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Rain Child
作者Author  /  Margaret  Laurence  瑪格麗特.勞倫斯

Rain Child

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 Major characters in their power relations
   
Whites 
Africans
the head mistress Hilda Poovey.
Mrs. Clare Mackie
David Mackie
Kwaale's father 
the owner of the oil palm plantation
Dr. Quansah. 
Ms. Violet Nedden Ruth
Ayesha as a stolen slave
Yindo as an internal migrant to work
  Ref. Ethnic groups in Ghana: 
"In 1960 roughly 100 linguistic and cultural groups were recorded in Ghana. . . . The major ethnic groups in Ghana include the Akan, Ewe, Mole-Dagbane, Guan, and Ga-Adangbe.  " (source)
 
 
   
 Tomorrow-Tamer, [where "Rain Child is from]:  "The stories
                 are set in Ghana in the period immediately prior to its constitution as an
               independent nation in 1957, and so depict a society in transition, in which the old
               and the new come into violent collision at every turn. Notwithstanding the
               specifically African context in which they are elaborated, however, the themes are
               essentially those that appear elsewhere in the Laurentian canon, those having to
               do with the nature and foundation of identity, the constraints upon human
               communication, the true essence of freedom, the complex interplay between
               change and tradition. As in Laurence's other books, these themes are typically
               articulated through the central metaphor of exile, reinforced in many instances by
               biblical imagery of the fall, of exodus, and of the quest for a Promised Land. What
               we are witnessing in other words are the preoccupations that haunt the entire
               corpus of Laurence's fiction, worked out on this occasion within the framework of a
               specific political situation which invests them with a local habitation and a name, a
               particularized content and a set of appropriate metaphors. And as in Laurence's
               other works, the unvoiced question hovering over nearly all of these stories is that
               of the basis that can be established for relationship with the Other, the "Other"
               conceived in both a personal and a cultural sense.

  ("Dancing to a New Song The Limits  of Community in Laurence's The Tomorrow-Tamer "  David Lucking )

   
     
     
 
   
 
   
 
                                           
 

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