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.

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

In the year I turned fifteen, I felt more unhappy than I had ever imagined anyone could be. It wasn't the unhappiness of wanting a new dress, or the unhappiness of wanting to go to cinema on a Sunday afternoon and not being allowed to do so, or the unhappiness of being unable to solve some mystery in geometry, or the unhappiness at causing my dearest friend, Gwen, some pain. My unhappiness was something deep inside me, and when I closed my eyes I could even see it. It sat somewhere--maybe in my belly, maybe in my heart; I could not exactly tell--and it took the shape of a small black ball, all wrapped up in cobwebs. I would look at it and look at it until I had burned the cobwebs away, and then I would see that the ball was no bigger than a thimble, even though it weighed worlds. At that moment, just when I saw its size and felt its weight, I was beyond tears. I could only just sit and look at myself, feeling like the oldest person who had ever lived and who had not learned a single thing. After I had sat this way for a while, to distract myself I would count my toes; always it came out the same--I had ten of them.

Annie John is a young girl coming of age on the island of Antigua. As a child she clings to her mother, but as she grows older, as they often do, tensions flare. Annie goes to school, where she becomes gifted, popular, and smug; she grows close to a girlfriend named Gwen, and though Annie does not perhaps have the vocabulary to articulate it, we understand her ardor for Gwen is romantic, and then, as puberty continues its march, sexual. Annie grows rebellious; stealing things and hiding them under the house--setting up a comic and intense moment when her mother crawls beneath the house to root out her stash of illicit marbles--doing things to flout her mother simply because she can. She briefly drops Gwen for the companionship of a "wild" girl who doesn't seem to bathe, and though she barely understands her own attraction to her, we can see that it stems from the same impulse as the stealing and the marbles, the desire to have what is unorthodox, outside the limits one's parents have drawn around their existence.

Annie John is separated into titled sections that work both on their own, as short stories, and as pieces of the larger whole. The first, "Figures in the Distance," begins with the line: "For a short while during the year I was ten, I thought only people I did not know died." Young Annie yearns to see death, which, though she lives across from the cemetery, has been invisible to her. She goes to funerals uninvited; she is overjoyed when a girl in her class she doesn't know very well kicks the bucket. There's something counterintuitive, yet perfect, about this beginning: a coming of age book that begins with death. It makes sense, doesn't it, the thought that a process of growing up begins with the first understanding that the process leads toward this particular end? Understanding death, after all, is the shedding of our very first kind of innocence.

One thing that Annie John does very well is depict the way that coming of age is a process of separating oneself from one's parents. Annie's father is a rather distant figure, much older than her mother, and who seems to live a life aloof in his workshop rather than at home. Annie grows up both with and against the figure of her mother; she describes her first sense of separation, or disidentification, when her mother scolds Annie for desiring a dress made of the same pattern as her own. Eventually, she tells Annie, she'll need to become a person of her own rather than an imitation of her, but these are words that will rebound her. As she grows and becomes more headstrong, Annie finds herself hating her mother. What Annie John understands, I think, is that this loathing comes from something other than a place of reason. Yes, her mother can be strict, but more often she is loving. It isn't enough--becoming an adult means revolting, in a way that is secretive and inscrutable even to us, against the people who gave us life, and who hang over us with their obligations of honor and love. Annie John treats this with an attitude that's neither overly cynical nor overly sentimental. Though Annie comes to a kind of partial reconciliation with her mother, she still ends the book by embarking on a steamer headed to England, a place where she can get away from her mother once and for all, and create a new self.

Last year I made a resolution to read more widely from international fiction. Before this I'd never read a book or a novelist from Antigua & Barbuda--now my list of countries read is up to 56.