2. "Rude Am I in My Speech" by Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips is a second generation Kittian-British novelist, playwright, and essayist. His notable awards include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and receiving the Commonwealth Writers Prize twice. In his essay titled “Rude Am I in My Speech”, Phillips discusses and attempts to explain the plight of first-generation immigrants relative to gaining social confidence in an entirely new country in which they are the minority. The audience of this essay is primarily second and third-generation immigrants, such as Phillips himself. He aims to do this by using the rhetorical devices of historical and literary allusions to the extent that the essay’s title itself is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello, as well as the use of a personal anecdote. His primary allusion is to Othello in Shakespeare’s play by the same name in which a lone celebrity immigrant moor arrives in Venice, marries a white woman, but is not looked down upon because of his celebrity status. With no other immigrants and due to his celebrity, Othello eventually goes crazy, killing his wife and later himself. However, as Phillips discusses the story of his own father, also a first-generation immigrant to Europe, there are two key differences: his father did not migrate alone and he was not a celebrity. Phillip states that these differences are what allowed his father to successfully fit-in (as much as is possible for an immigrant) because his father could be whoever he wanted in his own home, and when he was out with other immigrants. This allowed his father to stay sane by giving him a sort of “break” from who he had to become and act as around the European locals. In a historical allusion Phillips states, “When West Indians first arrived in England in the 1950s, countless pamphlets were thrust into their hands which explained to them the ways of the English.” This allusion demonstrates the pressures placed upon immigrants to behave in a certain fashion in England that would otherwise be abnormal for them. By using literary and historical allusions along with an anecdote of his own, I do believe that Caryl Phillips accomplished his purpose of communicating to second and third-generation immigrants like himself the plight of their parents and grandparents relative to finding their place in a foreign society.

"Othello and Desdemona in Venice" by Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856)