A Small Place

Central argument

Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua and lives in the United States. In four short chapters, written in the second person and addressed to "you", the white tourist who arrives by plane, she says that the beauty of the island (the sun, the sea, the drought the tourist likes) covers three layers of ruin: slavery and English colonialism, the corruption of the government after independence in 1981, and tourism, which puts Antiguans back to serving. The book accuses everyone: the English, the North Americans, the prime minister Vere Bird and his family, and the Antiguans too, who know the government is corrupt and re-elect it. The hardest point is about language: Kincaid can tell the crime only in the language of the people who committed it, and that language has no words for the wrong done to her.

Objections

• Anger is the book's method, and it works: the second person leaves the reader no way out. But the same anger flattens things: "all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted". Kincaid writes it almost ironically and corrects it herself on the last page (once free, they "are just human beings"), but for most of the book people are categories.
• She accuses the tourist of seeing Antigua from outside, but she looks at it from outside too: she left Antigua at seventeen to work as an au pair in the United States, and stayed there. The book doesn't hide it, but it doesn't think about it.
• On the present (corruption, schools, the hospital, the library closed since the 1974 earthquake) it gives few facts and many anecdotes. The picture is believable, but it's an indictment, not an investigation.

Examples / Notable passages

• V. C. Bird International Airport. The book opens there: why would a prime minister want an airport named after him, "why not a school, why not a hospital"? The tourist doesn't ask, because he won't see the schools or the hospital.
• The sewage. Antigua has no proper sewage system, and what the tourist flushes ends up in the sea where he then swims. The same ocean, Kincaid adds, has swallowed up a great many black slaves.
• The ugly tourist. At home you are an ordinary person, you feel alone in the crowd and you're afraid of going unnoticed. On holiday you become "an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing". Then she widens it: every native is a potential tourist, and every native everywhere lives "a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression", which they try to escape. The difference is that most Antiguans are too poor to leave.
• Barclays Bank. The Barclay brothers were slave traders; when the slave trade was outlawed, they went into banking. The bank is still there in Antigua. Hence the question: "Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget?"
• The Mill Reef Club. A private club built by North Americans, where the only Antiguans allowed in were servants. People can still recite the name of the first Antiguan to eat a sandwich at the clubhouse.
• Queen Victoria's birthday. At school 24 May was a holiday. At a dinner an Englishman tells her that at his school they marked the day the queen died, and Kincaid answers that at least they knew she had died.
• The library. Damaged in the 1974 earthquake, with the sign "REPAIRS ARE PENDING" still hanging there more than a decade later. For Kincaid it was the most beautiful place of her childhood, even if what she read there was history written by the English.