abusive scenes. This is the ultimate betrayal for the Black British child. Hyacinth's bedwetting angers the father who thrashes her. He fails miserably as a parent by not recognizing that his daughter needs comfort and love. Instead he resorts to beating her with every bedwetting occurrence. We are even more horrified in his change of behavior when Hyacinth turns fourteen and begins menstruating. One day he offers to enlighten her about the world of men:

"Do you know what a man's body looks like?" he asked suggestively.
"No, sir," she answered nervously, not liking the way he was speaking.
"Call me daddy," he said automatically. "I am tired of telling you that. I don't want no man take advantage of you," he continued. "So I going to show you some some of the things not to let men do."
Her heartbeat was making her breathing hard, she knew this was wrong, that he was going to hurt her somehow.
"Please sir, I already know what not to let men do," she said in alarm, her stepmother's words coming back to her with sudden meaning. "Don't let your father trouble you," the woman said and she suddenly felt that this was what she had meant. (48)

Hyacinth is given a book by her stepmother called, "Cider with Rosie," and is told that something happened to her cousin Anne. It is the circling of the phrase "Incest flourished where the roads were bad," that comes to haunt Hyacinth, and sensitize her to her father's upcoming violations. We move to the father's watching of Hyacinth bathe:

Many times he would order her to stand up and wash, and the knowledge of the lump in the trousers would force her to obey. She hated her body, felt the shame at the wisps of black hair that had started to grow on her pubic area and the fact that her breasts started to swell. (52)

She felt the lump moving, and she pushed and struggled, clawing out at him, her head singing as he slapped it about in annoyance. Now he was shifting on top of her, weight lifting, her legs no longer trapped. She could hear him grunting as he struggled with his trousers… (63)

This experience becomes one that cripples Hyacinth for the rest of her life; Hyacinth has no foundation to enter into adulthood. The racisms in the British society keeps her father's crime bottled within her. This silencing results in a core of unhealed pain, obstructing her future ability to have male-female relationships. Her fear to disclose her father's abuse, the hatred of her blackness, and the hostility of the British society, all keep her chained to her childhood memories of Jamaica and to a false domicile in the imagination. This has grave repercussions on her conception of home and belonging. Finally, Riley's emphasis on the sexual abuse connects her fiction to more expansive feminist intentions. Through the father's brutal act, Riley is able to comment on the erroneous assumption that incest is a white crime. The black female is trapped in the stereotypes that prevent us seeing her as a sexually violated woman. Slavery with its over-emphasis on the black woman's sexuality is directly responsible for this. Riley writes a corrective through highlighting that incest is also a damaging reality for the black child.

Copyright 2000 Black British Literature
Last Updated May 10, 2000 by Cesar and Sharon Meraz