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LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial &
Postcolonial Literature April
Patrick RESEARCH
JOURNAL I
enjoyed reading Lucy, the only book by Kincaid I’ve read so far, tremendously.
So I’ll start with a biography of Jamaica Kincaid.
I did my undergraduate schooling at Bennington College, in Bennington,
Vermont where Kincaid’s husband, Shawn Allen, teaches music composition and
Kincaid has taught sporadically. But
until this class, I hadn’t read Kincaid’s books.
Kincaid and Allen still live in Bennington, a small town I know well.
Kincaid says, in an interview with NY Times Book Review, that the kitchen
of their house is bigger than her family’s entire house in Antigua.
Next,
I will trace the history of Antigua to gain background on Kincaid’s native
country. Then I will study, in
sweeping terms, the invasion of Africa by colonists to better comprehend the
conditions surrounding the uprooting of Kincaid's ancestors from Africa. I want to refresh my memory and learn new information of the
time period in world history preceding and during Colonialism to obtain a
clearer sense of the underlying structures.
History was often presented in the dullest of ways to me in school and
Bennington College promoted freedom to the extent that I was not required to
take any History, although I did take one, The Old Order in Europe.
The historical information gathered here is very general and basic but it
provides me with a broad understanding of how colonialism happened.
KINCAID:
THE UPRISING Born
in Antigua and christened Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949, Kincaid was raised
in poverty by her stepfather, a carpenter (she never knew her biological father)
and her mother, a homemaker. They
had no electricity, running water or bathroom.
Her chores included: registering
the family outhouse at the Public Works every Wednesday so the “night soil
men” would come and take away their full tub and replace it with a clean one;
drawing four pails of water from a public pipe for her mother—or more if it
was washday—every morning and again after school; wiping the soot from the
lamp, trimming the wick, and buying kerosene if the lamp ran out (Garis, 1990).
As a young, only child, she was happy and
intimately connected with her mother. When
she was nine, the first of three brothers was born, a development not welcomed
by young Elaine, who was jealous when her mother’s focus shifted to her
brothers. More mouths to feed
sharpened her awareness of their poverty. To
feed her mind instead, she began stealing books and the money to buy books,
hiding them under the house and retreating there for a secret read with the
“lizards and spiders running around” (Garis, 1990, p.1).
Books were her greatest satisfaction--she particularly loved Jane Erye as
a child, reading it repeatedly. She
says today she can not go into a bookstore without buying a book and can’t see
someone’s library without wanting to lean her head against the books and
absorb their contents by osmosis. Kincaid
remembers her teachers in the British educational system in Antigua as angry
people who never encouraged or praised students.
“No one expected anything from me at all.
Had I just sunk in the cracks it would not have been noted. I would have been lucky to be a secretary somewhere,” (Garis,
1990, p.4). Not all the teachers
were Caucasian and the “black teachers were in some ways worse.”
In trying to prove they weren’t the “savages the white people thought
we were,” they became the most mechanical and inhumane of all.
Copying
passages from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” was one of her “punishments for
insubordination,” a lesson which informed her later writing.
Parts of the poem she still remembers verbatim and the theme of falling
from grace permeates her work. The
protagonist in Lucy hates her name until she realizes it bears a correlation to
Lucifer, the name of God’s angel before he fell from Grace and became Satan.
Another of the punishments she endured for insubordination was having to
write, “Ignorance is bliss; it is folly to be wise,” over and over.
The colonial teacher’s message to remember your place and not try to
rise above it was one she refused to internalize and later lambasted in “A
Small Place.” Kincaid
says that her adolescence was marked by her mother pulling away from her, that
what distinguished her life from her brothers’ was her mother’s obvious
dislike for her when she hit puberty: “When
I became a woman, I seemed to repel her. I
had to learn to fend for myself. I
found a way to rescue myself” (Snell, 1997, p.2).
When the opportunity arose in 1966 when she was 17, to work in America,
she did not hesitate to escape. With
no money or practical training, she left Antigua for Scarsdale, New York to work
as an au pair, or what she says was actually a “servant” (Salon, 1995, p.1),
for an upper class family similar to the one in Lucy, encountering elevators and
winter for the first time. Depressed
and alienated, she decided to attend college but discovered her Antiguan
education was not up to American standards.
So she took classes at night at Westchester Community College near White
Plains. Like Lucy, she received
letters from her mother that she never opened.
Then she answered an ad for an au pair for a family on the Upper East
Side (she’d wanted to work her way into New York City) and began a three-year
job caring for four little girls right in Manhattan. Coincidentally, she would work alongside the father of this
family, Michael Arlen, at The New Yorker, though not until many years after
leaving his employ. “That is how
I really left my mother,” (Garis, 1990, p.5) says Kincaid.
She relocated without telling her mother, resulting in not seeing her for
19 years. She would not return to
Antigua until she was 36, a respected author of fiction and a staff writer for
The New Yorker. While still living and working at the Arlen’s, she earned her
high school diploma and began college, studying photography at the New School
for Social Research. She then quit the au pair job for a secretarial position at
Magnum Photos. Unable to type and
longing to go back to school, she applied randomly to colleges and won a full
scholarship to Fraconia College in New Hampshire. She left Fraconia after only a year, returning to New York
and starting work as a receptionist at an advertising
agency, but soon getting fired. Having befriended a few people in publishing by then helped
her make her debut on the literary stage with her first article in Ingenue, an
interview of Gloria Steinem. It was
at this juncture, in 1973, that she dyed her hair blond and changed her name to
Jamaica Kincaid as a way of ceasing to be a person who couldn’t succeed,
remaking herself into someone capable of achieving. She published some
television criticism in the Village Voice.
Then, she met George Trow, a regular contributor for The New Yorker’s
Talk of the Town section who says with the multiple bold fashion statements she
made, Jamaica made “as extreme a statement as a person could make that this
was someone who did not necessarily fit anyone’s conventional idea of who she
should be” (Garis, 1990, p. 7). Trow
began to quote her in his Talk pieces, referring to her as “our sassy black
friend,” a reference she didn’t mind. Shrugging,
she says, “A lot of Caribbean writers are obsessed with race…in a way that I
don’t see or feel” (Garis, 1990, p.7).
She took notes of her impressions of a West Indian carnival she went to
with Trow. Trow passed them on, unchanged, to The New Yorker editor
William Shawn who showed Kincaid her true writing voice by publishing her
notes--her inner thoughts--without alteration. Seeing her “inner life”
(Salon, 1995, p.3) in print marked the development of the voice readers find so
powerfully moving in her fiction. She
explains, “When I saw it…that is when I realized what my writing was. My writing was the thing that I thought.
Not something else. Just
what I thought.” Four
years later, she wrote her first piece of fiction. Appearing in its entirety in
The New Yorker in 1978, “Girl” was one long, powerhouse sentence, filling a
single page. Derek Walcott said of her writing:
“The simplicity of her sentences is astounding…. It’s as if the
sentence is discovering itself, discovering how it feels.
And that’s astonishing, because it’s one thing to be able to write a
good declarative sentence; it’s another thing to catch the temperature of the
narrator, the narrator’s feeling,” (Garis, 1990, p.8).
When she first spotted Allen Shawn and felt attracted to him, she was
unaware he was the son of the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, who’d
published her carnival notes unaltered. They
married, both got offered jobs to teach at Bennington College in 1985 and went
to live in Bennington, Vermont then, thinking they’d return to New York after
the year. But they haven’t left
yet. Allen Shawn teaches there
still and Kincaid gave a talk on gardening, her second-greatest passion (books
being her first) in 1995. The two
make a touching couple, Allen, short, pale, balding and bespectacled, looks up a
long distance at Jamaica, tall, willowy, with thick hair and naked, ingenuous
eyes. They share a gentleness of
manner and “such an expression of devotion and benevolence passes between them
that you wonder why it isn’t common knowledge that the ideal couple is in fact
a tall black woman and a short white man” (Garis, 1990, p.9). Books, hundreds of them, form towering, disorderly sculptures
in her study. She says no matter
how hard she tries, her study always resembles the “stolen stash of books
under the house” when she was a young girl.
She and Allen have two children, Annie, 9, and Harold, 6. ABOUT
ANTIGUA Antigua
(pronounced Anteega) was first inhabited by the Siboney (an Arawak word meaning “stone people”), dating back to at
least 2400 BC. The Siboney were nomadic Meso-Indians whose beautifully crafted
shell and stone tools have been found at dozens of sites around the island.
The Caribs, aggressive people who ranged all over the Caribbean,
displaced Caribbean Arawaks, who lived on the island between AD 75 and 1100. Columbus
charted the island on his second voyage in 1493, naming it in passing Santa
Maria de la Antigua after the miracle-working saint (and the Church named for
the saint) in Seville. European
settlement didn’t occur for over a century largely because of the dearth of
fresh water and the abundance of the intimidating Caribs. In
1632, a group of Englishmen from St. Kitts established a settlement. Apart from a brief French invasion in 1666 the island along
with its dependencies, Barbuda and the uninhabited Redonda, remained under
British domination. In 1674, Sir
Codrington, an ambitious upstart, came to Antigua to determine if it could
support the sort of large-scale profitable sugar cultivation already flourishing
elsewhere in the Caribbean. His
first attempts were successful. Leasing
Barbuda to raise provisions, importing African slaves by boatloads, and
eradicating natural forests for his sugarcane plantations, he established the
first large sugar estate in Antigua in 1684.
The frequency of droughts in present-day Antigua is a result of the
forest devastation wrought by the sugar planters, many believe: without trees to
generate the carbon cycle, rainfall will not occur. Regular droughts plague the island. Ruined towers of sugar plantations stand as mute testament to
the destruction and consequent barrenness of the landscape.
From
1674 to 1724, sugarcane industry exploded on the island.
By mid-18th century, the island was dotted with more than 150
cane-processing windmills, each the focal point of a sizable plantation. In the
17th and 18th centuries, the British used the natural harbors of the island to
refit their ships, safe from hurricanes and attack. Europeans regarded Antigua as the “gateway to the
Caribbean,” situated in a position that offered control over the major sailing
routes to and from the region’s rich colonies.
Many of the fortifications built on the harbors during this period still
stand, illustrating the eagerness of the British to ensure their possession of
an island they stole from others. Most
Antiguans are of African lineage, descendants of the people abducted from Africa
for use as a free source of labor, for the economic gain of the greedy British.
The uprooting from their homelands and systematic of abuse of the African
slaves left a bitter legacy, as voiced by the confusion, alienation, anguish and
despair of Walcott’s poetry and Kincaid’s fierce prose.
During
reign of King William IV, Britain abolished slavery in the empire. “Freedom” came on August 1, 1834 when Antigua instituted
immediate emancipation rather than a four-year “apprenticeship,” or waiting
period. Today, Antigua’s Carnival
festivities commemorate the earliest abolition of slavery in the British
Caribbean. But the “freed”
slaves were rendered instantly impoverished and helpless by many deficiencies:
the lack of an “apprenticeship” or transition period; lack of surplus
farming land in an economy built on agriculture rather than manufacture; lack of
their own resources or access to credit; and the prevailing hateful attitude of
ex-masters to the former slaves. The
emancipated slaves continued
working on sugar plantations where abominable conditions and criminal wages
(considering the massive fortunes of plantation owners) kept them dependent on
their ex-masters, many of whom treated them worse than before.
Poor labor conditions and hostility persisted until violence erupted in
the early 20th c. as workers protested against low wages, starvation and
terrible living conditions. In
1939, to alleviate the seething discontent, the first labor unions were formed,
the Antigua Trades and Labor Union. Vere
Cornwall Bird became the President of the union in 1943 and with other trade
unionists formed
the Antigua Labor Party (ALP). Antigua
attained Associated Statehood status with Britain, with full internal
self-government while the British would still be responsible for defense and
some aspects of external affairs, in 1967, the first of the Eastern Caribbean
islands to do so. Antigua and
Barbuda as a single territory became independent in November 1981.
Antigua remains part of the Commonwealth of Nations, administered as a
constitutional monarchy with executive power vested in the British sovereign and
exercised by a governor-general who is appointed on the advice of the Antiguan
prime minister. Vere
C. Bird became the first Prime Minister of Antigua.
In 1989, at the age of 79, he took office for the 4th consecutive time,
although the general elections were marked by irregularities and allegations of
bribery. Mr. Bird appointed a
largely unchanged cabinet which included several members of his family.
In 1990 the Government was rocked by an arms smuggling scandal.
The Columbian Government produced signed documents showing that Communications and Works Minister, Vere Bird Jr., authorized
the use of Antiguan harbors as a transit point for shipments of arms from
Israel--and does not the United States supply Israel with arms?--to the Medellin
cocaine cartel in Colombia (revealing the speciousness of America’s War on
Drugs). Recommendations that Bird
Jr. be banned for life from holding public office were ignored, as were repeated
demands, amid allegations of his theft and corruption, that Prime Minister Bird
resign. However, several ministers
resigned from his Government. Prime
Minister Vere Bird finally retired at the age of 84 in February 1994, succeeded
by his son Lester, winning its 9th out of 10 elections held since 1951. Chairman
of the ALP, Vere Bird Jr. was not appointed to the new cabinet. Yet,
the new government was not free of corruption scandals.
Ivor Bird, a younger Bird brother and Manager of the ZDK radio station
was arrested and fined for taking possession of 12kg of cocaine at the airport
in 1995. In 1996, an advisor on the
control of illicit drugs and money laundering was appointed and by the end of
1997 closed 11 offshore banks. New
legislation was approved in 1998 to cut loopholes taken advantage of by
international criminals. In March 1999 the ALP won its 6th successive general
election, appointing Vere Bird Jr. to the cabinet as Minister of Agriculture,
Land and Fisheries. Since
the sugarcane industry waned completely in 1972, tourism has monopolized the
economy, expanding tremendously in recent years.
Half a million tourists visit Antigua and Barbuda annually, half of which
are cruise passengers. HISTORICAL
FRAMEWORK FOR COLONIALISM As
an expansionist political policy, colonialism is very old.
The Greeks established
colonies in Asia Minor seven centuries before Christ.
Carthaginian and Roman colonies had struggled for control of the
Mediterranean. Most European
countries reached out after 1492 and founded colonies on the continents
discovered to the west. But the
colonies made and fought over by European powers in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century were not created to drain off excess population or to advance
a religious or political cause. Their
main purpose was to establish and control world markets, motivated by greed for
economic gain. In
1500 world population totaled about 400 million.
Between 1500 and 1800 world population more than doubled and by 1900 it
doubled again to about 1,600 million. By
1960, it had doubled once more. Something
like a 100,000 years were needed to bring the world’s population to the level
of four hundred million reached by the year 1500.
During the 5 years from 1995 to 200 the number of human inhabitants on
the globe increased by more than that number (Van Doren 168). The
spread of new agricultural discoveries and techniques around the world was the
primary cause of the population doubling between 1500 and 1800. Because so much
more food became available, more people could exist. In 1500 less than a quarter of the world’s cultivable land
had been placed under the plow (Van Doren 168).
Hunters and gatherers, nomadic people, or hand cultivators inhabited the
remainder. Their farming methods
proved less efficient than plow cultivation.
Population was limited by recurrent famines brought on by the failure of
native crops and the refusal of people to eat strange food when available. The
causes of European exploration which resulted in the spread of colonialism
include: the broadening influences and inventions of the Renaissance (such as
the magnetic compass and the astrolabe for determining longitude and latitude);
improved ship construction (ships tripled in size, rigging improved, stern
rudders replaced lateral steering devices); the rise of trade and towns which
led to the search for better trade routes to replace overland routes controlled
by Muslims and Mediterranean trade monopolized by Venice; and the development of
a middle class of entrepreneurs and merchants encouraged the development of
central authority which could protect them abroad.
The activities of merchant adventurers helped the evolution of
capitalism. Middle class interests
and national strength fostered mercantilism, the belief in national economic
self-sufficiency, which in turn led to the acquisition of colonies (Leonard 74). The
year 1500 marked the development of a world market by the spread of domesticated
animals and food plants. Cattle,
sheep, and horses were introduced into the New World where they eventually
flourished. Wheat, originating in
the Near East, spread first throughout Asia and then spanned the globe. This staple was joined soon by banana, yams, rice and sugar
cane all from Asia Minor and by maize, potatoes, tomatoes and other food from
the Americas (Van Doren 169). For
centuries husbandmen in northern Europe had been unable to keep more than a few
cattle alive during the long cold winters, slaughtering many every fall.
Without spices, especially pepper, to preserve the meat, it soon spoiled.
They had to purchase pepper from the only known source:
the Arab traders who brought it on their camels through the desert.
The Arab traders would only accept payments of gold (Van Doren 132).
And in Europe, gold was scarce. Travelers
claimed that gold was plentiful south of the Sahara.
And trade was inefficient. Indian
middlemen ate up too much of the profits. Could
they find a way to the East Indies, the source of the spices, bypassing the
middlemen and creating a monopoly of trade and profits?
Muslim pirates held sway in the Indian Ocean. Thus, Portuguese and
Spanish explorers began to dream of a westward route that could avoid all
competition, an aspiration realized later by Columbus. Vasco
de Gama circumnavigated Africa in 1497, reaching the chief Indian trading port
of Calicut. He soon came into
conflict with the Muslim traders in the port.
In 1502 he returned to Calicut with a vengeance, proceeding to bombard
the town, burn a ship full of Muslim spice traders, women and children and
demand the spice trade be turned over to the Portuguese.
Within one generation, his demands had been met and his countrymen were
masters of the spice trade (Van Doren 134).
The world seemed to open up to explorers then. The world was round without doubt, so all the oceans must be
connected and therefore sailors could sail anywhere! Spain and Portugal managed, by force or wit, to dominate
trade routes between East and West for a century.
The Dutch, English and French began to look for a northern route that
would be free of Spanish and Portuguese dominance. With the discovery of the continent of North America, the
birth of a new kind of world trade created an economic unity despite political
divisions. By
the 1600’s, luxuries were no longer the primary objects of trade.
Fortunes could be made by shipping barrels of things like cloth, rum and
sugar, differing from the old trade of small amounts of valuable goods that
could be carried on a camel’s back. Shiploads
of tobacco, rice, and in the 19th century, granite and ice began to make
fortunes for marine merchants (Van Doren 178). In
this new world, sugar and slavery were inextricably linked.
Before 1500, the world’s sweet tooth had had to be satisfied by honey
and by a few rare sweetmeats from exotic sources in the East (Van Doren 178).
First the Spanish and then the English established sugar plantations in
the Caribbean islands and Central America.
Portuguese explorers started plantations in Brazil.
Sugar became as plentiful as salt and as profitable but labor was always
short, the work hard and deadly. African slavery presented a solution. The
European onslaught that brought cruel weapons and foreign disease, against which
the natives had no immunity, further reduced already sparse native populations.
For three centuries, slaves were the most valuable of all cargoes, even
it only half of those shipped on vessels leaving the coast of West Africa
ever reached the Americas alive. Objections
to this trade of human beings could be countered by Aristotle’s doctrine of
ethnic inferiority and later justified by Social Darwinism—only the fittest
would make it to the top in the bloody scramble for survival (Van Doren 179). By
the second half of the 19th century, the European industrial revolution had
outrun the local market for its manufactured goods.
The First Industrial Revolution occurred between 1770 and 1870 and was
characterized by improvements made in machines to make them more efficient and
using them to replace hand labor; the use of steam to power them; the rise of
the factory with its reserves of capital, labor pool and many machines; rise of
the system of investing money in private ventures to make a profit (Leonard
138). The
Revolution began in England because Britain possessed the necessary features:
raw materials shipped from abroad by her merchant marine, coal deposits
for steam power, a labor supply and capital looking for investment.
Producing steel in a new way, in furnaces heated by coal and coke,
lowered the price of steel and created sturdy machines with steel axles and
other turning parts which worked longer and produced more without having to be
replaced (Van Doren 214). Scientific
breeding and crop raising increased production and quality and the use of
machines to reap, thresh and harvest raised did the work the farmers used to do
while people flocked to the cities to work in the factories (Leonard 139).
The economic philosophy of the new capitalism was freedom from all
government restrictions (laissez faire, hands off).
Unsafe factory conditions, long hours and low wages were the products of
competition among factory owners who felt no obligation to their employees,
whose wages depended solely on supply and demand.
The lack of previously homegrown food and the terribly low wages forced
families to send even their youngest children to work. Some received no
education at all. Other children
split the day in half, attending school from 6 AM to 11AM and working at the
factory from 11AM to 6PM. Children
young as 4 and 5 worked long hours, losing limbs to machines and being forced to
stand all day with no break. The factory workers received very low pay since
there were no government restrictions at any level, became dependent on others
for food they had grown for themselves. Periodic
financial panics were the sign, Karl Marx wrote, that the European bourgeois
capitalist needed a constant increase in new customers if stability in market
operations was to be enjoyed (Van Doren 179).
Millions of new customers existed throughout the world.
They were very poor but their large numbers compensated for that and
their political and military weakness meant they could be forced to buy whatever
they producers wanted them to. Even
if they lacked money to buy manufactured goods, they did possess raw materials,
such as tobacco, oranges, sugar, diamonds, gold, spices, coffee, cotton and
rubber, that could be traded for the products that had to be distributed
somewhere—heaven forbid the European manufacturing machine break down. By
the 19th century, Great Britain had firmly branded the world so that she could
boast that the “Sun never sets on the British Empire.”
Or, the socialist’s phrase that I prefer, since more than a quarter of
Britain’s population lived in dire poverty at the end of Queen Victoria’s
reign, “The sun never sets on the British Empire. It has never risen on the slums of London.” Britain’s
African territories were more valuable than other nations’, including Egypt;
British East Africa, including Rhodesia; Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast,
Nigeria and Cameroon in the west. The
discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa led to an influx of prospectors
who expected Britain to protect and extend their rights and interests.
For example, Cecil Rhodes, imperialist and diamond-mine owner,
slaughtered the indigenous Africans to found his own kingdom on diamond wealth
he named after himself, Rhodesia, in southern Africa in the 19th century.
Cecil Rhodes expresses his conqueror’s philosophy:
“Whites have clearly come out on top in the struggle for existence.
Within the white race the English speaking man has proved himself to be
the most likely instrument of the Divine plan to spread Justice, Liberty and
Peace over the widest possible area of the planet.
Therefore, I shall devote the rest of my life to God’s purpose and help
him to make the world English.”
Rhodes’ nonsensical statement attempted to justify his unlimited greed;
he demonstrated no ideology of peace, liberty or justice when he had British
troops slaughter 6000 Africans, armed only with spears, with Maxim guns. Not
all British citizens shared Rhodes’ views. Gladstone and Prince Albert, to
name two, held more liberal views and were against taking possession of
territories in a warlike fashion. But
Queen Victoria did not approve of the “vulgar” methods of Gladstone, and
Prince Albert died early in her reign. The
insincere flatteries, refinement of manner and specious gentility of those such
as the silver-tongued, 1870’s Prime Minister Disreali appealed to Queen
Victoria far more. To paraphrase
Kincaid in Lucy, The people in the world who seem the most mannerly are wreaking
the most havoc on the world. Rhodes
attempted to take over the Transvaal Republic, inhabited by the Dutch settlers
called Boers, inciting the Boer War, led by brutal Lord Kitchener. Kitchener burned the farms of Africans and Boers alike and
collected as many as 100,000 women and children in neglected, unhygienic
concentration camps on the open, sun-drenched veldt (Leonard 167).
More than 20,000 died and their pitiful struggles and deaths were finally
reported to the world. The Boers
were defeated in 1902, agreeing to accept British rule temporarily in exchange
for eventual self-government. By
the turn of the century, Britain and various European nations claimed almost all
of Africa. But there was still a
potent and greedy player wishing to join the game:
Germany, which was emerging during the 19th century as the most powerful
state not just in Europe but in the world.
Each of the colonial powers gave up something to Germany, Britain most of
all because she possessed the most. Germany
desired great possessions but there was nothing left to claim unless the balance
of power in Europe changed drastically, a change for which Germany was preparing
to try to make (Van Doren 288). Wendell
Willkie (1892-1944) lost the race for the U.S. Presidency to Franklin D.
Roosevelt in 1940. Willkie traveled
the world after his loss and published a book in 1943 called, One World.
The book grew from Willkie’s idea that the world would change with
astonishing rapidity after WWII was over. “One
World” represented a political concept, suggesting a world organized for
peace, with every nation joining forces to promote freedom and justice.
It also meant that communication and transportation, shrinking distances
between “foreigners” and overcoming various traditional boundaries would
unite the modern world. Air travel
and the Internet link all countries and cultures.
Tourism has become the world’s leading industry, greater even than war
(Van Doren 318). There’s
so much for me to learn still that I wish, like Kincaid said, I could lean my
head onto the bookshelf and absorb the contents by osmosis.
In the future, I want to research India further, particularly the passive
nonviolent resistance by Ghandi which was so surprisingly successful in
effecting change and gaining Independence.
Also, I must learn more about China, especially the Empress Tzu Hsi,
enthroned when Victoria reigned, and the opium trade and Opium Wars.
I’m fascinated by study of the destruction of the natural habitat in
North America by earliest man and then the settlers, and will read a book about
that next. Africa continues to
captivate me. I want to know more
about that continent and its people. In
a Biology class I took, the professor Kerry Woods said that Homo sapiens
originated in Africa. I’m still
confused how, then, some people’s skin turned pale, though it concerns
pigmentation obviously. The idea of
all world cultures having descended from Africans renders the existence of
racism exponentially more foolish. BIBLIOGRAPHY Garis,
Leslie (1990). Through West Indian Eyes. New
York Times Book Review October. Retrieved
July 2, 2001. Web site: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/19/home/kincaid-eyes.html Salon
Features: Jamaica Kincaid (1995). Salon
Magazine. Retrieved July 2, 2001.
Web site: http://www.salon.com/05/features/kincaid2.html Snell,
Marilyn. Jamaica Kincaid Hates
Happy Endings. Mother
Jones Magazine 1997. Retrieved
July 2, 2001. Web site: http://www.mojones.com/mother_jones/so97/snell.html Antigua.
(n.d.) Island Connoisseur.
Retrieved July 3, 2001. Web site: http://www.caribbeansupersite.com/antigua/history.htm Van
Doren, Charles. A
History of Knowledge. New
York: Ballantine Books, 1991. James,
Leonard F. European
History and World Cultures, 2nd ed. New
York: Barron’s Educational
Series, Inc.
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