Antoinette and Tia: Frenemies?

            In class we talked about the dynamic of Antoinette and Tia’s friendship. Many people thought it was kind of bullying, but I just think that Antoinette had no previous experience with friends, so she followed whatever Tia did. And it sounds like Antoinette she really admires Tia: “…fires always lit for her, sharp stones did not hurt her bare feet, I never saw her cry” (21).  Their friendship seemed utopian, and the setting resembled Eden: “…Sometimes we left the bathing pool at midday, sometimes we stayed till late afternoon… looking at the pool… The water was so clear that you could see the pebbles at the bottom of the shallow part. Blue and white and striped red” (21).  

            But like the story of Adam and Eve, things can’t stay this way forever and something disrupts Antoinette and Tia’s friendship, namely the fight at the pond. It starts out as a childlike dispute where both sides have a point – Antoinette did a somersault, but the form was bad. Then suddenly Antoinette uses a racial slur and they both start hurling insults at each other, but these are insults they don’t fully understand and that they’ve heard from others. In a way these insults are like the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The kids are just trying to insult each other because they’re mad, but then it gets really personal, and it almost seems like they don’t know or realize the full meaning of what they said until afterwards.

            These insults also come from outside influence, just like Eve was tempted by an outside force, the serpent. Antoinette and especially Tia are just parroting what they have heard from their parents and others on the island. Just as we wondered who was right in the original argument, it now makes sense to wonder if the kids are ‘guilty’ in actively choosing to say those things, or if they are ‘innocent’ and just yelling whatever they can find at each other. I think that while Antoinette and Tia might not have understood the full gravity and consequences of what they were saying, they were still trying to hurt each other, and clearly they were knowledgeable enough to know that racial stereotypes and family gossip hurt.

           

            Further evidence of outside influence causing the discord between Antoinette and Tia appears during the scene at Coulibri. Antoinette’s home is burning, and she runs toward Tia, intending to leave her family and live with her, but is nailed in the head by a sharp rock. And yet, this act of violence is described in such a passive way: “When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either…” (Rhys,40). It’s as though Tia doesn’t realize what she’s done until Antoinette starts bleeding and faints. Oddly, this still reminds me of a kid fight in some ways. It’s like that moment when one is really mad at another and they start fighting, but then one kid hits the other way to hard and they’re seriously hurt, or start wailing. There’s that same feeling here of ‘I wanted to hurt you but not that much.’ On the other hand, Antoinette and Tia aren’t fighting here, it’s the mob against Antoinette’s family. It looks like that same influences that made them throw racial slurs at each other returns to push Tia to throw the rock.