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Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
“The Enemy” is set in the cities of Cunupia and Port-of-Spain in Trinidad (now called Trinidad and Tobago) in the mid-20th century, when Britain still had colonial control over the island. The Indo-Trinidadian characters in the story are likely descendants of Indian indentured laborers who immigrated to Trinidad in the 19th century after slavery was abolished and the plantation owners needed a cheap labor source. The narrator establishes the setting early on in the story in the following way:
We were living at the time in Cunupia, where my father was a driver on the sugar estates. He wasn’t a slave-driver, but a driver of free people, but my father used to behave as though the people were slaves. He rode about the estates on a big clumsy brown horse, cracking his whip at the labourers and people said – I really don’t believe this – that he used to kick the labourers.
The narrator explains that his father had a position as a “driver” on one of the plantations in Cunupia. While many Indo-Trinidadians worked as menial laborers, some, like the narrator’s father, were hired in slightly higher-up positions like those of “drivers” who, often through violent means, kept the laborers working in exploitative and violent conditions. The narrator subtly expresses shame here about his father’s actions, as seen in his assertion that he “really [doesn’t] believe” that his father could be capable of violently harming the laborers.
It is notable that “The Enemy” takes place on Miguel Street, a fictional street in the real city of Port-of-Spain. This story originally appeared in a short story collection called Miguel Street that featured linked stories all set on the same fictional street.
Related Themes:
