On the first page of the book we get a taste of the conflict Kathryn is harboring. “Maybe, if I had learnt to speak Jamaican instead of growing up on the Beach, people would have dealt with me differently.” (Philp 1) We learn that Kathryn is Jamaican but has no knowledge of …show more content…
Scratch beneath the surface though and you find a story about accepting our own culture, one’s roots. This theme is threaded throughout the story and plays out in different ways for three characters in particular. Kathryn (the missing girl’s mother), Jasmine (the missing girl) and her professor Jacob Virgo. The underlying conflict is summed up with a quote from the books name sake Marcus Garvey "A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots". We can see this theme played out in the aforementioned characters in how they celebrate, ignore, and discover their shared African