Preview

Antigua By Jamaica Kincaid

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
403 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Antigua By Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid, a writer from Antigua shares her personal experiences and clarifies how English imperialism affected her life, her personality, besides how it made other people treat her. She wrote about it in an autobiographical essay “ On seeing England for the first time” in 1991.
People in Antigua lived their whole life learning and glorifying England’s history; none of them had gone there. Jamaica had waited her whole life to go there and see how it would look like. She had the chance to go to England and her biggest disappointments had happened there. She hated how people treated her, she felt aggrieved and offended. Jamaica wants the reader to understand her feelings and how it feels like to be in her place.

Ideas and thoughts

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    A response essay to Kincaid’s article According to Jamaica Kincaid’s article, seeing things or going to new places for the first time can be exciting. But Kincaid gives us a view on personal opinions and thoughts on the reality of England. Also her purpose in writing this piece was to inform us how the people of England made them feel superior to the settlers in British colonies. Ever her tone has been criticized and angry.…

    • 346 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The ‘Jamaica Question’, as the debate came to be called, therefore started as a case of coloured colonised people versus White colonisers but turned into a verbal fight among Britons. These religious, social, economic, political and ethical divergences of opinion set up, and were fuelled by, the political context of Britain at the time; they reflected the perceived potential threats on an international scale to Britain's might.…

    • 543 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Their behavior and their disregard for her country anger her. As a country, Antigua has wrestled to find its identity. Tourism and banking have become Antigua’s primary industries. Banham Richardson, a scholar of Caribbean geography, blames the Antiguan government, as other Caribbean governments for promoting tourism as national industries. Kincaid dislikes tourists because they use her country as a relief for their boredom. They do not contribute any benefits to the country. Kincaid condemns the manner in which Antigua is depicted to tourists. The natives do not exist in their promotion. The ‘Antigua’ that Kincaid knows and grew up in is not the one shown or described to tourists. In Antigua and Barbuda’s website it states “Welcome to Antigua and Barbuda”. It goes on to say “In 1784 the legendary Admiral Horatio Nelson sailed to Antigua and established Great Britain’s most important Caribbean base. Little did he know that over 200 years later, the same unique characteristics that attracted the Royal Navy would transform Antigua and Barbuda into one the Caribbean’s premier tourist destinations.” This is stated on the Antigua and Barbuda homepage. It is because of depictions like this, that Antigua is becoming a tourism capitol. Which is why Kincaid expresses her anger in “The Ugly…

    • 1491 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Jamaica Kincaid’s article “On seeing England for the First Time”, she demonstrates the how her opinion, filled with bitterness and hate for England, was shaped by an oppressive and influential culture. Although she expresses a hint of reverence towards England early on in her essay, she consistently shows signs of bitterness and resentment towards England throughout the article using parallelism, a sarcastic tone, and strong diction. Even in instances where she tries to make England sound appealing, she ceaselessly succeeds at working in her own current opinion to make these statements sound insincere.…

    • 857 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “On seeing England for the first time” by Jamaica Kincaid was published by Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. Kincaid believes that she is a product of a culture that was forced upon her. She describes how angry she feels growing up in Antigua with the dark shadow of England continually looming over her. Antigua is an island in the West Indies, in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean region, the main island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493, the Spanish were replaced by the British in 1632. The British started to produce sugar cane on the island, and this production was supported by slavery.…

    • 676 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kincaid

    • 951 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Kincaid begins her essay comparing her homeland, Antigua, and how the food, clothing, manners, and standards are different. England was her “sense of myth and the source from which she got her sense of reality, her sense of what was meaningful, her sense of what was meaningless” (101). She puts England on such a high pedestal that it was destined to disappoint her. She goes on to describe her processions that were made in England, and even committed a large piece of England history to memory. She even compares the climates between her homeland and England. She was so obsessed with everything about England that she was swept into an idea of England and not the reality of it. When Kincaid actually visits England she meets her greatest disappointment. She says that she “finds England ugly, I hate England; the weather is like a jail…

    • 951 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Jamaica Kincaid Essay

    • 936 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In the excerpt from the essay “On Seeing England for the first Time” the author Jamaica Kincaid describes life in Antigua when it was an English colony. Antigua was first colonized by English settlers in 1632 and achieved its independence until 1981. There was an immense British cultural influence in the island, which Kincaid shows in her essay. In the essay Kincaid reveals her defiance for England’s imposed presence in Antigua by comparing other’s conformity to England´s way of life to her own subtle defiance.…

    • 936 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Jamaica Kincaid

    • 357 Words
    • 1 Page

    In Jamaica Kincaid's book A Small Place, she uses strong conviction and passion for the island which she grew up on. Although, the reader may view this strong affection very offensive, Kinkaid generalizes tourists and how they abuse the use of Antiguan workers in hotels and tourism while on vacations, seems like she is trying to leave the reader understanding and empathetic.…

    • 357 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Kincaid does something similar due to her experience away from Antigua and her feeling of being both and insider and an outsider when going back to her island. She takes her perspective of growing up and Antigua and her perspective as a successful middle-class American to discuss the tourism and its harm to the people to Antigua, as seen in her book, “A…

    • 1404 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kincaid essay

    • 782 Words
    • 23 Pages

    In Jamaica Kincaid’s essay “On Seeing England for the First Time”, Kincaid expresses her viewpoint on England’s authority over her homeland, the Caribbean island of Antigua. Kincaid has strong resentment towards England. She sees England as a dictator in her life. Through the use of emotional arguments and social appeal the author, Kincaid, gets the feeling across that she was a victim of England. At an early age she started to realize that the English had taken over her culture. Kincaid conveys her resentment toward England in her essay through tone, anaphora, and figurative language.…

    • 782 Words
    • 23 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    She acknowledges England’s successful imperialism and nationalism in the Caribbean Island of Antigua. England managed to mold the people of Antigua into proud English subjects, including Kincaid at the time, who had “long ago been conquered” (107). Upon recognizing these realizations, Kincaid considers it a “blessing” (115) that she couldn’t reproduce a map of England correctly, for bearing this ability symbolized submission to England’s reign and assent to its importance and “greatness” (32). This “greatness” (32) is undermined as Kincaid weaves in subtle sprinkles of sarcasm and rebellion to portray her growing resentment towards England as she matured. The imagery of Kincaid eating with her “bare hands” (97) against the “English way” (91) when her mother “wasn’t looking” (98) emphasizes her resentment towards English rule.…

    • 688 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    american colony

    • 232263 Words
    • 932 Pages

    [Taylor’s] strategy allows him to highlight the histories of peoples and places neglected in accounts of colonial North America. More than just a formidable work of historical synthesis, American Colonies provokes us to contemplate the ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity.” —The New York Times Book Review “At long last, we have an overview of colonial North America that addresses its full geographic, international, and multicultural sweep. In American Colonies, Alan Taylor transcends the heroic saga of freedom-loving Englishmen clustered along the Atlantic coast with a full-blown narrative that extends from the continent’s earliest inhabitants through Christian-Muslim interactions in fifteenth-century Africa and Europe to the onset of the American Revolution and Captain Cook’s Pacific…

    • 232263 Words
    • 932 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    She calls upon the of a number of maids who works for her friends; Aibileen, Minny and Pascagoula in order to make her book a real like interpretation of the struggles they face on a daily bases. Jackson has a community that seems to be very racist and oblivious and close minded towards change and fait treatment towards citizens that reside there. The community seemingly split in two divided over an adequate racial line that has been passed down from generations to generations. Stern guidelines and regulations are put in place in order to separate the blacks and white. The writer gives us a glimpse of the Mississippian world back in the day and how maids were treated and the amount of racism and hatred that occurred in Jackson Mississippi. White Mississippians had been brought up and through social conditioning they had a mentality that prevented them to change their views and allow blacks to live the same luxury they had. Whites had more freedom blacks had, they allowed their communities to grow and flourish whereas blacks’ community became congested and overcrowded due to the restrictions preventing their community to grow “Jackson is just one white neighbourhood after the next” and “the coloured part of town be one big…

    • 1770 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Jamaica Kincaid

    • 323 Words
    • 2 Pages

    After reading Jamaica Kincaid’s “On Seeing England for the First Time” it’s evident that Kincaid’s life revolved around the English. Jamaica Kincaid grew up like one of the English from eating huge portions for breakfast, to her father buying the same hat that was “Made in England”, but what really stood out was Kincaid’s street name: John Hawkins. Kincaid’s grew up in St.Johns Antigua, Ovals where there were five streets “each of them named after a famous English seaman…” her street was John Hawkins. John Hawkins was a terrible man who is notably known for opening the slave trade. “Every single person living on Hawkins street was descended from a slave.” When Kincaid mentioned John Hawkins the tone of the essay quickly shifted from gloomy…

    • 323 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Jamaica Kincaid Girl

    • 889 Words
    • 4 Pages

    An important influence on Kincaid’s writing is the era she was living in when she composed her stories. At that time, Antigua and Barbuda was colonized by England, so that the…

    • 889 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays