Who doesn’t love a good holiday?
The question may appear rhetorical, if not redundant, but in Jamaica Kincaid’s travel essay A Small Place it serves as less of an aphorism as a real consideration. With humour, her book asks us to seriously consider those people who can’t go on holiday, those who have no means to escape their day to day reality.
The people in question are the Antiguan people, and it is them who sit beneath the surface of her essay. Kincaid begins, however, by addressing the incoming tourist, parodying their expectations of the island: ‘you are feeling wonderful, so you say, ‘’oh what a marvellous change these bad roads are from the splendid highways I am used to in North America’’ (Or, worse, Europe)’.
And it is not long before these light jabs turn into bitter slap. ‘A tourist is an ugly human being’ she says, ‘an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that’. Yet, what feels like a personal attack is never taken personally by the reader. ‘You are not an ugly person all of the time’ she tells us, and with this we are placated into understanding that the tourist is not who we are, but who we become.
It is this narrative technique of holding both the experience of the native and the tourist (Kincaid was born in Antigua yet has spent the majority of her life in the U.S) that allows us to embrace her criticisms with a degree of conscientiousness. In her direct, second-person address we are forced to consider our apathetic attitudes towards the people who live in the places we only visit. She holds up the mirror to our seemingly oblivious nature in understanding that ‘the people who inhabit the place in which you have paused cannot stand you…they do not like you’.
And it is in this moment of realisation that she takes us on another kind of tour, away from the plush sandy beaches and wealthy golf clubs that we may be accustomed to. She redirects our gaze to some of the historical moments of Antigua; she remembers the destructive earthquake of 1974, the destroyed public library, and the corruption and theft of government officials.
In the discovery of these historical moments -otherwise unseen – the tourist is changed. Engagement with what seems to be ‘the real Antigua’ feels to the tourist somehow less exploitative. And perhaps there is a reality in this? That to be actively engaged in the socio-political and cultural monuments of the land, as well as its people, is an altogether more righteous pursuit than taking selfies and laying on beaches?
But it is at this point where we must pause as readers (i.e. tourists) and ask ourselves, is this the purpose of A Small Place? For catering to the conscience of the tourist? Kincaid has been criticised for making the white European gaze the focus of her work, and whilst I would not argue against the aesthetic of this point, I would at the same time maintain that there is a cultural/political necessity in tourist representation. The tourist experience cannot be omitted, and their interaction with the land does contribute to shaping the reality of the island.
Kincaid has also been criticised for shedding a poor light on Antiguans, however I feel these judgements have been greatly misdirected. Her attack is on the political structure, and of those in power, as opposed to the everyday native people. In fact, if there is a criticism to be made on this front, it is that the native Antiguan is largely absent throughout her narrative. Kincaid points to the monuments, yes – to the library, the airport, the schools – but on no occasion are we offered the experience of the librarian, the clerk or even the schoolteacher.
A Small Place is a work of politic, and any of the everyday techniques that she utilizes in her style only work to symbolise this politic. Kincaid writes in the straight-forward style of a repressed native striking back – bluntly referring to tourists as ‘human rubbish’ or dryly prescribing Horatio Nelson to being the ‘the maritime criminal’ – but this I feel, does not work to actually represent the native as much as to highlight the historical and political injustices.
Having left Antigua at age 17, Kincaid is working from a distance, and this is always felt throughout her text. It is perhaps what separates her work from many of her Caribbean contemporaries such as Derek Walcott or Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Where there is a sense of interior in their work – of understanding the psychological, inner-world of their characters – the people of Antigua serve as monikers for Kincaid; as a repressed, symbolic body largely absent from the narrative of Antigua.
It is this sense of distance that creates the greatest irony in A Small Place. Not only does it miss the opportunity to represent the native, it also has the ability to pacify the tourist. Yes, we are aware of the many injustices, of the corrupt politicians and of the swindling businessmen, but there is a sense of apathy that we are liable to embrace in the face of this over-familiar reality. The truth is that we have heard this story many times before, and our lack of intimacy with any individual Antiguan experience leaves our empathy to lay with the nondescript ‘island of Antigua’ or, ‘people of Antigua’. For all of its wonderfully engaged polemic, A Small Place, I fear, risks becoming just another political statement all too easy to forget.
Margin Page
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
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