From “On Seeing England For the First Time” by Jamaica Kincaid
When I saw England for the first time, I was a
child in school sitting at a desk.
The England I was looking at was laid out on a map gently, beautifully,
delicately, a very special jewel: it lay on a bed of sky
blue—the background of the map—its yellow form
mysterious, because though it looked like a leg of
mutton, it could not really look like anything so
familiar as a leg of mutton because it was England—
with shadings of pink and green, unlike any shadings
of pink and green I had seen before, squiggly veins of red running in every direction.
England was a special jewel all right, and only special people got to wear it.
We understood then—we were meant to understand then—that England was to be our source of
myth and the source from which we got our sense of reality, our sense of what was meaningful,
our sense of what was meaningless—about much about our own lives and much about the
very idea of us headed that last list.
At the time I was a child sitting at my desk seeing
England for the first time, I was already familiar
with the greatness of it.
Each morning before I left for school, I ate a breakfast of half a grapefruit, an egg,
bread and butter, and a slice of cheese, and a cup of cocoa; or half a grapefruit, a bowl
of oat porridge, bread and butter and a slice of cheese, and a cup of cocoa.
The can of cocoa was often left on the table in front of me.
It had written on it the name of the company, the year the company was established, and
the words “Made in England.”
Those words “Made in England,” were written on the box the oats came in too.
They would also have been written on the box the shoes I was wearing came in; a bolt of
gray linen cloth lying on the shelf of the store which my mother had bought three yards
to make the uniform that I was wearing had written along its edge those three words.
The shoes I wore were made in England; so were my socks and cotton undergarments and
the satin ribbons I wore tied at the end of two plaits of
hair.
My father, who might have sat next to me at breakfast, was a carpenter and a cabinet
maker.
The shoes he wore to work would have been made in
England, as were his khaki shirt and trousers, his
underpants and undershirt, his socks and brown felt
hat.
Felt was not the proper material, from which a hat that was expected to provide shade from
the hot sun should be made, but my father must have seen and admired a picture of an
Englishmen 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.
And this hat—a brown felt hat—became so central to his character that it was the first
thing he put on in the morning as he stepped out of bed and the last thing he took off
before he stepped back into bed at night.
As we sat at breakfast a car might go by.
The car, a Hillman or a Zephyr, was made in England.
The very idea of the meal itself, breakfast, and its substantial quality and quantity was
an idea from England; we somehow knew that in England they began the day with this meal
called breakfast and a proper breakfast was a big breakfast.
No one I knew liked eating so much food so early in the day; it made us feel sleepy,
tired.
But this breakfast business was Made in England like almost everything else that surrounded
us, the exceptions being the sea, the sky, and the air we breathed.
At the time I saw this map—seeing England for the first time—I did not say to myself,
“Ah, so that’s what it looks like,” because there was no longing in me to put
a shape to those three words that ran through every part of my life, no matter how small;
for me to have had such a longing would have meant that I lived in a certain atmosphere,
an atmosphere in which those three words were felt as a burden.
But I did not live in such an atmosphere.
My father’s brown felt hat would develop a hole in its crown, the lining would separate
from the hat itself, and six weeks before he thought that he could not be seen wearing
it—he was a very vain man—he would order another hat from England.
And my mother taught me to eat my food in the English way: the knife in the right hand,
the fork in the left, my elbows held still close to my side, the food carefully balanced
on my fork and then brought up to my mouth.
When I had finally mastered it, I overheard her saying to a friend, “Did you see how
nicely she can eat?”
But I knew then that I enjoyed my food more when I ate it with my bare hands, and I continued
to do so when she wasn’t looking.
And when my teacher showed us the map, she asked
us to study it carefully, because no test we would
ever take would be complete without this statement: “Draw a map of England.”
I did not know then that the statement “draw a map of England” was something far worse
than a declaration of war, for in fact a flat-out declaration of war would have put me on alert,
and again in fact, there was no need for war—I had long ago been conquered.
I did not know then that this statement was a part of the process that would result in
my erasure, not my physical erasure, but my erasure all the same.
I did not know then that this statement was meant to make me feel in awe and small
whenever I heard the word “England”: awe at its existence, small because I was not
from it.
I did not know very much of anything then—certainly not what a blessing it was that I was unable
to draw a map of England correctly.