Lost Pedigree, Racism, and the Enigmas of Diasporic Identity in Maisy Card’s These Ghosts are Family

Abstract

The paper is about lost pedigree of Jamaican black slaves, racism at the hands of white supremacists colonial masters, and their experiences at diasporic foreign lands to escape the post-colonial pressures at their native lands and the haunting past in Maisy Card’s novel These Ghosts are Family (2020). Using the postcolonial and diasporic perspectives from literary theory the paper establishes that racism is not because of inborn inferiority of colored people but a socially constructed notion. Blacks are not biologically inferior; rather they are oppressed and exploited due to white’s urge to control all the political, social and economic sources. Both at postcolonial and diasporic spaces, Jamaican people of color try to raise their status and search for their lineage to develop their identities, but they find no histories and resultantly are dragged into uncertainties. The paper shows that the Jamaican blacks have not been able to keep record of their pedigree. They find their history in traces and not in totality. The racism faced by Jamaican people of color still haunts them resisting their new identities in new lands.