A Small Place

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Antiguans’ minds have been shaped from the bottom up by the experience of being enslaved and, later, colonized. This intimate shaping determines the contours of daily life and even private thoughts. For example, the young Kincaid’s greatest pleasure is in reading, but everything she reads is tainted by bitterness, since she is learning the dominant culture from the position of a dominated people. English is her first language, and Kincaid complains that even her critique of colonialism must be expressed in the words she learned from the colonialists themselves. Kincaid doesn’t feel at home in either world. She will never be truly English because of race and history, yet her intimacy with English culture expands her horizons far beyond the small boundaries of Antigua. Thanks to slavery and to being ruled from afar for so long, the Antiguans have become accustomed to being passive objects of history, rather than active makers of it. The experiences of the colonized are therefore always secondary in some sense; it is the people from the “large places” who determine events, control history, and even control language. The Prevalence of Corruption Part 1 - Poorly written, second-person, sanctimonious, stream of consciousness invective, that appears to have been written by an inebriate. Garis, Leslie (1990-10-07). "Through West Indian Eyes". New York Times on the Web . Retrieved 2016-03-22. Kev: Meh. Maybe? I don't know, it still sounds like you're reading it so you can think you're better than me. And the Antiguans sound like the real racists for not liking tourists. White men are the true oppressed group now, afterall- Published in 1988, A Small Place is a novel by Jamaica Kincaid. It is set in Antigua, the island where she was born and raised before she came to the United States at her mother's wish. The book was critically well-received, although also mildly controversial for its unfailingly candid perspective on the wrongdoings of the tourism industry.

Ultimately, this book of essays is great because it feels like listening. It's a taste of what Antiguans think about the situation in their country. I think this book is applicable for the entire conversation about tourism and traveling, as well as the longtime impacts of colonialism. urn:lcp:smallplace00kinc_0:epub:3ce9fdfd-96d3-4379-a2b8-24be0a541ef1 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier smallplace00kinc_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t2v41v05m Isbn 9780374527075 Oblomov: Yeah, honestly. She does, and her ire is very much directed at the English. How we were snooty, rude, condescending, had a superiority complex. How the behaviour was so normalised it was seen as our country's 'bad manners' rather than the actual racism it was. The author and narrative voice of A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid, asks readers to imagine themselves as a tourist landing in Antigua for vacation. The tourist takes a taxi to the hotel and passes by crumbling buildings, like the colonial library, which was destroyed in an earthquake over a decade ago. Having rhetorically delivered the tourist to their room, Kincaid ruminates on how tourists—people privileged enough to escape their mundane lives and temporarily enjoy another place without having to experience its troubles—become examples of human ugliness. A Small Place is bold and enlivening polemical theatre nonetheless, and it is passionately performed, with political resonances around race, colonial legacy and blind consumerism that run deep.S tim u vezi, osim političke dimenzije dela, nimalo manja nisu značajna razmatranja vezana za malu sredinu. Šansa da je Kinkejd čula za Radomira Konstantinovića je maltene nepostojeća, ali krajnje je interesantno da su im neka razmišljanja identična. Koga zanima može uporediti šta ovde, a šta u „Filozofiji palanke” piše o tome kako mala sredina doživljava protok vremena. Kev: But does it matter? Again, independent since 1981, she's writing in '88, that's seven years to sort themselves out? Scene: An empty beer garden. Kev and Oblomov sit down at a small table with a pint each, both in casual wear The new Antigua, self-ruled, run by corrupt yet elected rulers, all of whom have had US green cards and most with Swiss bank accounts, each foreign investment has a suspect story attached to it.

Oblomov: 'Oh Stalin industrialised Russia, but you just have to mention the mass executions'. See how daft that sounds? Kev: Cheers, Terry. Look, Ob, I get we messed up in the past. I know we weren't always perfect, I'll admit it, but I still don't get why you want to read something like that. It's like you're wanting her waving a finger at you. 'Yes, Madam, my ancestors were shits, I must forever pay for that time we didn't fix a library! *Kev slaps the table* Oh thank you, Madam, may I have another historical revisionist spanking?!'As a child, Kincaid is a close, critical observer of the behavior of the adults around her. Her attitude toward the visiting Princess Margaret is reminiscent of the child in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes: while everyone else is happy—even excited—to stand around for hours in the sun to catch a glimpse of the royal guest, the seven-year-old Kincaid is unimpressed. A voracious reader, the young Kincaid exhausted the children’s books in the library, and Kincaid explains that reading was a kind of escape from the frustration and boredom of her daily life. So passionate is the young Kincaid about reading that she steals books from the library. Oblomov: The ignorance of tourists. Ignorance of the island being anything but a pretty landscape outside the hotel, with no concept of history. Džamajka Kinkejd je u jednom intervjuu rekla kako piše tako da svi budu makar malo manje zadovoljni nego što su bili. I u pravu je – izvesno iritirajuće sneveseljavanje je zagarantovano. A malo ko bi to rekao kad se susretne sa kristalno jasnim rečenicama i duhovitim, pa čak i razdraganim pripovednim tonom. Sve deluje savršeno naivno, čak i pojednostavljujuće, ali iza te fasade nema šta nema. Lukavo je to pakovanje, jer nema koga u ovoj knjizi Kinkejd nije, na ovaj ili onaj način, potkačila, ali tako da će se malo ko pronaći čak i u neposrednim optužbama. Doduše, ne treba prenebregnuti da je ona mogla da o svojoj rodnoj Antigvi piše bespoštedno tek van nje, ali sa druge strane, da nije živela u SAD, pitanje je da li bi uopšte njena priča i mogla da dopre to ostatka sveta. Oblomov: The 2008 crash was over a decade ago and we're still feeling the effects of that. You think seven years is that long a time after centuries of colonial rule?

Part 4 - This commences rather schizophrenically. After bemoaning the fact that Britain provided a library which "erased (her people's) history in an earlier chapter, significant description is given to how wonderful the old library was and how it was able to "acquaint me with you in all your greatness" despite her regular thieving of its contents. Similarly, a complaint of "the bad post-colonial education" suggests that colonial education was, in fact by her own inference, "good." She also complains that the islanders "speak English as if it were their sixth language" whilst forgetting her rant about the colonial tongue in previous chapter. And of course, the solution isn't to stop visiting because that would just harm the economy more. It's more complicated and layered than that. We need to listen, we need to find ways to balance out everything. Oblomov: You know, just as an aside here, I love how you blame the bloke who works minimum wage and bad hours, and not 'Dave' who hired him in the first place so he can keep more cash for a bigger BMW. He's the one actively not hiring 'our lads'.A Small Place is a work of creative nonfiction published in 1988 by Jamaica Kincaid. A book-length essay drawing on Kincaid's experiences growing up in Antigua, it can be read as an indictment of the Antiguan government, the tourist industry and Antigua's British colonial legacy. Kev: And you said she was writing in 1988? So that's seven years the Antiguans could have rebuilt it but they didn't. But I bet she makes out that's the British's fault too? Oblomov: I'm good, you lanky sod. I've started a reading challenge I call 'The Drop in the Ocean Project', where I try to read at least one book from every country before I die.

Lang-Peralta, L.; American Comparative Literature Association (2006). Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings. University of Delaware Press. p.11. ISBN 9780874139280 . Retrieved 2015-05-13. Dolby, Nadine. "A Small Place: Jamaica Kincaid and a Methodology of Connection." Qualitative Inquiry 9.1 (2003): 57–73. Web. 2013-12-01. Sure, you can steer away from voluntourism and disaster tourism, you can do your best to educate yourself about the country, you can let locals lead but still, you can't ignore the fact that your mere presence there isn't entirely positive. As a tourist, you represent something, your demands mean something and your existence means something. You are privileged, you can easily and sometimes even unknowingly end up exploiting entire nations.Kincaid observes the quality of education on Antigua, as well as the minds of its inhabitants, and remains deeply ambivalent about both. She herself is the product of a colonial education, and she believes that Antiguan young people today are not as well-educated as they were in her day. Kincaid was raised on the classics of English literature, and she thinks today’s young Antiguans are poorly spoken, ignorant, and devoted to American pop culture. However, one of the things Kincaid despises most about the old Antigua was its cultural subservience to England. If young Antiguans today are obsessed with American trash, in the old days they were obsessed with British trash. One of the insidious effects of Antiguans being schooled in the British system is that all of their models of excellence in literature and history are British. In other words, Antiguans have been taught to admire the very people who once enslaved them. Kincaid is horrified by the genuine excitement the Antiguans have regarding royal visits to the island: the living embodiment of British imperialism is joyously greeted by the former victims of that imperialism. That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.” A Small Place' is about the effects a past of racist colonialism had on her home, the Caribbean island of Antigua, and the current ongoing corruption from catering to an amoral tourist industry since independence from England. It is a very personal non-fiction essay and memoir, written with no filter or pretense of fairness or any academic distance. Kincaid remembers Antigua as it was when she was a child, but I think it still today must be basically the way she remembered it in this book, if even more so. In 1976, Kincaidwas hired as a staff writer by The New Yorker, and the magazine’s editor, William Shawn (famous as a judge of talent and an exacting critic of prose) became her mentor. Kincaid’s first book of short stories, At the Bottom of the River, was published in 1983, and her first novel, Annie John, followed two years later. Kincaid’s early fiction, such as the much-anthologized story “Girl,” often focuses on the mental world of a young girl much like the young Kincaid, with particular attention to the nuances and rhythms of Caribbean English. This evocation of the speech of the islands is reminiscent of the poetry of Derek Walcott (of St. Lucia) and Edward Kamau Brathwaite (of Barbados), and the stories of At the Bottom of the River have often been compared to prose poems. Kincaid’s treatment of the lingering effects of slavery and colonialism on the minds of those descended from slaves and from the once-colonized Caribbean “natives” places her in the company of the Trinidadian novelist V. S. Naipaul and the Dominican novelist Jean Rhys, as well as the poets just mentioned. However, Kincaid’s primary allegiance in her fiction—more than any affinity she might have to a movement or school of writing—is to her own vision and voice. Kincaid describes the way that so much of the country circles around the tourists and such tourists often don't want to face the actual country, they want the beaches and vacation. Truly, 50% of Antigua and Barbuda's GDP is tourism based. This statistic feels unbelievable because it's just such a big number and that really does mean many people will be dealing solely with tourists. This forces the country to work in a specific way.