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A Small Place – Jamaica Kincaid
Part I:
A Small Place is divided into four loosely structured,
untitled sections
...
The reader, through Kincaid’s
description, witnesses the great natural beauty of the island,
while being sheltered from the harsher realities of the lives
of those who must live there
...

Included in her guided tour are brief views of the mansions on
the island, mostly gained through corruption or outright
criminality
...

The tour continues at the hotel, and Kincaid concludes the
section with a discussion of her view of the moral ugliness of
being a tourist
...
’ Tourist – local divide established straight off
‘to be frank, white…you move through customs swiftly’
‘you feel cleansed, immediately you feel blessed (which
is to say special); you feel free
...
”
‘isn’t that the last straw; for now only did we have to
suffer unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction
to be had from “We made you bastards rich” is taken away,
too
...
’
‘If it were not for you, they would not have Government
House, and Prime Minister’s Office, and Parliament
Building and embassy of powerful country
...
’
Kincaid constantly reminding the tourist of slavery,
colonisation
‘A tourist is an ugly person
...
’
Belonging/identity
‘They are too poor to escape the reality of their own
lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the
place where they live’ lack of freedom/poverty
‘they envy your ability to turn their own banality and
boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself’
MORAL UGLINESS OF BEING A TOURIST

PART 2
The second section deals with Kincaid’s memories of the “old”
Antigua, the colonial possession of Great Britain
...
She

delves briefly into the history of Barclay’s Bank and
discusses the Mill Reef Club, an elite, all-white enclave
built by wealthy foreigners
...
Much of the section is
concerned with the distortions that colonialism has created in
the minds of the Antiguans; Antiguans do not tend to recognize
racism as such, says Kincaid, and the bad behavior of
individual English people never seems to affect the general
reverence for English culture
...
She then discusses the connection she sees
between the colonial past of the island and its impoverished,
corrupt present
...
’
‘But the English have become such a pitiful lot these
days, with hardly any idea what to do with themselves now
that they no longer have one quarter of the earth’s human
population bowing and scraping before them
...
’
‘And so all this fuss over empire…always makes me quite
crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong: they should
never have left their home, their precious England’
‘everybody they met they turned English’ reidentifying
‘nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be
English’
‘it remained clean and white and high’ wall of Governor’s
building
On Barclays Bank – the two brothers were formerly slave
traders ‘when they saw how rich banking made them, they
gave themselves a good beating for opposing an end to
slave trading (for surely they would have opposed that)
‘Do you ever wonder why some people blow things up?
...
’
Other/self/black/white

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‘to inspect us’ other
The doctor’s wife checking ‘that nothing else about us –
apart from the colour of our skin – would offend the
doctor
...
’
‘we thought they were like animals’ identity – whites –
re-identifying – how cultures see other cultures
Wide Sargasso Sea, identity is a big part of the
narrative
‘the English were supposed to be civilised, and this
behaviour was so much like that of an animal’
‘the England that, no matter what we did, we could be
of
...
’
‘what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just
one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods,
no excess of love which might lead to the things than an
excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most
painful of all, no tongue
...

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‘people like me’ ‘people like you’ other/self
‘Have you ever wondered…?’ questions engaging with the
reader – creates a relationship with them by asking
them/accusing them/criticising

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‘You murdered people
...
You robbed
people
...
As an example, she takes the state of the
library, awaiting repairs after all these years and
forced to reside in “temporary” quarters above a dry
goods store
...
She recalls
the imperious ways of the head librarian (who suspected
Kincaid, rightly, of stealing books), who is now sadly
reduced to campaigning, mostly unsuccessfully, for funds
to build a new library, while the collection decomposes
in cardboard boxes
...
Kincaid mentions the
ironies involved in Antigua having a Minister of Culture
without having a culture to administer
...
Education has clearly suffered on Antigua in
the years since independence, and Kincaid ruefully notes
the poor speech habits of the younger Antiguans

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‘Is the Antigua I see before me, self-ruled, a worse
place than what it was when it was dominated by the
bad-minded English and all the bad-minded things
they brought with them?’
“The government is corrupt
...
” Corruption/human cruelty

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‘if you could hear the sound of its quietness (for
the quiet in this library was a sound in itself),
the smell of the sea (which was a stone’s throw
away), the heat of the sun (no building could
protect us from that)’ past – the library building
‘where the sound of quietness used to be, where the
smell of the sea used to be, where everything used
to be’ re-identified – the old library
‘The government is for sale’
Motto of independence ‘A People to Mold, A Nation to
Build’
‘this family specialised in breeding special groups
of black people, whom they then sold into slavery’
‘For the people in a small place, every event is a
domestic event; the people in a small place cannot
see themselves in a larger picture’

PART IV
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‘human cargo’
‘they were beaten, they were murdered, they were sold’
‘nobody, which is what a servant is’
‘people cannot see a relationship between their obsession
with slavery and emancipation and their celebration of
the Hotel Training School’
‘They go back and forth, exchanging places, and their
status from day to day depends on all sorts of internal
shadings and internal colourings, and the forces that
manipulate these internal shadings and internal
colourings are kept deliberately mysterious and unknown

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