Sadia Tasnim
Professor Sidibé
Freshman Composition ENGL 11000
4 March 2019
Jamaica Kincaid on Cultural Erasure and Colonial Education
The difference between writing that simply states a fact and writing that makes the reader wholly understand the writer’s experiences can consist of just a few choice words. There is not a word out of place in Jamaica Kincaid’s On Seeing England for the First Time. Every sentence adds to the reader’s understanding of her youth and growing up in Antigua under British colonization. Because she uses pathos to subtly bombard the reader with experiences of the lasting impact of a colonized education, Kincaid is able to effectively elaborate her experience with cultural erasure. Right from the beginning of her piece, Kincaid instills the foundation of her message about colonization: education is the vessel through which the colonizers brought cultural erasure.
Her story starts with, “When I saw England for the first time, I was a child in school sitting at a desk.”, which effectively sets the reader up with an initial image of England being delivered to young children at school (Kincaid, 364). She goes onto describe other aspects of her life that were changed by colonial influences such as fashion (her father’s obsession with the wrong hat for the climate) or food (the idea of a breakfast); she could have chosen to write about how the English went about obscuring Antiguan culture through these means. However, because she begins her account of realizing that English culture had subdued her own native culture with the memory of her education, the idea that the main proponent of this cultural replacement was the colonial education system is clear in the reader’s mind.
The reverence with which Antiguan children were taught about England cemented a divine, perfect image of the colonizing nation for them. Kincaid recalls the map of England which her teacher pinned to theclassroom wall, “This is England” -and she said it with authority, seriousness; and adoration, and we all sat up. It was as if she had said, “This is Jerusalem, the place you will go to when you die but only if you have been good.” (Kincaid, 365). Kincaidcontinues talking about how the English standard was supposed to show Antiguans what was worth something, what was meaningful, and how it shaped much of their entire lives. This memory, especially for a young and impressionable child, served to give a superior quality to all things England-related while giving all things non-English an inferior quality simply because it was non-English.
The extent of colonization on education reaches outside of the traditional classroom setting and into the homes of the people that are being colonized. Kincaid writes about her mother teaching her children English manners, “And my mother taught me to eat my food in the English way…When I had finally mastered it, I overheard her saying to a friend, “Did you see how nicely she can eat?” (Kincaid, 366). A large part of education comes from the home and from parents; children become the adults they become because of the influences they had during their critical periods. With the importance placed on English values not only in a formal education setting, but also within the home, Kincaid and children like her were faced with English propaganda on all fronts.
Another facet of education that colonization overwhelms is history. History is written by the winners and it is rewritten by colonizers. Kincaid laments on how she was made to memorize all of English history, “I knew the details of the year to66 (the Battle of Hastings, the end of the reign of the Anglo-Saxon kings) before I knew the details of the year 1832 (the year slavery was abolished).” (Kincaid, 367). With hindsight, Kincaid remarks that what was actually important to learn was history that was relevant to her and her people, but it was foregone in favor of the British agenda. She sums up her thoughts on the matter after she goes through her family history and how so many of her relatives were named after historical British figures, “The first view I got of England then was not unlike the first view received by the person who named my grandfather.” (Kincaid, 367). A reference to an owner naming a slave, she likens the brainwashing of Antiguans through the education system’s rewriting of history to the stealing of identity that comes with being owned and renamed.
Being able to control the education system of a people means being able to control their eating habits, their dressing habits, their speaking habits, their value system; it means being able to control their culture and change it to fit the colonizer’s preferences. Kincaid writes about what she could do to the English if she had the power, and it reflects directly on what was done to her:
“What if I had the power to simply banish them from their land…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, make them look more like the people I love and treasure and hold dear, and more like the people who occupy the near and far reaches of my imagination, my history, my geography, and reduce them and everything they have ever known to figurines as evidence that I was in divine favor, what if all this was in my power? Could I resist it? No one ever has.”
(Kincaid 371-372)
She wishes that she could do what the British had done to her back to them and she places an emphasis on imagination, history, and geography in terms of the things that the British used to conquer her people. The education system is directly responsible for affecting the imaginations of the youth of a culture, for ingraining history into the minds of the next generation, and for giving importance to certain places over others. She indirectly states that the British reduced her own imagination, history, and geography to figurines while they sanctified their own just because it was in their power to do so. This statement encompasses the damage that the colonial education system had on Kincaid and children like her. Through precise recollections of her memories and how her British education, be it in school or elsewhere, affected her and shaped her into the adult she is, Jamaica Kincaid effectively illustrates how colonial education can facilitate cultural erasure.
