BP3- Comparison & Contrast

“Little Cogburt” & “Cotton Candy”

When reading these two stories it is easy to see why they are considered classics from the Caribbean. Both authors use incredible ways to keep the audience’s attention and create a very realistic and relatable set of characters. Every human being can relate to the sense of longing that one has when daydreaming about things that you desperately want or miss. That is a very common theme with these two stories. In “Little Cogburt”, there is the longing of a mother for her children that are thousands of miles away and in “Cotton Candy”, there is the longing of a relationship-less woman that is longing for the romance of having a partner.

The story “Little Cogburt” is written by Phyllis Shand Allfrey, and is set in Dominica. The author focuses heavily on the working class and the exploitation of laborers. This stance of the author is very clear in this story because it is told from the perspective of the plantation owners which allows us to see how the owner’s wife really feels about all of the workers and their children. You can see this with the way that she describes the children as “the little dark children” and especially the derogatory language she uses to describe little Cogburt himself. The story takes place at Christmas where she spends her time comparing the worker’s children to her own that are back at home. She tells the story about the tradition of making dolls with her own hair, then the children would each get one of the Christmas angels. She states her belief that she would rather burn the hair or flush it down the toilet rather than let one of “the dark children” have it. When she thinks about throwing the workers and their children she imagines her little daughters being upset with her asking her, Mother! Don’t forget us suffering at boarding school. Don’t throw a party for those dark children!”. However, after some thought and talking with her husband, she decides to throw the party for the kids and their parents. Throughout the party you can see that her views of these children are changing, she starts to realize as they are opening presents that they are just like her own children, even though they look different. When little Cogburt was crying because he didn’t want the ball due to his handicapped hands, he cried and begged for the angel that the wife had made. That is when she realized that this “gross, unpleasant little boy” was the only one that cared about the homemade angel that she had held so dear, and when she realized that he was handicapped, she was completely in awe. This story shows that just because someone looks different than us, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a lot in common, never judge a book by its cover.

The story of “Cotton Candy” is quite similar in the way that the author writes about the forgotten minorities of a workforce and focuses on the “misfits of society”. The author uses very figurative language and uses a fairly common theme of the Caribbean which is “magical realism”. You see this through the different symbols that appear throughout the story, we have the butterfly that appears and represent her womanly desire for a man, then later in the story when she is much older, the animals in the zoo represent her own sexuality and she becomes in sync with the animals. These animals awoke something that she hadn’t felt since she was a young girl, she felt love and romance from watching the animals mating. She saw what she had never allowed herself to have, she had repressed her desires for so long that it had driven her partly insane over the years. However, with these animals she was able to come into herself again, she started to feel young because of these feelings that she had never experienced. In the end, she buys a mirror, when she looks into it she sees herself as a young woman again in her hometown. This is a story of rediscovering and finding love for herself, she accepted that she was an old virgin and finally got in touch with her true self from so many years prior.

Both stories share the common themes of how society views its peasantry, one from the perspective of a plantation owner and the other from the first-hand account of a woman who is a “misfit of society” living in isolation and how both battle their longings for things that they do not have. The plantation owner longs for her own children and overcoming her negative views of the “dark children” and coming to the realization that they are not any different from her own children. The second story has an old woman overcoming her desperation of wanting a romantic relationship with a man and coming to the point of loving herself again after years of misery and desperately longing for something she would never have.