My Experience
My experience with reading the personal essay Report from the Bahamas, 1982 by June Jordan felt interesting with how the narrator talks about how she felt the safest in the country in a big hotel while those working there have to consider their living situations constantly while she has to figure out what family can afford back at home. To me, I felt as if the report exposed differences between classes amongst races as it goes into detail about what she felt like was a forced conflict between her and a maid at the hotel named Olive. She also compared herself to the hotel corporation in ways as putting herself in a situation of not wanting to lose anything either. The essay also addresses issues present in the 1980s such as over federal programs being cut that aided minorities as well as the differences between the most powerful countries and the developing world.
Classifying My Experience
An experience that I have taken in is moral omniscience especially after seeing how Jordan accepts that there is an unwanted conflict between her and Olive over their class. To her, race doesn’t make any impact on each other, it’s their wealth class. To me, this essay is very eye opening for as to who has higher priority in society within the world and the norms that have been set by it economically. She does try to break it but knows it’s not easy to.
“And not only that: even though both “Olive” and “I” live inside a conflict neither one of us created, and even though both of us therefore hurt inside that conflict, I may be one of the monsters she needs to eliminate from her universe and, in a sense, she may be one of the monsters in mine.”
-Jordan. p. 9-10
These lines especially stood out to me because it shows how Jordan really feels about her stay at the hotel and how she tries to process what Olive could be thinking even though she never expresses how she actually feels. She does wonder how she’d feel if she found out why she chose to stay at the Sheraton British Colonial. She also thinks about how she’d feel if she found out she’s a rich woman from Brooklyn and also about the other differences between each other that would result in both thinking of each other in this enemy perspective.
“My “rights” and my “freedom” and my “desire” and a slew of other
New World values; what would they sound like to this Black woman
described on the card atop my hotel bureau as “Olive the Maid”? “Olive”
is older than I am and I may smoke a cigarette while she changes the
sheets on my bed. Whose rights? Whose freedom? Whose desire?
And why would she give a shit about mine unless I do something,
for real, about hers?-Jordan. p. 8
This part also stood out to me heavily because it made me feel suddenly there wasn’t any respect towards Olive from outsiders and it made me feel as while it is hidden, many generally don’t think about service workers and what they all are going through in their daily lives trying to make a living. It also sticks out to me that those who are at an advantage are not going to think about those at a lower wealth class than them and that there is this hidden caste system the world abides by when it comes to economic treatment of people.
“She needed a doctor, right away. It was a medical emergency. She
needed protection. It was a security crisis. She needed refuge for battered
wives and personal therapy and legal counsel. She needed a friend.
I got on the phone and called every number in the campus directory
that I could imagine might prove helpful. Nothing worked. There were
no institutional resources designed to meet her enormous, multifaceted,
and ordinary woman’s need.”-Jordan, p. 11
While at this point Jordan is back in the states teaching, this excerpt really shows how little care there can be towards international students of color showing how someone of a lower class will be disproportionately impacted by systems above them. She then later got help from another international student who was able to help her amidst the situation with getting resources for Sokutu. Despite knowing she was at a high advantage to her students from abroad, she wanted to find morality in herself despite what had happened previously in the Bahamas.
Narrative Technology
One narrative technology that I could see here from the author is apology referring to how Jordan reflects on how she treated those working at the resort in the Bahamas. I could tell through her language thinking to herself about Olive as well as the other workers at the resort such as the tall men. I also could see it in her after reflecting on what she read in The Bread Givers novel as well. I could tell by her overall tone that she wished she wasn’t privileged to have to think she had hidden enemies against her and wanted to apologize if she knew.
