María Castaño, A&E Section Editor
“A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid situates you in the middle of Antigua, an island in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean known for its beautiful climate and beaches. It is a tourism haven for people around the world, and the book’s main critique is towards the systems that keep it that way.
Kincaid offers a poignant critique of tourism in relation to neo-colonialism and how Antigua’s status as underdeveloped, with an economy and education system that seem to be actively hostile to its own people, are all calculated efforts made by corrupt government officials and the influence of exterior institutions like the British government to maintain colonial structures of power and the tradition of extraction and exploitation.
The book begins with Kincaid talking to you about you as the tourist. She immediately places the reader in a position of complicity as she narrates the story as a tour guide of Antigua and highlights the conditions of the country as being entirely catered to the tourist to the point of hostility toward the locals.
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At this point, there is an emphasis on the escapism the tourist seeks when visiting a place with almost artificial beauty, such as Antigua, and Kincaid makes the poignant connection between this escapism and the fatalistic conditions the locals must go through. To substantiate her point, Kincaid makes a lot of political commentary on the corruption of Antiguan politicians and the prevalence of neo-colonialism affecting Antigua, emphasizing the Department of Tourism as the wheels that help to uphold the colonial-esque system of subjugating the locals into being pushed to work within the tourism industry, where they serve wealthy white foreigners.
Another neo-colonial force Kincaid criticizes is part of a documentary called “Life and Debt,” directed and produced by Stephanie Black, with some narration by Kincaid herself, that focuses on the International Monetary Fund and its predatory lending conditions that restrict the development of a country’s market.
She mentions the public library multiple times throughout the story as a symbol of colonial times, since it was built by the British during their time in Antigua, and places multiple conflicting meanings on this symbol as a type of childhood refuge where she first cultivated her love for reading and learning. The library was damaged by The Earthquake, as the locals call it, in 1974 and has had a sign that says “repairs are pending” for decades.
What makes Kincaid’s narrative fascinating to me is how she deals with the relationship between the colonized or native, as she calls them, and the colonizers. She makes the resentment that fills the relationship evident in her narration but also mentions the difficulty of having parts of your oppressor be inextricable from your own individual and cultural identity.
To make this point, she talks about being forced to use the language of the colonizer to denounce these issues and how this causes the native language of the island, which is used by most locals, to be subjugated in favor of the academic and political English language, replicating the oppressive power dynamics of colonialism.
“A Small Place” is a book full of irony that demands the reader’s attention as it forces you to see the problems with a system we often think of as innocuous. Tourism in the Caribbean and other underdeveloped countries has a specific pattern that rhymes with colonial structures of power to limit the access the locals have to any sort of tool of liberation or agency.
This book was eye-opening to me, as I realized the political and moral weight that comes with the escapist tourist and realized that issues such as gentrification are threats not only to isolated communities but to whole countries that are forced to receive with open arms the expats and the wealthy and, in return, must ignore and accept the systems in place that perpetuate their reality.