The Titanic Analysis

In her article, Bethel compared our culture to an iceberg. This simile (comparison) was noted several times. She says “Imagine culture as an iceberg,” “But like an iceberg, most of culture exists below the surface,” and “Like an iceberg, culture exists below the surface” (Bethel, paragraph 6). For all those that has watched The Titanic, you should have remember that this huge cruise ship was sunken by an iceberg. Thus, one who has looked closely at an iceberg, would know that only about 10% of an iceberg peaks at the surface and about 90% is below the water. Because it’s not our “own” culture that is seen in the 10% our 90%, rooted culture may soon sink us. In other words, we need to bring out our true characters that’s rooted within the 90%

Nonetheless, she made use of exemplifications. She listed examples of what The Bahamas perceived as its culture; junkanoo, ring play and flour bag. She included some of our Bahamian entertainers; George Symonette, KB, Ronnie Butler and Dr. Offff. She talked about how hefty our Sunday meals are, a ring play called Blue Hill Water Dry and one of the first settlements to be populated by our ancestors; Over –the-Hill. Anaphora is another rhetoric device that Bethel made use of in her essay. The anaphora presented was “like an iceberg” (Bethel, paragraph 6 and 7). This is an anaphora because she repeated “like an iceberg” a few times in front of sentences. Bethel also included a metaphor, “To protest that it isn’t is to get distracted by the tip of the iceberg” (Bethel, paragraph 16). This is a metaphor because Bethel is saying that, protesting that Wendy’s isn’t our culture is like being distracted by the tip of an iceberg. Simply put, we can see Bahamian are so accustomed to buying Wendy’s and embraced it as a part of Bahamian culture just as we can see only the peak of an iceberg and assume that that’s all there

What I took away from that story is that, we as Bahamians put ourselves in this position to being stereotyped. We need to ask ourselves these question, do we want to be stereotype as imitators of foreign culture or do we want to be original? Do we want to turn back to the original traditions of our ancestors? As Adichie said “a single story robs people of dignity.” Do we want to end up in a foreign country as Adichie did and be labelled to a single story or do we want to go back to our ancient ways and have foreign explore our original traditions so that multiple unclichéd stories can be told of our