As I was reading Jamaica Kincaid’s creative no-fiction essay/book ‘A Small Place’, I found myself thoroughly relishing it. I loved the idea of this voice addressing tourists, specifically white and western, and kind of holding them up by their breeches as she ticked off a million reasons why they need to pay attention, not just money, to the land they have set foot in.
I am not an essay/book critic. In fact, I really do not know how to sensibly critique any piece of work. So I will just stick to what I remember of the essay and my personal feelings.
I read ‘A Small Place’ in December 2020. Not a lot of time has gone by since, yet I do not remember most details from it. (Should I chuck it to everything else fighting for their share of my attention economy?) What I do recall is coming away thinking how cool and interesting this essay was. And it now has a place in my favourite reads list.
Ms Kincaid threw in a bunch of words, some volatile emotions, a bunch of historical facts, and a generous heap of social commentary to create this exquisite work.
To give a gist of the subject matter, it is centred on tourism in the island of Antigua in the Caribbean region. Formerly a British colonial land, the small island and its inhabitants are still experiencing lingering jolts of the British yoke even after all these years.
She has dealt a strong bittersweet, melancholic stroke to this piece.
The acerbic tone was really enjoyable. She doesn’t mince words when it comes to bashing the British, the tourists, and even the island natives. It is angry, it is cutting, and it is definitely thought-provoking. I imagine every reader will feel the pervasive mood of anger and bitterness from the first to the final page.
Immediately, I connected it to modern day tourism and the Instagram hashtag holidays. I don’t know what Antigua looks like but I visualise blue waters, white grainy sands and palm trees.
Our lives are intertwined so firmly with social media that words like ‘beach holidays’, ‘sand, ‘hotels, ‘tourism’, etc., instantly take me to the image I described above. And who would be the humans in those pictures but the white people!
If I remember correctly, the writer describes the thoughts of the tourists towards the locals and vice versa. Each looks down at the other. But the locals, who also work at the hotels, have to hide their thoughts behind gratitude and politeness reserved for moneyed guests.
Ms Kincaid’s anger is aimed at the hundreds of years of British colonial rule and its lasting impact over the people it once ruled. It is pointed at the corruption that is rife in Antigua and the government which seems hopeless. It is aimed at the tourists who live tedious, ordinary, dull lives back home but have the temerity to spend a little bit of money (and gain a lot of value for that amount) at a lovely beachside resort in an exotic part of the world. These tourists don’t care to know what is going on beyond their resort walls. They come for a holiday but they stay inside these ‘civilised’ spaces. All they are concerned about is their hotel pools, taking in some sunshine, and walking by the beaches.
The corruption is rampant in Antigua. Anything is available for those who have money. Like the universal totem of corruption, the rich get richer while the poor remain downtrodden. There’s a library she talks about which is almost like the symbol of the endemic corruption. It’s been years since there was talk of fixing and restoring the library to its former glory but it remains dilapidated to the day she wrote this piece.
It gives an overarching view of the Antigua then. I found out this essay was published, in 1988, one year after I was born. I don’t suppose they’ve managed to root out corruption there in the last 33 years.
But reading this felt sort of comforting. She has written this with so much passion. There is a sense of an animal sniping at a person’s heels. It has that energy. I wish I could write like that. I also appreciated learning about Antigua’s history and reading about the powerful, crooked local people there.
It is 2021. We cannot escape dialogues on race, ethnicity, slavery, colonialism, caste, capitalism, etc. Our world has shrunken and broadened almost concurrently. So reading essays/books like this presents us with a worldview that feels familiar (corruption, poverty) and foreign (slavery, white colonialism) at the same time.
I’m also guilty of very much enjoying, especially, the literary clobbering she doled out to the entitled white tourists (Oops).
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