Passage Analysis

“Then I stared for a while at a traffic light, which was suspended elaborately on wires above the intersection. I couldn’t look at the cars themselves. My
brain was roaring from all the color and orchestrated metal movement. From the open building behind me came a blast of neutral-smelling air and a high
hum of fluorescent lights. Even though I was outdoors, I felt a peculiar confinement. One discarded magazine lay on the edge of the street, impossibly
clean and unblemished. A breeze gently turned the pages for me, one at a time: here was a neatly coiffed white mother beside a huge white clothes dryer
and a fat white child and a great mound of bright clean clothes that would be sufficient, it seemed to me, to clothe a whole village; here were a man and
woman holding between them a Confederate flag on a vast lawn so flat and neatly trimmed their shadows stretched behind them for the length of a fallen
tree; here was a blonde woman in a black dress and pearls and long red fingernails leaning over a blank white tablecloth toward a glass of wine; here
was a child in many kinds of new clothes hugging a doll so clean and unrubpled it seemed not to belong to her; here was a woman in a coat and hat,
hugging a bundle of argyle socks. The world seemed crowded and empty at the same time, devoid of smells, and extremely bright. I continued to stare at
the traffic light, which glowed red. Suddenly a green arrow popped on, pointing left, and the row of cars like obedient animals all went left. I laughed out
loud(Kingsolver 443).”

The passage I chose is about the culture shock of being back in a materialistic society. She uses metaphors comparing the things she sees back in the United States to things in Africa, such as the animals. I love this passage because Kingsolver gives this amazing picture of what culture shock looks like from a different perspective. Most people think culture shock only occurs when people go to a less developed region like at the beginning of the book when the Prices move. Here, we have the coming full circle where the culture shock is being back into a city with flashing lights, “roaring from all the color and orchestrated metal movement”, which is why this passage holds a lot of value. Kingsolver method of using African associated words is absolutely brilliant, not just adding to the diction, but allowing the reader to truly feel the power of this feeling of isolation in such a busy city. It gives deeper meaning to the parallels between these two completely different realities.

“It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement
curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one
curb. For what? I could not quite think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places
with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane wrapped tomatoes, in our absence(Kingsolver 443).”

The deeper meaning can be found here, after years in a completely different environment she finds herself questioning the industry. The vast amount of resources that are wasted can be directly correlated to her personal trauma of people she knows in Africa who would actually benefit from that so-called waste. She knows the constant battle between life and death.