Lucy tells the story of, yup, Lucy. She's a young woman from an island in the Caribbean who emigrates to America and becomes a nanny. In this scene, she comes across some daffodils in America and remembers a poem she was made to memorize in school.

"I remembered an old poem I had been made to memorize when I was ten years old and a pupil at Queen Victoria Girls' School. I had been made to memorize it, verse after verse, and then had recited the whole poem to an auditorium full of parents, teachers, and my fellow pupils. After I was done, everybody stood up and applauded with an enthusiasm that surprised me, and later they told me how nicely I had pronounced every word, how I had placed just the right amount of special emphasis in places where that was needed, and how proud the poet, now long dead, would have been to hear his words ringing out of my mouth […] I made pleasant little noises that showed both modesty and appreciation, but inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem. The night after I had recited the poem, I dreamt, continuously it seemed, that I was being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils that I had vowed to forget, and when finally I fell down from exhaustion they all piled on top of me, until I was buried deep underneath them and was never seen again." ("Mariah")

Colonial discourse is crushing, just like those daffodils that bury Lucy in this passage. Lucy's made to learn the poem "I wandered lonely as a cloud" (it has daffodils in it) by William Wordsworth, a famous English poet. Lucy isn't English. She's never seen a real daffodil in her life (that is, until she goes to America as an adult). Daffodils are not native to her island.

And yet, because she's a colonized subject, British culture and discourse—including the literature and poetry of Britain—is imposed on her. Even the landscape of Britain is imposed on her, through those daffodils. Why? Well, because the colonizers believe that their literature and culture is better than Lucy's own.

Hey, we're all about learning about other literatures and cultures—but not this way.

Lucy's speaking in the first person here, and she does so throughout the whole book. By focusing on the "I," or on her own experience in relation to the poem ("I had been made to memorize [it]," "I was being chased," "I had vowed to forget") Lucy voices her own experience of oppression in relation to the poem.

So, while the passage tells us about how horrible Wordsworth's poem made Lucy feel, the fact that she's telling us that it made her feel horrible here is actually an act of empowerment on her part. She is setting her voice against (or in opposition to) the voice of the poem.