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A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid In A Small Place, Kincaid leaves the realm of imaginative fiction for a more indeterminate, genre-liminal space amidst fiction, travelogue and essay from which to voice her polemic. She takes on the British colonial and capitalist neo-colonial history of Antigua, written by white men, in a contentious struggle to make Antigua mean something else. The pervasive culture of corruption put in place by the unnamed Antiguan Prime Minister, his two sons, and the rest of his ministers is also attacked and re-written. Through her work, Kincaid insists on the importance of challenging the primacy of the male text in the construction of national cultures and histories. Jamaica Kincaid begins her project of re-writing the male text when, in the form of the ignorant musings of a tourist to Antigua, she questions the Antiguan Prime Ministers act of naming the countrys airport after himself.
In a move that opens the way for her later excoriation of government corruption, she reveals this act to be part of an arrogant male narrative of appropriating public places for self-aggrandizement at the expense of ordinary Antiguans. Kincaid is here claiming her right to write her country of origin and she achieves this in the first section of her text (the section closest in form to a travelogue) by constantly anticipating the tourist's gaze and thoughts, while providing her accompanying narrative as an alternative guided tour commentary. As part of her bold denunciatory style, Kincaid turns the oft-touted tourist experience in Antigua of luxury and self-indulgence on its head by setting it in a different context. She points, for example, to the ironic discrepancy between the interests of the tourist and the native as the former craves the sun as part of his holiday fun while the latter has to live with long periods of drought. She further undermines the conventional snapshot of the happy natives when she draws our attention to a hidden narrative of corruption that accounts for what would appear to be charming island ways to the tourist. Thus, the taxi-driver who drives a luxury Japanese car does so only because the banks are encouraged by the government to make loans available for cars and the two main car dealerships in Antigua are owned in part or outright by ministers in government (7).
Similarly, the fact that the library destroyed by an earthquake in 1974 is still unrepaired is a shameful indictment of the government rather than a sort of quaintness on the part of these islanders, these people descended from slaves - what a strange, unusual perception of time they have (9). As a vacationer in pursuit of pleasure in a foreign place, the tourist becomes the center of every setting and is blind and impervious to the local inhabitants: You see yourself taking a walk on that beach, you see yourself meeting new people (only they are new in a very limited way, for they are people just like you). You see yourself eating some delicious, locally grown food. You see yourself, you see yourself... (13) While the tourist may be a harmless, ordinary person in his own country, ordinariness is no excuse as he remains, according to Kincaid, inextricably implicated in the exploitative networks of global capitalism.
Kincaid returns the tourists gaze with the natives. By showing how the tourist is seen to profit in a cannibalistic fashion from the unnoticed misfortunes of the natives, Kincaid is writing back to European-authored travel narratives in which the Caribbean is presented as a tropical paradise catering to the desires of the visitor whose presence and impact on local life is in turn, frequently left unexamined. In Kincaid's eyes, there is a clear sense of historical continuity between the tourist and the colonizer of old. The second section begins with the narrator still addressing you, a tourist (23). The target of her vituperative verbal attack grows, however, when the boundaries of you are expanded to include the English colonizers and other Western neo-colonizers: Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to learn from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault.
Let me just show you how you looked to us. You came. You took things that were not yours, and you did not even, for appearances sake, ask first. (34 - 5) Stressing the affiliation between tourist and colonizer, Kincaid's rewriting of Antigua's history involves insisting on links where some would rather not see connections. It may be argued that A Small Place confronts the readers of post-colonial texts who are paralyzed by liberal guilt and calls for a re-evaluation of the ways in which cross-cultural readings may occur. It seems that the troubling power of Kincaid's text lies precisely in its damning approach towards everyone and everything; there is no sense of any ironical or satirical intent in her accusations. Kincaid appears to suggest that there is not enough guilt, particularly among white, Western readers, hence her need to push this point and call for the acceptance of responsibility as a first step towards healing the wounds of the past.
Perhaps Kincaid's greatest frustration with Antigua lies in what she sees as its narrowness of vision, a phenomenon she repeatedly equates with its physical smallness. Living in Antigua, according to her, is stifling and suffocating, as if everything and everybody inside it were locked in and everything and everybody that is not inside it were locked out (79). The island is too self-contained and isolated in an intense way. Antiguans seem trapped in a time warp, unable to view themselves within a larger global history and context. This is where Kincaid comes in. As both an insider and an outsider, she provides much-needed perspective.
Ultimately, she argues that Antiguans must start assuming responsibility for themselves and stop seeing themselves as victims. She paves the way for this with her conclusion when she levels colonizer and colonized, slave-owner and slave, tourist and Antiguan; all, Kincaid notes, are human beings. Works cited: Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
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Research essay sample on A Small Place By Jamaica Kincaid
