Roughing it in Bermuda
Roughing it in Bermuda provides a close text analysis of Susanna Strickland Moodie’s literary works and the life in which Mary Prince lived in Bermuda as a woman from an African descent considering the atrocities they faced from slavery. It also presents what these literary works mean to the current crop of black-skinned literature writers in Canada. Though such writers try to make their case and express their ideas regarding slavery, colonization, and violence innocently, they will always be treated as diasporic literary writers. This kind of profiling emanates from the fact that their predecessors with the same racial profiles mainly presented their literary works with the above themes.
Disambiguating Susanna Moodie’s roughing it in the bush requires analysis from a different angle. Roughing it in the bush has been considered as a settlement journal. However, a closer look at it from a different perspective as in the context of Mary Prince’s legacy, it reveals the uneasy truth that Canadians subject their writers to. Susanna Moodie’s narration begins by her arrival into Canada from England in 1832, two years before the fall of the British empire in Canada, and the abolition of slavery. She describes Canada as a land of freedom, a place where emigrants can no longer be oppressed and refer slavery and oppression of immigrants to the southern united states, a land she describes the far distant land of exile and slavery. However, some of her poems, like I sketch from nature and a painful experience from a distant land, reveals some element of slavery that can be closely associated with Mary Prince’s life in Bermuda.
Additionally, she reveals how haunting slavery is to an individual. She states in her first line that, in most cases, immigration is a matter of necessity. The Canlit critics point out the presence of black people in upper Canada during the settlement period. Like in the case of Susanna Moodie’s neighbor, old Joe. The presence of blackness in early Canadian literature has resulted in a lot of debate among different individuals with Richard Almonte, stating that darkness does not signal much what whites might be, but indicates what they do not what to be. A statement that has a lot of weight in the angle which this analysis tries to bring out in respect to what Canadian literature is all about.