Beckford, William. A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica. Michigan: Library of the University of Michigan, 1790. Ebrary Reader e-book. https://ia802706.us.archive.org/15/items/adescriptiveacc00beckgoog/adescriptiveacc00beckgoog.pdf
In her thought provoking essay “In History,” author Jamaica Kincaid explores the idea of naming things in a historical context through various anecdotes. Kincaid makes a purposeful choice to tell her story non chronologically, beginning with the tale of Columbus, putting her own reflection on plant nomenclature in the middle, and ending with an overview of Carl Linnaeus, the inventor of the plant naming system. This choice gives Kincaid the opportunity to fully vet out each point that she makes, an opportunity she wouldn’t have gotten had she written her essay in chronological order. Throughout each anecdote that Kincaid tells, the theme of names and giving things names is central. Kincaid argues that by giving something a name, one unrightfully takes ownership of it and erases its history.
In Jamaica Kincaid’s essay “On Seeing England for the First Time”, she clearly voices her animosity towards the one place her whole life surrounded as a child in hopes of persuading her audience into understanding that there is a fine line between dreams and realities. As an adult, Kincaid finally is able to travel to England to witness firsthand what all the hype was about and why her childhood and education happened to be based around the fantasy customs of this country. Noticing that every detail of her life revolved around England, from the way she ate her food to the naming of her family members, Kincaid found her hatred growing more and more. Coming from a British colony, the obsession with England drove Kincaid crazy to the point that she finally traveled there one day. She says, “The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark” (37).
In “Girl”, Jamaica Kincaid describes the situation of a girl whose mother explains her her duties as a woman. Within the text, Kincaid uses a lot of enumerations to stress how many duties women have. It does not only illustrate the good sides of being a woman, but also how hard it is, how men will treat a girl, and what a woman can do against it. The story includes many contradictions of what a girl should and should not do, moreover, it provides the reader with a wrong image of women, which is made up by a worried mother, who tries to prevent her daughter from any harm. There is a contradiction within the text and the tasks; on the one hand, a girl is prepared to be good at doing the household, but on the other hand, she is
Although she loves her nation, she is not so ignorant as to not see the problems that have, or still reside in Antigua. A point that came back several times is that the library was never fixed. As a child, Kincaid would always be in the library reading. Reading so much in fact that she would try to hide and check out extra books than she was allowed. The library was unfortunately damaged by an earthquake, and remained damaged for decades.
She achieves her aim in highlighting that the prohibitive laws which reduce people like her to mere sexual bodies is a psycho-social remnant of the colonial past. She addresses a number of audiences within the piece, including the human rights community, the governments of both her native Trinidad and Tobago and The Bahamas, and by extension all citizens of the Caribbean and wider world who have been disenfranchised by laws that diminish their humanity and highlight their perceived iniquity. The implication of her essay is clear: if not just any body can be a citizen, the democracy which we have set up is in need of some adjustment. It relates to us because it reminds us that for every time we deny any body rights, we have failed to live up to the principles on which are postcolonial societies are supposed to be
They are all major tourist destinations and while they are not the wealthiest countries in the western hemisphere, they are not struggling. Yet, one of the issues they face is that they struggle to maintain their own unique culture. French assimilation did not skip over the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana. As we read in the assigned reading, School Days, French culture was superimposed on the people of the Caribbean islands. Their Creole culture was looked down upon, and children were forced to learn French language if they wished to be able to attend school.
What's the one place where you feel like home? For Jamaica Kincaid, that would be Antigua. Jamaica Kincaid tells us how the British colonized Antigua. When processed through Marxist, psychological and post-colonialism lenses, Jamaica Kincaid's book, a “small place”, reveals the impact of British colonization on Antigua. Through a Marxist lens, we can see how Jamaica Kincaid would behave in a society and how coliseum shaped and changed her society.
In the above block quote, Kincaid talks about how her people would congregate like “communicants at an altar” to the library into order to read about the “fairy tale” the “beautiful” colonizers had the “right to do the things [they] did.” Due to the wording these sentences, the author depicts a dream-like image of the natives learning about the history of their colonizers and their “beauty” that is often proved to be quite the opposite in every experience these people ever had with the English. The author claims that the foreigners “were un-Christian-like,” “small-minded,” and behaved “like animals” (29). In the library, the people of Antigua have access to knowledge of what the colonizers have caused them, but due to the condition that the government has left the building after the earthquake, no one will be able to learn about methods in which they can change their nation’s infrastructure. The wealthy outsiders will continue to abuse the island through bribes and loans, eventually driving away the Antiguans from their own island.
Antigua is a land of blue skies and waters, where the white sand sticks between your toes and you laugh as a wave splashes you in the face. But underneath all that beauty and seemingly paradisiacal lifestyle there lies a harsh and bitter story behind what Antigua is and how it is viewed by people inhabiting it. By emotionally explaining her ideas on Antigua 's role, Jamaica Kincaid, author of A Small Place, takes her audience on a journey of a direct relationship with the reader, thoughts on personal experiences, and factual evidence. This book can be viewed through lenses that describe ways the book presents its claim.
Throughout history there have been many historical circumstances which led to the growth of enculturation where beliefs, ethnicities, and behavior influenced the developments of societies and cultures accommodating the diversity of individual populations passed on from the genesis it was established. Jamaica is a country known for its independence, african descendants recognized as maroons who were enslaved by the british as plantation workers. The struggle for freedom lead men and women to departure the island looking to start a new community for themselves. Today the ancestors of the Jamaican maroons preserve the traditions and cultures carried on from one generation into the other. Throughout the process of this ethnographic project
Once gaining independence, the only experience or firsthand account the Antiguans captured of how to govern and treat each other occurred through the English who governed poorly, murdered and imprisoned each other, and used the country’s wealth not to improve the country itself. Kincaid writes about how those who attempt to uncover government secrets have died, hinting at the murder aspect past Antiguans learned from the English. She continues to explain how the country’s wealth seems to vanish while places such as Antigua’s hospital remain in a destitute state. Since before November 1, 1981, Antigua resided under the rule of one country for three hundred and forty-nine years, thus proving the only influence for their ways is from the English who brought colonization to Antigua. The evidence of a dominant power, Britain, as a deplorable example to those it is dominating, the Antiguans, proves the destruction of
It is a personal opinion that without art, music, and literature, the people are collectively motionless. Culture is more than art, music, and literature, it is the substance of the people’s faith and the evidence of their growth. While Black culture contributed to the development of the United States of America’s culture, Caribbean popular culture is and has always been the channel used by the lesser group against the dominant group actions. An example, when the dominant group (British) tried to restrict the Carnival celebrations of the enslaved on the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago in late 1800 the lesser group fought back . For the purpose of this essay, Trinidad Carnival will be the focus of this discussion.
It was an eye-opening experience and I felt guilty for being so fortunate. When the average person thinks about Jamaica, they think of a tropical paradise. Although it is a popular vacation destination, many people don’t realize is it’s a poverty-stricken country that
At least tourists can go home after their visit… The article talks about the daily life of the average Jamaican woman or adolescent and how Jamaican men seem to feel entitled to us. It also mentions how those men go on to make the female tourists feel uncomfortable with the same actions they have become so used to practicing. Unfortunately, I have too much experience in the actions and words of some of these men. What was more, well, uncomfortable was the information available on the amounts of crimes against women occur in Jamaica. But we have also been shown that there is hope yet.
