Jasmine - Prompt Four: The Setting

   In Jasmine it is not so much the place and time that matter when discussing setting.  Rather, it is how Jasmine’s experience in that place and time relates to Jyoti, Jane, or Jase’s experience in another place and time.  Jasmine evolved from Jyoti in the palpable mud huts of India, to Jasmine in the small apartment with the books on the edge of the bed, to Jase in Duff’s room with the collapsible cot, to Jane in the mishmash of different textures and layouts of rooms, and finally back to Jase in the unknown.  

   Back in India, during the Jyoti period, Jyoti and the other women were able to defecate openly with their physicality exposed.  While gossiping and bonding, they squatted and crapped.  However, in Miami during the later Jasmine period, Jasmine and her dignity and past were brutally and sexually assaulted – she was manipulated – and forced into self-defense.  She rose then, and in the fluorescent motel with the pink flamingos and scattered detritus and offal, she escaped.  Miami and India were quite different settings however what defined them was their comparison to one another.  In the novel Jasmine, it is not the contrast between the undisturbed forest and the manmade hotel that aid the imagination in an exploration of description, it is rather the experiences in those two places that are diametrically opposed that create the relationships of both contrast between settings and contrast between “incarnations.” 

                           - J. A. Kind