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From the award-winning author of Annie John comes a brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua. 'If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the prime minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a prime minister would want an airport named after him-why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen ...' So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up. Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.… (mehr)
This author is very angry, and I felt chastised! First among various reasons for being a tourist! It should be required reading for anyone vacationing in the Caribbean, where the tourists have plenty and the locals do not. Take for instance, water. Tourists can swim in it, and then bathe in it, and drink as much as they like. But many islands have no water source so the locals have to conserve every last drop. From there, the author delves into how the residents of Antigua came to live there—slave ships, and the dire faults in the English empire. It’s a tongue-lashing for sure. ( )
I read this for a Postcolonial literature class at CU Boulder. While I know a lot of folks can't get past the bitter, I think the point is that most of us are reading this from the comfort of privilege, especially those of us privileged enough to be reading it in a university.
I love the message . We can't "get over" our past. We can't turn away from our history. But we can meet each other in the middle, acknowledge our past and embrace our history - which might help all of us start acting a little more human.
I‘m struggling to review this precisely. It reads like a stream of consciousness diatribe to the point I had trouble finding cohesion sometimes as I read. Nonetheless, it has a lot to say about how overwhelming and multi-sided corruption can be and the difficulties of untangling it. It dealt also with the problems of tourism and outside influence on a small nation. I can‘t say I enjoyed reading it, but it‘s a pick for the emotional force it has. ( )
I'm not sure I've ever come across a voice so forthright and beautiful at the same time. Jamaica Kincaid manages to reveal the underbelly of colonization (specifically in regard to her birthplace Antigua) while writing with blurry metaphor (blurry in the sense that things seems like metaphors and also not metaphors), wry humor, and a telling of political history in an almost folk-style narrative like a parable, but in reference to specific people. She unflinchingly deals out critiques yet manages to convey a sadness at the same time:
"And it is in that strange voice, then--the voice that suggests innocence, art, lunacy--that they say these things, pausing to take breath before this monument to rottenness, that monument to rottenness, as if they were tour guides; as if, having observed the event of tourism, they have absorbed it so completely that they have made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction." (69)
In eighty short pages, Kincaid shares a truthful experience of a land, the likes of which few get to see or experience when caught up in the "unreal beauty" of a tourist destination. Kincaid describes beauty as a prison, and in so doing, changes our understanding of that which might deserve a deeper look beyond the blue of the ocean and the colors of the sky. ( )
There are places worth revisiting not to relive joyful memories, but to allow for the catharsis that comes from exposing festering wounds so that cleansing, and perhaps healing, can begin. This is the kind of journey Jamaica Kincaid allows us to witness. In this essay, orginally published in 1988 and recently released in paperback, she takes us behind idyllic countrysides and sun-kissed beaches to examine the underbelly of life in Antigua, the tiny island in the West Indies where she grew up. It is a place she lovingly describes as "too beautiful." But Antigua also elicits bitter memories for our tour guide, who makes it clear she has an ax to grind in this short but powerful billyclub of a book.
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For Brian and Veronica Dyde; for my brothers Joseph, Dalma, and Devin Drew with love; and for William Shawn (again) with gratitude and love
Erste Worte
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If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see.
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As your plane descends to land, you might say, What a beautiful island Antigua is—more beautiful than any of the other islands you have seen, and they were beautiful, in their way, but they were much too green, much too lush with vegetation, which indicated to you, the tourist, that they got quite a bit of rainfall, and rain is the very thing that you, just now, do not want, for you are thinking of the hard and cold and dark and long days you spent working in North America (or, worse, Europe), earning some money so that you could stay in this place (Antigua) where the sun always shines and where the climate is deliciously hot and dry for the four to ten days you are going to be staying there; and since you are on your holiday, since you are a tourist, the thought of what it might be like for someone who had to live day in, day out in a place that suffers constantly from drought, and so has to watch carefully every drop of fresh water used (while at the same time surrounded by a sea and an ocean—the Caribbean Sea on one side, the Atlantic Ocean on the other), must never cross your mind.
In the Antigua that I knew, we lived on a street named after an English maritime criminal, Horatio Nelson, and all the other streets around us were named after some other English maritime criminals. There was Rodney Street, there was Hood Street, there was Hawkins Street, and there was Drake Street.
And then there was another place, called the Mill Reef Club. It was built by some people from North America who wanted to live in Antigua and spend their holidays in Antigua but who seemed not to like Antiguans (black people) at all, for the Mill Reef Club declared itself completely private, and the only Antiguans (black people) allowed to go there were servants.
I attended a school named after a Princess of England. Years and years later, I read somewhere that this Princess made her tour of the West Indies (which included Antigua, and on that tour she dedicated my school) because she had fallen in love with a married man, and since she was not allowed to marry a divorced man she was sent to visit us to get over her affair with him. How well I remember that all of Antigua turned out to see this Princess person, how every building that she would enter was repaired and painted so that it looked brand-new, how every beach that she would sun herself on had to look as if no one had ever sunned there before (I wonder now what they did about the poor sea? I mean, can a sea be made to look brand-new?), and how everybody she met was the best Antiguan body to meet, and no one told us that this person we were putting ourselves out for on such a big scale, this person we were getting worked up about as if she were God Himself, was in our midst because of something so common, so everyday: her life was not working out the way she had hoped, her life was one big mess.
(The people at the Mill Reef Club love the old Antigua. I love the old Antigua. Without question, we don't have the same old Antigua in mind.)
I had heard from many people that the person who wanted to develop that part of St. John's was a foreigner, who was once wanted in the Far East for swindling a government out of oil profits, a man so notorious that he cannot travel with a passport from the country of which he is a citizen but travels on a diplomatic passport issued by the government of Antigua.
(But let me just tell you something about Ministers of Culture: in places where there is a Minister of Culture it means that there is no culture. For have you ever heard of any culture springing up under the umbrella of a Minister of Culture? Countries with Ministers of Culture must be like countries with Liberty Weekend. Do you remember Liberty Weekend? In the week before Liberty Weekend, the United States Supreme Court ruled that ordinary grown-up people could not do as they pleased behind the locked doors of their own bedroom. I would have thought, then, that the people whose idea it was to have the Liberty Weekend business would have been so ashamed at such a repudiation of liberty that they would have cancelled the whole thing. But not at all; and so in a country that had less liberty than it used to have, Liberty Weekend was celebrated. In countries that have no culture or afraid they may have no culture, there is a Minister of Culture. And what is culture, anyway? In some places, it's the way they play drums; in other places, it's the way you behave out in public; and in still other places, it's just the way a person cooks food. And so what is there to preserve about these things? For is it not so that people make them up as they go along, make them up as they need them?)
Letzte Worte
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Only once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.
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From the award-winning author of Annie John comes a brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua. 'If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the prime minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a prime minister would want an airport named after him-why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen ...' So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up. Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.
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