#15. A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid
A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
1988. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I am a fan of Jamaica Kincaid. In the last year or so I have read her books At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy, and got a lot out of each of them. I was looking forward to reading A Small Place because I was looking forward to learning more about Antigua, the Caribbean island she comes from. (Both Annie John and At the Bottom of the River are set on Antigua, but since they are pretty much in the mind of a first-person narrator, who is usually a child, there is not the kind of distance that you'd need to be _told about_ Antigua -- the kind of political, historical, or sociological things about it that might be interesting to a grown-up North American reader.)
I am disappointed in A Small Place, partly because... I'm not sure what the book wants to be. I've seen it described as a "travelogue," and also as a "jeremiad." The first section, or chapter (like many of Kincaid's books, it is very short: 80 pages of large, clear print), starts off in second-person: it is telling "you," the traveller, what to expect when you arrive in Antigua. The next two sections are in first person, with many recollections of Kincaid's early life in Antigua, which move out and away to analysis of what the problems of the island are (the second section considers mostly colonialism and slavery, the third the island's desperate political corruption.) There is also a very short fourth section, which feels sort of tacked on for closure.
I guess I feel as if the book is not very tight or well-held together, in spite of its size -- and a small book needs that even more, doesn't it? Although her fiction is also full of digressions, I feel as if they work and shape to a larger whole. A Small Place is strangely imbalanced, though: analysis, personal recollection, anger carrying the writer away.. Part of the issue, maybe, is that she seems to sort of be writing around or even trying to get at certain ideas and concepts which have, I think, been formulated more concisely and forcefully by various other post-colonialist theorists and writers. But Kincaid does not want to seem to avail herself of any of that language or intellectual discourse, and so it feels as if she is lurching at things and coming up short. (It feels odd and audacious to level this criticism at Jamaica Kincaid, whose intellect is profound and formidable and whose writing sometimes borders on genius. But nonetheless, that is how the book made me feel.)
Despite that, there were entire passages I want to copy out to think about and remember.
... In the middle of High Street was the Barclays Bank. The Barclay brothers, who started Barclays Bank, were slave traders. That is how they made their money. When the English outlawed the slave trade, the Barclay brothers went into banking. It made them even richer. ... Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget? There is the Barclays Bank. The Barclay brothers are dead. The human beings they traded, the human beings who to them were only commodities, are dead. It should not have been that they came to the same end, and heaven is not enough of a reward for one or hell enough of a punishment for the other. (25-27)
I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions. All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (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? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal... can explain and express the deed only from the criminal's point of view. ...) (31-32)
... Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, it's because we, for as long as we have known you, _were_ capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were the commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this is so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you. (36-37)
(The hospital in Antigua is so dirty, so run-down, that even if the best doctors and nurses in the world were employed, a person from another part of the world -- Europe or North America -- would not feel comfortable leaving a domestic animal there.) (65)
... 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 would 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 be like; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of these noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, one you cease to be a master, once you throw off your masters 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. (80-81)
Also, FYI, here is a helpful paragraph of information about Antigua from Wikipedia. (One thing that reading this book did make me want to do was immediately go and do a whole lot of research about this particular small island country, and having read the book lent that deep shading and texture to the string of facts that makes reading about other people's countries so awesome. If you decide to read this book, you will understand what I mean.)
Antigua (pronounced /ænˈtiːɡə/ an-TEE-gə) is an island in the West Indies, in the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean region, the main island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua means "ancient" in Spanish and was named by Christopher Columbus after a church in Spain, Santa Maria La Antigua - St. Mary the Ancient. It is also known as Wadadli, from the original Amerindian inhabitants, and means approximately "our own". ... The island's circumference is roughly 87 km (54 mi) and its area 281 sq km (108 sq mi). Its population is about 69,000 as of July 2006. It is the largest of the Leeward Islands, and the most developed and prosperous due to its upscale tourism industry, offshore banking, internet gambling services and education services, including two medical schools. ... Owing to the absence of rivers, the paucity of springs, and the almost complete deforestation, Antigua is subject to frequent droughts.
1988. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I am a fan of Jamaica Kincaid. In the last year or so I have read her books At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy, and got a lot out of each of them. I was looking forward to reading A Small Place because I was looking forward to learning more about Antigua, the Caribbean island she comes from. (Both Annie John and At the Bottom of the River are set on Antigua, but since they are pretty much in the mind of a first-person narrator, who is usually a child, there is not the kind of distance that you'd need to be _told about_ Antigua -- the kind of political, historical, or sociological things about it that might be interesting to a grown-up North American reader.)
I am disappointed in A Small Place, partly because... I'm not sure what the book wants to be. I've seen it described as a "travelogue," and also as a "jeremiad." The first section, or chapter (like many of Kincaid's books, it is very short: 80 pages of large, clear print), starts off in second-person: it is telling "you," the traveller, what to expect when you arrive in Antigua. The next two sections are in first person, with many recollections of Kincaid's early life in Antigua, which move out and away to analysis of what the problems of the island are (the second section considers mostly colonialism and slavery, the third the island's desperate political corruption.) There is also a very short fourth section, which feels sort of tacked on for closure.
I guess I feel as if the book is not very tight or well-held together, in spite of its size -- and a small book needs that even more, doesn't it? Although her fiction is also full of digressions, I feel as if they work and shape to a larger whole. A Small Place is strangely imbalanced, though: analysis, personal recollection, anger carrying the writer away.. Part of the issue, maybe, is that she seems to sort of be writing around or even trying to get at certain ideas and concepts which have, I think, been formulated more concisely and forcefully by various other post-colonialist theorists and writers. But Kincaid does not want to seem to avail herself of any of that language or intellectual discourse, and so it feels as if she is lurching at things and coming up short. (It feels odd and audacious to level this criticism at Jamaica Kincaid, whose intellect is profound and formidable and whose writing sometimes borders on genius. But nonetheless, that is how the book made me feel.)
Despite that, there were entire passages I want to copy out to think about and remember.
... In the middle of High Street was the Barclays Bank. The Barclay brothers, who started Barclays Bank, were slave traders. That is how they made their money. When the English outlawed the slave trade, the Barclay brothers went into banking. It made them even richer. ... Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget? There is the Barclays Bank. The Barclay brothers are dead. The human beings they traded, the human beings who to them were only commodities, are dead. It should not have been that they came to the same end, and heaven is not enough of a reward for one or hell enough of a punishment for the other. (25-27)
I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions. All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (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? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal... can explain and express the deed only from the criminal's point of view. ...) (31-32)
... Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, it's because we, for as long as we have known you, _were_ capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were the commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this is so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you. (36-37)
(The hospital in Antigua is so dirty, so run-down, that even if the best doctors and nurses in the world were employed, a person from another part of the world -- Europe or North America -- would not feel comfortable leaving a domestic animal there.) (65)
... 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 would 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 be like; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of these noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, one you cease to be a master, once you throw off your masters 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. (80-81)
Also, FYI, here is a helpful paragraph of information about Antigua from Wikipedia. (One thing that reading this book did make me want to do was immediately go and do a whole lot of research about this particular small island country, and having read the book lent that deep shading and texture to the string of facts that makes reading about other people's countries so awesome. If you decide to read this book, you will understand what I mean.)
Antigua (pronounced /ænˈtiːɡə/ an-TEE-gə) is an island in the West Indies, in the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean region, the main island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua means "ancient" in Spanish and was named by Christopher Columbus after a church in Spain, Santa Maria La Antigua - St. Mary the Ancient. It is also known as Wadadli, from the original Amerindian inhabitants, and means approximately "our own". ... The island's circumference is roughly 87 km (54 mi) and its area 281 sq km (108 sq mi). Its population is about 69,000 as of July 2006. It is the largest of the Leeward Islands, and the most developed and prosperous due to its upscale tourism industry, offshore banking, internet gambling services and education services, including two medical schools. ... Owing to the absence of rivers, the paucity of springs, and the almost complete deforestation, Antigua is subject to frequent droughts.