On Seeing England for the First Time...

In the essay, "On Seeing England For The First Time" (1991) author Jamaica Kincaid subtly hints that the colonization of Carribbean cultures by the English empire devalues the people, metaphorically brainwashing them into deifying the British way of life. Kincaid brings up events from her past, such as her father's hat wearing habits where he "must have seen and admired a picture of an Englishman wearing such a hat in England, and this picture that he saw must have been so compelling that it caused him to wear the wrong hat for a hot climate most of his long life." (2). She regales the reader with her tales of her youth; often about her father's hat, her mother's desire for her to eat properly, and the entire family's morning ritual of engulfing a large breakfast, in order to depict the colonial effect on the population while providing a counterargument from her young persona. Kincaid addresses a large portion of her homeland Antigua, as well as other settlements in the region, to not exalt the English way of life and realize the industrialization of an environment and assimilation of a culture, with an increasingly-hostile, yet underlying "wake-up" message.