How do the poets present time and place in “Electricity comes to Cocoa Bottom” and “An unknown Girl”?

The two poems “Electricity comes to Cocoa Bottom” and “An unknown Girl” have a lot of similarities and differences between them about time and place.

In the two poems there are some similarities in time. One of them is that both poems could be referring about the same time, the 90’s. The facts that shows that both poems are written about the same time are that in “An Unknown Girl” there are things such as neon lights and we can see that when the writer says, “in the evening bazaar studded with neon”. The writer also puts a very obvious quote from which we can see that the story is referring to the 1990s. “Banners for Miss India 1993”, from this quote we can see exactly that the poem is talking about the 1990s. The other poem “Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom” we cannot be certain that it happened in the 1990’s. However, we can guess, because it is happening in a small Jamaican village, in the Caribbean it means that the people living there won’t be developing as quickly, as the people in other big Countries. That is the reason for the children in the poem carrying oil lamps. “They camped on the grass bank outside his house, their lamps filled with oil”. These are the similarities in time between the two poems.

There are also a lot of differences between the poems. The first one and the most obvious one is that the writers talk about different time. For example, in “electricity comes to cocoa bottom” people are just discovering light, where in the other poems they have things such as a “neon light”. This clearly shows that there is a very big time difference in time between the two poems. Also clearly the people in “electricity comes to cocoa bottom” are far more behind compared to the life of the people in “an unknown girl”. You can see that, because in “electricity” the children are carrying oil lamps, where in “an unknown girl” people are