Tuesday, October 25, 2011
On Seeing England for the First Time
How does reading the rest of Jamaica Kincaid's personal essay "On Seeing England for the First Time" affect your understanding of her attitude toward England? You may write informally but not unintelligently. Express analytical ideas about specific details and rhetorical strategies.
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Wow, after reading the full version of Jamaica Kincaid's personal essay on England, it gave me a totally different view. I always thought there was an underlying almost frustration towards anger, but I never could have predicted this. Kincaid took it to a whole other level. I felt like where the section we read up to before was mediocre. There was no real indicating of this anger with England. She was focusing more on describing what it was like for her as a child. The rest of the essay I feel, it reflecting on how terrible it really was having England mean everything to a small island like Antigua. I feel, as I read on, that the pace of the essay picked up immensely. It woke me up in a way because all of a sudden she was giving all this negative emotion that did not exist in the first part we read. It was eye-opening to realize that she felt exactly how I thought she would feel. I did not believe she would be happy with England when she grew up. The rest of this essay proves that in various ways. For example, she talked about how nothing was actually the same between England and Antigua. England would say "When morning touched the sky", and Kincaid's response is that in Antigua, no morning touched the sky. Evenings never approached and walks were not for pleasure, but for labor, a burden. She also did a great job of showing true emotion when she made this statement, "Their skins were so pale, it made them look so fragile, so weak, so ugly. What if I had the power to simply banish them from their land, send boat after boatload of them on a voyage that in fact had no destination, force them to live in a place where the sun's presence was a constant?" This is a quote she makes based off of the time she finally went to real England for the real first time, and got to see what it was like. Her opinion is a bit scary; she is so angry and fed-up with England that she would want to send them away to on a no-destination boat. The rest of the essay was defiantly worth reading, and changed almost every opinion I had of her as a writer and the essay as a whole.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with Rachel on this. At first, when I began reading the rest of the essay, I thought that Kincaid was going to continue describing her experiences as a child. I figured that the emotions of bitterness were going to be expressed subtly in the essay. However, I was completely wrong. Kincaid fully expresses her complete anger and animosity towards England in the rest of the essay and I was surprised how explicit she expressed her feelings. For example, when she sees the “real” England for the first time, she describes her emotions with the following statement, "I wanted to take it into my hands and tear it into little pieces and then crumble it up as if it were clay, child’s clay.” I was completely taken aback by the ferocity and frankness of her opinion. The part of the essay we read first gave no foreshadowing of how extreme her feelings of antagonism were towards England.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I felt that Kincaid was not just accusing England of brainwashing, but for hypocrisy as well. For example, when she mentions how her English friend (who did not like England) “didn’t like her not liking it (England) too”; the tone of it tells me that Kincaid is disgusted of this hypocrisy. It made sense to me that the English friend did not want Kincaid to dislike England (in fact, she said, “I want to show you show my England, I want to show you the England that I know and love.”), but I was shocked how straightforward Kincaid’s response was when she said that she “didn’t want to love it anyway”.
In addition, as I read through the essay, prejudice and desires of revenge from Kincaid became evident to me. For example, want for vengeance is shown when Kincaid states, “What if I had the power to simply banish them from their land, send boat after boatload of them on a voyage that in fact had no destination, force them to live in a place where the sun's presence was a constant?” We can see how much her hatred for England has grown to the point where she wishes for the same fate to occur to the English which they forced upon her people and ancestors. Also, when Kincaid mentions how she “liked the conductor being rude” since “his behavior seemed quite appropriate”, we can see that prejudice is present in Kincaid’s emotions. However, she justifies this prejudice by stating, “I may be capable of prejudice, but my prejudices have no weight to them, my prejudices have no force behind them”, meaning that she cannot express her opinions publicly because she has no power (This could lead back to her bitterness). She also uses examples of how England belittled her and forced her and her people to assimilate to their customs in order to convince us that her prejudice is justified.
All in all, I felt that the rest of the essay showed more of Kincaid’s hatred towards England. However, it also shows her making an argument about how her prejudice can be justified due to the oppression of her people. Personally, I don’t think that prejudice can be justified. I feel that if Kincaid wishes the same fate upon England that her people had to suffer, it makes her as bad and oppressive as the English themselves.
After reading the rest of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Seeing England for the First Time” I immediately thought how stupid my rhetorical analysis would look in the scope of the whole piece. Many of the points that I described emphasized the subtle hints used to put England down and what they meant as a whole. I also explained how her attitude toward England was negative but only slightly so. I used phrases of disappointment and looking down on what England did but my understanding of her attitude now would lead more to hatred. Also I wrote about the slight irony of explaining her childhood awe with England but it is not slight, it is blatant sarcasm used to show the hatred of England and what England did to her as a child. One example of a point that I had noticed and thought was a subtle hint that would only be picked up if careful was the idea that the England she loved was an idea not a place. In the excerpt it may be subtle but in the entire piece she actually says, “the space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide deep and dark.” Coming right out and expressing what I thought was a important thing to be inferred. This one example shows how everything changed as the piece progressed and we only read the opening piece. The blatantly expressed anger in the full piece that was not included in the excerpt changes my view completely. Upon reading the first I was confused as to why this was even written. In the first I got the impression that Kincaid was upset over what happened but didn’t really show the emotion to make it a powerful piece. The use of open emotion made a lot more sense to me and I see why the piece has been written. My view of her attitude changed from assuming slight disappointment to outright anger and I connect more with the author for the honest use of emotion.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading Jamaica Kincaid’s full essay I was on the right track when I was analyzing her strategies, but based on the original piece we had I didn’t realize how much hate Kincaid had toward England. The piece reads almost as if she was trying at the very beginning to just subtly hint about how much she dislikes England, then goes all out in her anger toward England. And that loathing shows up when she really sees England for the first time. She writes about how everything there is not what she loves, how people are rude and that completely changed my thoughts of her being a bitter person who was wronged to something like someone disgusted, who thinks they and their culture is so much better then others. This change in tone really hit me when she wrote about how she wished that everything in England would die because it made her think that something about her life was incomplete. Now personally I think the essay lost a bit of effect of me, but that’s mostly because I don’t have the same experience with England as she does. So I guess it may be a more effective essay if somebody who had been under the rule of another country read it, but I am lucky enough not to have. So I suppose my thoughts towards her essay are prejudiced, but have no weight.
ReplyDeleteBut about the original piece vs the full piece, I wish I had the full thing the first time I read it. I would have had so much more material to work with and I probably could have made more points and stronger points. So I guess this just shows how hard it is to really understand writing from just one section of it.
So yeah. Wow. That’s not how I expected the rest of the essay to sound at all. When I read the except I thought I could clearly see that Kincaid was as we all said “bitter” about how England had colonized her country and taken away her cultural identity, but after reading it I discovered she was not bitter, she was furious. She raged about how she knew more about English battles before she even knew the date slavery was abolished. She looked angrily at the cliffs of Dover, which was as she said, not actually the color of white but instead the idea of white and how English people who were white thought they were better. But honestly, I wasn’t sure how to react to her hostility toward England. I’m not saying it wasn’t understandable, but it was definitely thought provoking. I mean, there obviously are good English people, and it seemed strange to me to think that she was just going to look at them all with disgust with no exceptions, even her friend who was English and therefore white. But as an American, sitting in a chair and typing on a computer that is a million miles away from her circumstances, I can say with confidence that the perspective I have (not having experienced anything like the English colonization) makes it a lot easier for me to say “Just forget it.” And she’s only acting the way England acted to her. I do want to point out though that her writing style is amazing. I loved the way she strung words together. She used a lot of similes and metaphors, and the stories about her experiences in England had some sort of dark humor surrounding them. It makes me realize that the excerpt from the AP exam was really just Kincaid getting into her writing stride, and my analysis would have benefited from reading the entire essay in the first place.
ReplyDeleteBitterness doesn't even really begin cover the full scope of Kincaid's attitude towards England. Reading the rest of the essay has entirely changed how I would reflect on her. There is some more building of examples of anger, somewhat subtly in the beginning of the new section, discussing how in Antigua there was no such thing as "morning touching the sky", or "evening approaches", she discusses how these sneakier influences made a more lasting impression on her. After this, things start to heat up more, Kincaid writes about all the other things that English people say and do that just don't have any application in her life, other than to impress on her exactly what she didn't have. Later on, she begins writing about the connections to slavery in the names and revered figures in Antigua, further showing the cruelty of the occupation, rubbing the native’s faces in the fact that they were basically enslaved.
ReplyDeleteI really like the part where she talks about what lives in the “space between the idea of something, and the reality.” Kincaid found a really good way to express what she meant to me, because I feel like I totally understand what she means about the longer they are kept apart, the space fills with feeling, in her case the hatred and scorn for England, and for the English people. Kincaid really gets into her hatred for the rest of the essay, and I really like what Winslow said about identifying with the author more because of her “honest use of emotion”. I mean, I think that all personal essay writers write because of their emotions, but Kincaid does nothing to dress up how she feels. She literally says “And then it all died, we don’t know how, it just all died.” In reference to England. By leading the reader through how she got there, from childhood to adulthood/motherhood/being a wife, you can understand the full reasoning behind her poisonous feelings for the country that infiltrated her life, and made her feel like she was second best.
Something that I just now noticed, and I’m not really sure how to say, is that Kincaid doesn’t always speak in an absolutely clear way. In the second half of the essay, a lot of her sentences become more complex, structurally (especially when she talks about the English smelling like lavender, and all in that paragraph). I feel like she writes in a way that builds, getting more and more angry and emotional, and slightly more jumbled, and that comes out in the syntax. It feels like she is writing in a way that you might rant to somebody, justifying, and explaining completely why you feel such a way, and showing them just how fully you feel it. I have such a respect for Kincaid after reading the rest of the piece, much more so than I got just from the first half, and even now writing this, I feel angry on her behalf for what was done to her. The way she writes fully conveys her feeling, forcing this reader, at least, to feel what she feels.
From the passage we were given you could certainly conclude that Kincaid was frustrated with England and surely not fond of it. However, to bring that frustration to such an overwhelming hatred was not something I thought could have reached that amount of strength after only reading what we were given for the rhetorical analysis. It only made me wonder why she chose not to be more forward with the hatred that would soon be clearly displayed in the upcoming pages for the normal reader. I believe it may have been her way of not coming off too strongly at first and then leading up to the many extensive reasons as to why her hatred had come to be so strong. I think that the kind of buildup Kincaid was using in her beginning passage when discussing her childhood only hinted at the effect England had over her life. For it to be such a large part so early on in her life may have been to intend the progressing effect it had as she grew older and grasped an even better understanding. It’s hard to believe that her having to draw a map of England would lead to her later stating, “What if I had the power to simply banish them from their land, send boat after boatload of them on a voyage that in fact had no destination, force them to live in a place where the sun’s presence was constant?” There is a voice of revenge in this quote and intimidating hostility. This kind of anger was slowly built up by Kincaid but once it was there, it came at you with full force. I do agree with Zoe especially about the way she writes closer to the end of the essay and it seems that it is more and more jumbled. Almost like she is just spewing out information and how she sees England. The way she constructed the essay certainly made a bigger impact for me and as a reader I was certainly able to relate and sympathize with the emotions she expressed through her excellent use storytelling especially.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the rest of Jamaica Kincaid’s “On Seeing England for the First Time,” I got a much clearer picture of how strong her abhorrence towards England really is. My feelings towards this essay have completely changed since reading the whole thing through. At first, I thought that Kincaid had a slight bitterness and disapproval towards England. But she used very strong language burdensome metaphors in the rest of her essay that clearly painted the picture, “I hate England.” In this particular quote, she related England with torture. “If now as I speak of all this I give the impression of someone on the outside looking in, nose pressed up against a glass window, that is wrong. My nose was pressed up against a glass window all right, but there was an iron vice at the back of my neck forcing my head to stay in place. To avert my gaze was to fall back into something from which I had been rescued, a hole filled with nothing, and that was the word for everything about me, nothing.” Her bitter feelings toward England only grew stronger. Kincaid is convinced that she doesn’t belong; she is not one of the English people and this thought depresses her. A lot of the reason Kincaid felt as if she didn’t belong in England was because of her race. The only black people living in her town were descendants of slaves, and Kincaid felt as if she wasn’t as high up on the class scale as many of her English neighbors. When Kincaid meets a white, English friend on the train, she tours England with her for the first time. When Kincaid saw how rude everyone is, her hostility only grew stronger. She also realized that even though the English people rejected each other, they rejected her even more. When feeling completely conquered, Kincaid said, “What is I had the power to simply banish them from their land, send boat after boatload of them on a voyage that in fact had no destination, force them to live in a place where the sun’s presence was a constant? This would rid them of their pale complexion and make them look more like me.” I found this quote extremely powerful and I definitely would have included it in my paper if I had read the rest of the essay prior to writing my analysis. This quote really portrays Kincaid’s resentment towards England; she gets angrier and angrier as she goes along. Since the English people never accepted Kincaid for who she is, she cannot accept them for who they are either. She wants to send them away, get them a tan, and make then be more like her. I can’t blame her for wanting to do this because I can understand how she wants the English people to be in her shoes for a day and understand the hardships that she suffered within that country.
ReplyDeleteDanielle P
ReplyDeleteFrom the beginning of this passage by Jamaica Kincaid, you can surely tell she harbors negative, oppressed feelings towards England. I could've never imagined how much she truly despised England from those first four paragraphs, though. Jamaica Kincaid hates England with everything she has, and she truly wishes she could be rid herself of anything England related.
For years, Kincaid has been taught English history. She had to know and understand English heritage to get an education school, but then she steps that learning process up by actually visiting the place she has learned so much about. She takes a trip to England with her English friend, and her resentment towards England is in full bloom. One of the main reasons she despises England is because of how the English treated her ancestors. She makes a point to let the reader know her resentment when she rhetorically asks what the English were to do if she had put them aboard a ship bound for an unidentified location, and they had no choice whether to stay or go. She is clearly referring to slavery, but makes her point more evident by masking it under a new scenario.
Jamaica Kincaid's strong feelings towards England show when she says, "the world was theirs, not mine, everything told me so." This passage makes you pity her, and the fact that growing up she thought she never measured up to the English. Jamaica Kincaid grew up doubting herself because of a foreign country she had never been to.
As if Kincaid's attitude towards England was not as direct as she'd like to make it, she says the following; "in me, the space between the idea o it and the reality had become filled with hatred, and so when at last I saw it I wanted to take it into my hands and tear it into little pieces and the crumble it up as if it were clay, child's clay." This is a quote filled to the brim with resentment and hatred. She is painting a vivid picture in the reader's head of how she feels. You can literally imagine her taking a clay figure of England, and destroying it to smithereens. Her vivid image helps the reader fully understand her harsh feelings to Antigua's mother country.
Jamaica Kincaid leaves no room for reasonable doubt when she says, "I find England ugly, I hate England; the weather is like a jail sentence, the English are a very ugly people", and when she continuously repeats, "and then it all died." She literally wishes England and all things English to be dead. Her feelings are brutal, but not unfair. The English have never treated her and her people properly, and they have forced her into an unchosen lifestyle. Metaphorically speaking, they have kept her a slave to their system even after slavery had been abolished.
In the end, this is not what I expected Jamaica Kincaid's attitude towards England to be like. In her first few paragraphs, she makes it obvious that she did not enjoy living under English rule, but I never expected her to fully loathe the English as much as she did. In the beginning, she uses irony and this can sometimes confuse the reader into believing England was not all bad. She never directly came out and said her feelings towards it, so I believed based on what she did tell that she disliked it, and even felt oppressed, but never despised it as much as she did. This goes to show that you can't tell a book by its cover, and to get the full effect of Kincaid's writing, you must read her entire piece.
Kincaid climbs, and climbs again, and drops off repeatedly a tension and an anticipation that never is quite consummate until it reaches the white cliffs of dover. she loves anticlimax. the portion we analyzed was simply an essay that conveyed the single introductory thought, and immediately after that thought is conveyed, Kincaid disappoints my sense of proper narrative with a dose of anticlimax in the words "after that there were many times of seeing England for the first time."
ReplyDeleteshe repeats this, but it kept me engaged and saying always in the margin the undignified utterance "woah." but not fully until she sends off her final poison dart that is her desire to have England swallow its own self.
I see how she sets up that tainted longing in the first section we read that is her bitterness, but you can't really understand it until you've absorbed her spitting fury. i can't really react in a scripted fashion because i'm not used to reading anything like this.
pretty much, the first part retains its characteristics, but those characteristic fall useless without the following tirade.
Wow! I thought I knew exactly how Kincaid felt after reading the beginning of her essay, but I had only gotten a brief look at what was much more than bitterness. I think it is safe to say that everyone feels similar to me. I read and watched as Jamaica took her feelings from negative to extreme. However, the content that picked up where we left off in class was more of Kincaid talking about everything England had, and I almost begun to get the feeling that she was in awe of England. “They loved their children; their children were sent to their rooms as punishment larger than my entire house.” This quote stood out to me because I really felt sorry for Jamaica at this time because I really saw the difference in lives between England and Kincaid herself, and so did she. I began to think she was hurt by these differences. It was shortly after that quote when Kincaid unleashed. It wasn’t until she got the “privilege” to live the English life that she learned what it meant to be from such a distant country. These people were no longer “special jewels”, but rude, arrogant, people. It wasn’t until she experience this good from afar life, that she realized how much the people of her home meant. I was baffled to find out the wrong doings that were occurring. I was even more taken back by thinking about how many foreigners including Jamaica that once adored such a place. I think she married into England for the simple hope of becoming the fantasy she learned about as “a child”. I smiled when she again became beyond angry or bitter at the horrible place called England.
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