Analysis Of Jamaica Kincaid's Essay 'Made In China'

Made in China’. In our shrinking world, we frequently find this label stamped on our possessions, and for the majority of us, this label is synonymous with the manufacturing price advantage that China has over other countries. However, the label, ‘Made in England’, though similar to the former label, embodies a completely different mythology, a different set of social ideals and meanings. For some, this imprint glares disturbingly right back, carrying greater significance than merely information about where an object was manufactured. For one such Antiguan individual, Jamaica Kincaid, the words are physical manifestations of England’s ubiquitous, intangible presence in Antigua, constantly reminding her of a troubling familiarity with a ‘distant’

land she has never visited. She finds herself trapped in an uneasy relationship with the phantom-like presence of England, unable to communicate with it, yet trying to impress it by emulating all of its characteristics.
In her essay, “On Seeing England for the First Time,” Kincaid questions the omnipresent English influences in her Antiguan upbringing and the English lens through which she was raised to see the world. Though she suggests that she was made to understand that “England was to be [her] source of myth and the source from which [she] got [her] sense of reality,” numerous instances reveal to her the inherent hypocrisies and ironies of colonialism, forcing her to question her identity as an Antiguan (720). In an attempt to come to terms with the constricting and troublesome English influences in her life and to reify England’s incorporeal presence, Kincaid compares her childhood understanding of England to a trip there. However, Kincaid’s trip reveals the illusion of English superiority in Antigua, which in turn sets in stone her anger towards England but leaves her antagonism and search for reality unresolved.
Having always been fed English ideals, Kincaid recollects an impressionable childhood shadowed by hagiographic views of the English. She claims that “England was a special jewel all right, and only special people got to wear it” (720). Through this metaphor, Kincaid compares England to a precious, almost royal object that is exclusive to people from only a certain race. It exposes the common Antiguan perception of being in awe of the British and the pedestal that they put the English on. Kincaid recollects not only her teacher who addresses England’s map with “authority, seriousness, and adoration” but her own familiarity “with the greatness of it” (720). Ironically, despite these hard racial lines, Antiguans are brought up in a manner that imitates the English- people they have never seen nor ever met. With a learning environment where more emphasis is put on knowing how to draw the map of England, and raising the British flag than on those of Antigua, Antiguans find themselves trapped in a double veil, a gray area where they are neither Antiguan, nor English. Because the established English myths are such that the Antiguans are always held in a position of inferiority, Kincaid finds herself existing as a mere puppet, controlled by England’s strings of customs and traditions.
But, was it England that the Antiguans revered and adulated or just the idea of it?

Throughout her essay, Jamaica Kincaid highlights this battle between the “idea of something and its reality” (724). She details her struggles to separate herself from British symbols subconsciously rooted in her way of life in Antigua. Be it her father’s “wrong hat for a hot climate,” eating an ‘English’ breakfast, wearing clothing made in England, or having three members of her family named after an English King, Kincaid finds English influences weaved intricately and oppressively into daily life (721). It does not matter whether she feels tired after eating so much food, or that her family members are “named after a man that they have never met,” this is the way things were done (722). To address the source of this loss of identity, Kincaid unearths her underlying contempt towards the English as a consequence of their hunger to rule, because they were “everywhere…in places where they were not welcome, in places they should not have been” (720). This description uncovers Kincaid’s resentment towards the English, who she believes have forced their way into Antiguan history, invading and polluting a land of natives.
Despite trying to understand English symbols, in an attempt to distinguish between myths and reality, Kincaid may in fact find herself not getting any closer to truth, as Suzanne K. Langer suggests in her essay, “Signs and Symbols,” all human activity is “based on the appreciation and use of symbols” (Langer 526). The basic human trait consists of symbolic thinking; what we see is only a projection, an understanding, or a mental image of the world after data from our five senses have passed through the biological, linguistic and cultural filters of our

brains.
Langer raises the concern that in a “mind-made world,” with the ability to perceive, comes the possibility of preoccupation with what things mean, “rather than what things actually are” (526). She highlights that signs are “always embedded in reality” whereas symbols “may be divorced from reality altogether” (528). It is our use of symbols that allows us to think about things, which in turn at times forms distorted images of reality. The manipulation of symbols inevitably alters the original experience, and the “conception we project on the screen of memory is quite different from anything in our real history” (529). Therefore, if the process we obtain knowledge and perceive information from is subjective from the most initial stage of processing, how are we supposed to get any closer to obtaining reality?
This question, however, considers that symbols are limitations, ignoring the fact that they are a quality that sets “human mentality apart from every other” (526). Humans, unlike animals, react depending on the way they conceive their surroundings, the way they create symbols that can find expressions in “words, pictures and memory images” (528). Furthermore, language and the ability to conceive are fundamental qualities of the human mind, making it much more than simply “a transmitter like a telephone exchange”; language is a talent and the process of conception “underlies the human faculties of abstraction and imagination” (526, 529). This process allows us to make sense of the world beyond our biological needs, understand the way things work and even question them. We witness ourselves stuck in an uneasy relationship with reality, capturing the instances when it appears in glimpses, but never experiencing all of it. It is probable that we will never ever find absolute reality, but we can find inconsistencies in our symbols and attempt to get closer to the far-reaching goal of reality, by making sense of the information we have available to us.
Thus, at a second glance, Langer’s essay seemingly mirrors Kincaid’s narrative; only through questioning the way the English symbols are conceived is Kincaid able to pinpoint the “abstracted features of reality” (Langer 529). Kincaid scrutinizes the very foundation of deeply engraved signs and symbols intertwined in the form of English morals, in her life. She comments, “I was told not to gossip, but they did that all the time. And they ate so much food, violating another of those rules they taught me: do not indulge in gluttony” (Kincaid 722). Through this list, Kincaid underlines the hypocrisy in the scruples that she is taught by her own people. Brought up with such strong conflicting influences, Kincaid longs to identify distortions of reality through her physical trip to England. Her trip reinforces her concerns about the Antiguans’ idolization of the English as she notices that the English were “rude to each other,” “so straight, so dead looking,” and “a very ugly looking people” (725). She voices her hatred for everything English, being judgmental of all its faculties - its people, places, frameworks - so much so that visiting England is almost a punishment for her, comparing the weather and the food to a jail sentence. The repetition of the simile “like a jail sentence” underlines not only Kincaid’s bitter tone, but also her suffocation whilst visiting England (726).
Though Kincaid makes her trip to England in search of truth, her preconceived notions of England cloud her judgment and influence the way she perceives her trip there. Kincaid loses her sovereignty of “seeing England for the first time” because she carries her childhood prejudices with her to England. Walker Percy, in his essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” suggests through the example of sightseeing at the Grand Canyon that the result of pre-formulation is a disparity between what something is and what it is supposed to be. Percy argues that because of mediums such as picture postcards and geography books, the Grand Canyon has been appropriated by the “symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind” (Percy 751). This means that instead of getting an objective outlook to the Grand Canyon, sightseers hold it up to a certain standard, measuring their satisfaction based on the extent to which it conforms to their expectations (752). Kincaid finds herself falling into this trap that Percy warns us against. Her high expectations for England may have caused her to be more critical of England than if she had experienced no connection to it in Antigua. Not even once in her essay does Kincaid mention an aspect of England she enjoys or is fascinated by.
Despite the fact that “a degree of sovereignty has been surrendered” by Kincaid, it is the nature of this loss of sovereignty that is highlighted by Walker Percy (Percy 755). He is concerned with the fact that people “are not aware of the loss, beyond a certain uneasiness” and even if they were to acknowledge the loss, “it would be very difficult for them to bridge the gap in their confrontation of the world” (755). For example, even though Kincaid is aware that her memory of reciting hymns and poems about longing to see the glorious White Cliffs of Dover shadows her actual view of the cliffs, her mental image of the cliffs is held so high that it makes it difficult for her to bridge the gap. After Kincaid’s first-hand experience of the cliff, the pearly whiteness of the cliffs that was representative of the pure aura of England for her, no longer holds true because the word, “white” no longer “mean[s] something special” (Kincaid 726). Kincaid wishes for her views of England to “jump and die and disappear forever” from the White Cliffs of Dover, which “were not white” (726). This stresses Percy’s concern, as the use of anthropomorphism gives human functions to Kincaid’s views, relieving her of the task of having to separate herself from them; she almost wishes that her views would involuntarily vanish, that the phantom would spare her autonomy. Moreover, the anthropomorphism of her views reveals the fabrication of the idea of England, as the cliffs are in fact dirty, just like the corrupt English principles she was taught.
Yet, it is this unique human ability of creating images in our minds even before seeing something first hand that allows us to defy the boundaries of our minds, surpass what is currently known and form new ideas, images or concepts that are not available to the senses. These new concepts may even be paradoxical, challenging the very laws of nature that are commonly accepted as true. In his drawing “Relativity,” M. C. Escher plays with our senses by connecting numerous flights of stairs from three different centers of gravity. Escher imagines a world where it is possible to have a door at the bottom of the floor, stairs that seem to ascend and descend from the left to the right simultaneously, and yet seem geometrically logical. Every aspect of the drawing defies the undisputable gravitational laws of physics, but the manipulation of three-dimensional space makes us believe what we see. Moreover, the extent to which the drawing is made real can be seen through the use of shading in the drawing. The three windows located at the vertices of the horizons act as light sources, which give depth and mass to the objects in the drawing, including the human figures, tables, railings. Despite the fact that three distinct light sources would interfere and conflict with the logical shading of the objects, Escher forces a new kind of truth on paper, one that exists beyond the limits of our world, yet seems forged in reality.
Thus, the question arises, who is the sovereign that controls reality: individuals or society? Looking back at Kincaid’s essay, she resents being just another product churned out from the ruins of Antigua’s colonial history and longs to be free of the “Made in England” tag. To her, “the sea, the sky and the air” seem to be the only untouched elements, pristine and original (Kincaid, 721). Yet, due to the degree to which societal mythologies create opacity in Kincaid’s life, she is unable to square her mental images with reality, leaving her with a superficial familiarity with the Queen of England, the face of her myths who she promises to “do [her] duty to”, but leaving her unfamiliar with and inept to be the sovereign of her own reality (723). She claims the existence of the world as she came to know it was an “idea of thing over here, reality of thing way, way over there” (724). She classifies her whole upbringing as a process of erasure, “not [her] physical erasure, but [her] erasure all the same” (721). Therefore, the assignment of a newfound responsibility of building her own myth is unrealistic, as Kincaid has nothing to fall back upon; all that she knows revolves around England. Instead, perhaps, what is needed is a new definition of her mythologies.
It is true that there will always be pieces missing from the puzzle of reality, and that there is often a mental image of how that puzzle should look, which guides us in the way we choose to put together the pieces we have. However, new experiences and perspectives can change myths from being a set of rules that govern and guide us to avenues through which we can deepen our understanding of reality- where we come from and why we are raised in a certain way. Kincaid’s trip to England can therefore be looked at through Escher’s ‘three point perspective’- a trip that allows her to understand the difference between myth and reality, an to attempt to pinpoint incongruent symbols, and an effort to separate herself from preconceived notions, all of which act as her windows, shedding light on the drawing of reality.