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Jamaica Kincaid and the Canon: In Dialogue With "Paradise Lost" and "Jane Eyre." - West Indian writer; British novels
MELUS, Summer, 1998 by Diane Simmons
As a child schooled in the British colonial system, West Indian writer Jamaica Kincaid was nourished on a diet of English classics, reading from Shakespeare and Milton by the age of five (Cudjoe 398). Sometimes the canonical works of English literature were administered as punishment; for her schoolgirl crimes Kincaid was forced to copy large chunks of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Other works, such as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, were Kincaid's best friends and she read them over and over (Garis 42).
In her relation to the English language and the English literature with which colonial children were so assiduously inculcated, Kincaid presents a paradox. The emphasis on England, Kincaid has, said, the constant inference that England was the center of the universe, robbed colonial children of a sense of their own worth. Further, the rigorous study of English only enhanced the power of what Kincaid has called "the language of the criminal." This language, she writes in her long essay, A Small Place, is inherently biased in favor of those who enslaved and continue to dominate her people:
For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal's deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal's point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me. (32)
It is no accident that Kincaid's reading in English literature served to diminish, even to "erase" her while it enhanced the beauty and power of everything British. English studies emerged as a discipline out of the "same historical moment" which "produced the nineteenth century colonial form of imperialism," writes Bill Ashcroft et. al. Both English studies and colonialism
proceeded from a single ideological clime and ... the development of the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the other, both at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and at the unconscious level, where it leads to the naturalizing of constructed values (e.g. civilization, humanity, etc.) which conversely, established "savagery," "native," "primitive," as their antitheses and as the object of a reforming zeal. (3)
One result of making literature "central to the cultural enterprise of Empire" was to cause "those from the periphery to immerse themselves in the imported culture, denying their origins in an attempt to become `more English than the English'" (3-4).
For Kincaid, immersed in the English classics, in a world where, she has said, "everything seemed divine and good only if it was English" (Cudjoe 398), the requirement was to be as English as possible: "... my whole upbringing was something I was not; it was English. It was sort of a middle-class English upbringing--I mean, I had the best table manners you ever saw" (Cudjoe 400). But table manners would prove not to be enough: "Of course there was the final hurdle that you could never pass, you could never be English. You could never be a real person" (Simmons Interview).
Kincaid has shown how the English classics invited her to "erase" herself. This was accomplished not only by a focus on the geography of England, her wars, and her kings and queens, but also through depictions of English life as if it were the only real life: The "softer views," Kincaid says:
were the ones that made the most lasting impression on me, the ones that
made me really feel like nothing. `When morning touched the sky' was one
phrase, for no morning touched the sky where I lived. The morning where I
lived came on abruptly with a shock of heat and loud noise. ("On Seeing
England" 14)
But while Kincaid has explored the negative impact of colonial education, she has also made positive use of the English classics. Milton's Paradise Lost, she says, taught her that questions of justice and injustice could be considered and articulated, inspiring her to express her own sense of wrong. Though this was undoubtedly not the intention of the colonial educators, the young Kincaid found a hero with whom she could identify in Paradise Lost, the defiant outcast Lucifer. Given several books of Paradise Lost to copy out as punishment, Kincaid was especially sensitive to Milton's study of Satan's crime and punishment:
My feeling of how wrong my own punishment was, was very much in my small mind as I was [copying out pages of Paradise Lost]. So ... this story about the powerless and the powerful is very much connected with my feelings of powerlessness. And I think it is very connected to justice and injustice, whatever Milton intended.... My version [of Paradise Lost] had a painting of Lucifer. His hair was snakes, all striking. Oh it was fabulous! I was the wrong person to give it to. Milton's work, Kincaid says, "left me with this feeling of articulating your own pain, as Lucifer did, that it seemed too that if you couldn't say what was wrong with you then you couldn't act.... I felt quite aggrieved as a child.... I did feel that I was cast out of only own paradise. (Simmons interview)
