In History Jamaica Kincaid Summary

Martin Luther King Jr once said “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” Some would agree with this statement. Some would disagree. It’s an eternal debate over the role history plays in the present. And often, more importantly, the question is what is history itself and whose narrative is at the core. In her reflective, but argumentative, essay entitled “In History”, Jamaica Kincaid analyzes how these ideas-- what is history and how does what happened in the past impact us today-- can and should impact people today. Kincaid commences her essay discussing the actions and lasting legacy of Christopher Columbus. She describes that “he [Christopher Columbus] named” the various people, animals, and the landscape surrounding him. She repeatedly says “He named” to bring emphasis to the fact that this naming is what “g[a]ve him knowledge of things”. By portraying this causal relationship, Kincaid employs the issue of naming as a microcosm for the larger idea that “This blankness, the one that Christopher Columbus met, was more like the blankness of paradise, paradise emerges from chaos, and this chaos is not history; it is not a legitimate order of things”. In …show more content…
Most frequently; “What is history?”. This question is not truly a question or inquisition into the subject, but rather said to have the reader ponder an answer and to spur thinking. At the completion of her essay she sets up a dichotomy; either history “is an open wound and each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again, over and over” or “a long moment that begins anew each day since 1492”. She clearly sides with the preceding not the latter, as seen by her self-insertion into history. Rather than focusing on just Eurocentric empirics and oversimplified accounts, Kincaid urges her reader to look beyond the benefits of simplified narratives the greater impacts of accurate