The Pain Tree Review

Farewells are sad. The moment in the story when Lorraine leaves to England appears to be a break, a cut.

The connection between two people that have so different lifes, but live in a common space. A house where one is the owner’s daughter and other just a servant. The meeting of two different ways of seen the world in a simple situation. Larissa gives her pain to a tree and then she feels relief, Lorraine doesn’t understand at first but then she realizes.

In that simple situation you can see that having the power or be the owner of some place does not mean that you belong to there or that place belongs to you. Upper classes has always have that distance from popular wisdom, from nature, from words, from the past. And the colonial or post colonial societies are the most clear proof of that.

We learnt from power, we’ve been taught that everything that culture is about rationality, that our past remains in Europe culture, and that’s all bullshit.

The movies that we’ve seen in this class are kind of “happy”. They have the movement and dynamism of cotidianity. The text has always been a hard place to see things, to learn, and the Pain Tree is pure nostalgic, pure sadness. And it’s fine, because it’s true.

The part where it talks about Larissa’s sons, one of them that they never heard about after the war, and she didn’t cry. Words have not the epicness of images, but they seem to be more faithful. I can’t believe when the text says that she never cries because women like here have no right to grieve, have no right to cry. They were there just for work, just for serve.