A Small Island by Jamaica Kincaid

Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty--a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might belike; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of those noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid's jeremiad about her home country of Antigua, beings in the accusatory first person: suppose you are a tourist, visiting Antigua for the first time. You see the beautiful green hills and blue waters of Antigua, and you see the poverty: the dilapidated library, the school, which looks like a latrine, and you have a kind of sense of superiority to what it is you lay your eyes on. There is an Antigua that has been fashioned for you, but still you cannot help but see what you might think of as the "real" Antigua, and you--you!--do not think about why or how this "small place" in the middle of the Caribbean sea might have inherited corruption and degradation from the colonial powers of which you, whether you know it or not, are a belated representative. It's a pointed and really quite vicious accusation. Kincaid doesn't mince words: "An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that..." She goes on to say the one thing that you will not and cannot imagine is that the people of Antigua despise you, and what is worse, they laugh at you.

A Small Place contains other sections, but they're all as frank and forthright as this one, and for that, I really enjoyed it. One section details the astonishing corruption of Antigua's leaders in the decades between independence from Britain and the 1980's in which Kincaid was writing, but Kincaid makes it clear that these methods were learned from the colonists, and reflect a kind of rapaciousness that the English taught to their subjects. One thing that really struck me, and will stay with me as I think about colonialism and its consequences, is that Kincaid describes the Antiguans of the colonial era not thinking of the English as racists: what they thought was that they were "ill-mannered," or in some cases, "puzzling," because they spent their time among people they clearly did not like. This provides an interesting response to modern critiques of (God help us) "wokeness," which might be described by its critics as a tendency to see racism everywhere, because the Antiguans, as Kincaid describes them, didn't see racism at all; they saw boorishness and ill manners--the sad and sorry traits that lie, perhaps, at the bottom of racism.

And the whole thing is filled with remarkable prose, because Kincaid is really a terrific prose writer. Her precise and cutting way of writing, I think, is really well disposed to a jeremiad like this one. She doesn't pull any punches, but neither does it seem one-sided or unfair, whatever that might mean in this case. Funnily, for someone so skilled at writing in the English language, Kincaid repeats a really familiar critique: "For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?") It is especially tragic to think of Kincaid, a talented and incisive writer if ever there was one, describing herself as having "no tongue." Tongueless though it may be, A Small Place lashes powerfully.