The descriptive essay entitled “Island Morning” by Jamaica
Kincaid is about a girl comparing and contrasting her home from the place she
currently lives.
A girl describes her home as a place where people get up so
early to make a living. Her home is said to be abundant in sugarcane,
arrowroot, tobacco, and cotton fields, where people grow other fruits and
vegetables like bananas, mangoes, and potatoes, and sell them to the market
every Sunday. A very small number of people
work in banks and offices while the rest of them work as carpenters, servants,
tailors, shopkeepers, fishermen and the like.
Manhattan, the place she currently lives, on the other hand,
is almost completely different, except that both places share similar
geographical definition. At the place she calls home, people wake up by 6 o’clock
while people in Manhattan are barely alive at that time.
Accustomed to getting up early, the girl still wakes up
early even without hearing the sound of the alarm. She kills her early morning time
reading women’s magazines, watching morning news and television shows. Then,
she noticed it’s no longer an early morning in Manhattan anymore.
