Jamaica Kincaid On Seeing England For The First Time

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Picture a world where a person’s heritage was stripped completely away and they were forced to accept the new strange culture of the nation that conquered them. Hopelessness, despair, and hatred are just a portion of the emotions that one would experience. In the autobiographical essay, On Seeing England for the First Time written by Jamaica Kincaid, this is exactly what happened to the author when she was a young girl living in her native homeland, Antigua. In this essay, Kincaid expresses her strong resentment towards England for dominating her native country; she views England as in a position of dictator over her life and country. With regards to this, Kincaid employs the rhetorical strategies pathos, bitter tone, anaphora, imagery, and figurative language to convey her enmity towards England. …show more content…

She sees the words, “Made in England” everywhere and feels that English society is usurping the Antiguan culture. She asserts that the food, clothing, accessories and cars in her household have been “Made in England.” Kincaid explicates that drawing a map of England “would result in my erasure, not my physical erasure, but my erasure all the same”, which implies that the loss of her culture would influence a loss of herself as a person. She also uses anaphora of the word, “England” or the phrase of “Made in England” expansively throughout On Seeing England for the First Time. The words “England” or “English” are found recurrently in the composition; repetitions of these words show Kincaid’s antipathy of all things English by emphasizing her feelings of disaffection and alienation during her childhood which expresses her sarcastic and bitter

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