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small axe 25 • February 2008 • p 77–92 • ISSN 0799-0537

Constructing a Nation: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place Corinna McLeod

AbstrAct: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place reveals the subalternity of Antigua as a tourist locale; an identity which undermines Antigua’s position as a nation. Through the use of a metafictional discourse, Kincaid’s narrator deconstructs colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial myths, thereby interrogating the tourists’ perspective and unraveling the continuing colonizing construction of a place legitimized only by its visitors.

The question of Antigua’s identity as a nation—is it a tourist resort, a postcolonial nation, a neocolonialist territory?—is mimicked by the multiplicity of narrative elements found in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. To attack the long-standing myth of the tourist colony, Kin- caid must lead her resisting protagonist/antagonist through a voyage of self-discovery. And the perspective of the tourist—which undermines our ability to perceive Antigua’s nationhood— becomes the means by which nation and national identity are revealed. Through Kincaid’s gaze, which has insight into the perspectives of both the native and that of the tourist, the colonial construction of Antigua’s history begins to unravel. The revelation does not yield a clear picture of an uncorrupted Antigua; rather it yields a pathway by which the narrator (and, vicariously, the reader) is able to conceive a nation. However, Kincaid’s summary at the end of the text, which reads as an indictment of the black Antiguans who refuse to take respon- sibility for their nation, also reads as a prediction that through voices like hers, Antigua will see itself as a new country able to construct itself outside of the tourists’ disfiguring gaze. In short, Kincaid (re)mythologizes Antigua.

The subalternity of Antigua as a tourist locale and its continued position of servility to its former colonizers complicates Antigua’s position as a nation. Indeed, Kincaid’s vitriolic jeremiad leaves readers and book dealers uncertain where to file A Small Place on their shelves. The Library of Congress has labeled the text as biography, travel, and the ubiquitous “homes

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and haunts.” But on the bookshelves in bookstores, the text appears under autobiography, travel literature, fiction, and essay. A Small Place is all of these things. In fact, the dis-placement of Kincaid’s text, the very ambiguity of its subject, reflects the complexities and challenges faced in defining a postcolonial nation.

One of the first difficulties of understanding A Small Place is deciding how to discuss it. The book is a surprisingly short composition, a mere eighty-one pages in the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition. Despite its small size (or perhaps because of it) the accumulation of such postcolonial issues as nation formation, national identity, neocolonialism, and economic underdevelopment that Kincaid addresses complicates the text and overwhelms the reader. The back matter of the text trumpets this quality with a quote from Salman Rushdie, who calls the work “A jeremiad of great clarity and force that one might have called torrential were the language not so finely controlled.”1 In its density, the physical text becomes a metaphor of Antigua. Like the island it describes, the work is “a small place”; and like that island, access to its inner complexities is not as easily accomplished as one might think.

Also, like Antigua, it is difficult to find a place for the text in terms of genre. As a country, Antigua has wrestled to find its identity. An island with little or no natural resources, Antigua exists mainly as a convenient port for travelers. Though there is some agricultural production in the form of cotton and pineapples, tourism and banking are Antigua’s primary industries. Antigua has made attempts at other commercial ventures, as evidenced by the rusting oil refin- ery Kincaid mentions in her text, but the small island nation has been unable to establish its identity outside that of a resort location and a tax haven.2 According to Kincaid, the industries Antigua has developed—service and tourism— are based on the fact that “[Antiguans] have made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction.”3 Bonham Richardson, a scholar of Caribbean geography, blames the Antiguan government, as well as other Caribbean governments, for promoting tourism as national industries:

Billboards throughout the region remind (black) local residents to put on happy smiles for (white) tourists. . . .So groups of tourists can be typically loud and offensive while expecting deferential servility from their “hosts.” Caribbean governments, with an eye on tourist profits, reinforce these expectations. It is perhaps needless to point out that this economically imposed servility is galling in light of the obvious (at least to the Caribbean peoples) inequities. . . .4

Richardson exposes the economic and social impact of tourism on Antigua and the govern- ment’s active pursuit of tourist dollars, tracing one important source of the problem back to

Salman Rushdie, Back Matter, 1. A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988). Jamaica Kincaid, 2. A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988), 67. Ibid., 69.3. Bonham C. Richardson, 4. The Caribbean in the Wider World 1492–1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 127.

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the “Hotel Aid Ordinance,” passed by the island’s colonial government in 1952, that reduced import fees on construction material for hotels. He also notes that the expense paid by the government to renovate the airport, roads, and harbor to improve Antigua’s image did not result in an equivalent payoff in terms of alleviating the poverty of residents. To say, then, that tourism is beneficial to locations without other predominant industry is inaccurate. Not only does tourism, as Kincaid explains, make the native population an exhibit, but Richardson’s research shows that the population derives no benefit from their role in amusing tourists.5 Nonetheless, Antigua’s role as a tourist destination came about when Americans sought an alternative tropical haven after Cuba’s revolution in 1959. By the 1960s, tourism was an economic staple of the island.6

The importance of tourism and its position as central in Antigua’s identity continues in the present day. The official homepage of the Antigua and Barbuda Department of Tourism reads: “Welcome to Antigua & Barbuda: The Caribbean You’ve Always Imagined.” Link after link leads the websurfer to pictures of uncrowded, white, sandy beaches and blue, blue water. “There are 365 beaches on Antigua,” the website gushes, “one for each day of the year.”7 There is a link on the same page that reads: “click here to see what visitors are saying about the beaches of Antigua and Barbuda.” On the website, the natives of Antigua are mentioned only for adjectival purposes to describe pristine, “undiscovered” scenic areas or as a recommenda- tion for good restaurants that serve authentic food “where all the natives eat.” The natives, then, exist only as indicators to enhance tourists’ experiences. There is no place to “click here” to see what natives are saying about the beaches. Antigua, then, is depicted as a place of transience. It is a place that exists in dreams that can only be legitimatized by visitors. For the websurfing tourist who longs to be a visitor, who longs to become a “been to” of Antigua, who fantasizes about balmy, tropical weather during the North American or European winter, Antigua is presented as a haven. The marketing of the island and its consequent identity on the world stage thus create the complete antithesis of a tourist’s everyday reality: Antigua is a place where dreams come true, where the visitor can invent whatever pleasure he or she desires. Antigua is “the Caribbean you’ve always imagined.”8 It is this depiction of Antigua as a locale that exists solely for the pleasure of its visitors that Kincaid so strongly condemns. A Small Place is written both in praise of Antigua and as an attack on all that has made it the place it is today—no longer a colony, but certainly not free from colonizers.

Ibid., 124–127. Richardson cites Guyanese economist Clive Thomas as the source for his information regarding the 5. economic underdevelopment of the Caribbean and the influence of tourism. See Clive Thomas, The Poor and the Powerless: Economic Policy and Change in the Caribbean (London: Latin America Bureau, 1988). Richardson, 6. The Caribbean Writer in the Wider World, 124. “Antigua and Barbuda” in the official homepage of the Antigua and Barbuda Department of Tourism.7. http://www. antigua-barbuda.org/agbeach1.htm (accessed November 28, 2000). Ibid.8.

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In A Small Place, Kincaid writes: “The Antigua that I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see now.”9 The narrator’s voice throughout the text covers derision of tourists who visit Antigua, anger towards these tourists (especially white, European tourists), and anger towards the Antiguans. Like the above quotation, the narrative also contains echoes of mourning. The mutually antagonistic voices that Kincaid uses in the text create a space in which the mythical identity of Antigua is both upheld and debunked. A Small Place is both a call to arms and a cry of frustration that aims to strip Antigua of its glamorous taint of tourism, thereby exposing the island’s crumbling infrastructure, unmasking neocolonial facades and allowing for the rebuilding of a nation. To accomplish this task, Kin- caid remythologizes Antigua and creates a national identity for the island by slowly destroying the myth of Antigua as a temporary landscape that exists for the use of a visiting hegemony, a myth created by the colonizers and neocolonialists who created and promote tourism.10 The narrator is both guide and tourist: she paints the images of a pristine, harmonious, charm- ing island only so she can follow in her own footsteps to shred these images. She promises to be a native informant but at the same time preserves the distance between spectator and spectacle.

To this end, Kincaid employs a strategy of doubleness in the text. By playing the dual role of insider and outsider, Kincaid destabilizes the reader/author paradigm. At one moment, Kincaid uses the second person you to reflect the emotional separation between narrator and reader; at the next moment, her interior monologue disrupts the narrative and demonstrates her own feelings of alienation. The complexity of Kincaid’s position as author/narrator illu- minates Homi Bhabha’s theory of doubleness in writing, which he discusses in The Location of Culture. Bhabha writes:

If . . . we are alive to the metaphoricity of the peoples of imagined communities—migrant or metropolitan—then we shall find that the space of the modern nation-people is never simply horizontal. Their metaphoric movement requires a kind of ‘doubleness’ in writing; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a centred causal logic.11

Kincaid’s narrative strategy of using the fictional anti-travel narrative decenters her text and allows for the doubleness described above. By first creating the palimpsest of narrator, insider/outsider, native/non-native, and spectator/spectacle, Kincaid is able to peel away the

Kincaid, 9. A Small Place, 23. For additional discussion on tourism and cultural construction see Peter T. Newby, “Literature and the Fashion-10. ing of Tourist Taste,” in Douglas C.D. Pocock (ed.) Humanistic Geography and Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1981), and Polly Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (London: Cassell, 1996). Homi Bhabha, 11. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 141.

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ideological layers comprising tourist Antigua. This doubleness, and Kincaid’s use of the ironic second person “you,” create a commentary on neocolonialism in which the narrator also assumes the role of the metafictional colonizer.12

So what is a nation and how can we witness a nation’s construction in A Small Place? Con- trary to the metaphysical definition of nation offered by some theorists, Benedict Anderson’s definition of nation is—more usefully, I think—grounded in religion and dynasty.13 For the purpose of understanding A Small Place, the pivotal chapter in Anderson’s Imagined Communi- ties is his “Origins of National Consciousness,” which explains his theory of national identity. Though one may get caught in the chicken-or-the-egg argument—does national conscious- ness precede nation or does a nation lead its citizens to a national consciousness?—Anderson sees the issue of national consciousness as the core of nationalism and the construction of a nation. Anderson traces the importance of developments in print-media to the formation of the modern nation by arguing that “print languages created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars.”14 Putting words on paper using print technology “helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation.”15 This second point is crucial: according to Anderson, the identity of a nation is grounded in its literary construction. When applying Anderson’s theory to the case of Antigua, we see that western literary culture has created a nation conceptualized as a way station; a place for scientific study of plants, animals, or marine life; a plantation economy; and a tourist stopover.16 The colonizers’ literature creates memory that is permanent, somehow inescapable, and gives rise to the postcolonialists’ dilemma of trying to rewrite the past.

Thus print gives power and a written, permanent voice to an otherwise subject population. It can both preserve and circulate independent ideas and cultural concepts that can promote

“Metafiction” is a term used to describe novels that “specifically and self-consciously examine the nature and status 12. of fiction itself and that often contain experiments to test fiction as a form in one way or another.” Ross Murfin and Supryia Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 2nd ed. (New York: Bedford, 2003), 210. See, for example, Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Homi Bhabha (ed.) 13. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Benedict Anderson, 14. Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London, Verso: 1991), 44. Ibid., 44.15. Some examples include, Mary Prince, 16. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Moira Fergueson (ed.) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003); Vere Langford Oliver, The History of the Island of Antigua, One of the Leeward Caribbees in the West Indies, from the First Settlement in 1635 to the Present Time (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1894–1899); George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies: Written During the Expedition Under the Command of the Late General Sir Ralph Abercromby: In 3 Volumes (1806; reprint, Westport, Conn: Negro Universities Press, 1970); and James A. Thome, Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Month’s Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837 (1838; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969). Various amateur and professional scientists have used Antigua as a resource for the study of natural- ism, for example, Albert Herre, Notes on a Collection of Fishes from Antigua and Barbados, West Indies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1942).

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a national identity.17 In A Small Place, however, Kincaid writes Antigua as a temporary space that seems to lack awareness of both its past and its future. “A Small Place,” as a term analogous to Antigua, becomes in Kincaid’s literary creation significant for its lack of place.

And so everywhere they [the English] went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that.18

Antigua, because it is not England, becomes a non-place. Its failure to become England marks its failure to have any identity whatsoever. What was not England, according to Kincaid, was destroyed in the process of colonization, leaving behind a vacant, peripheral space that could be defined as “not-England” but not as a place with its own political or social distinctive- ness, cultural history, or position of cultural centrality. Kincaid’s use of language becomes a rhetorical device to paint a picture of emptiness. The rhetorical structure of Kincaid’s writing and her use of the second-person are deliberately alienating creating an ambivalence even on the national home front. Rather than bringing the reader into the text, the accusatory “you” functions to preserve a text-reader distance. Neither does the second-person seem to come from a voice that indicates a sense of belonging to the native population:

But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue.19

Exacerbating the ambivalent alienation are the elements of forgetfulness and loss that permeate Kincaid’s Antigua. For example, early on, when “you” first arrive in Antigua, one of the sites Kincaid names is the old, dilapidated library damaged by an earthquake in 1974. A sign hanging on the building reads, “THIS BUILDING WAS DAMAGED IN THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1974. REPAIRS ARE PENDING.”20 As Kincaid points out, “The Earthquake” occurred over a decade before. So the library, a sign of learning, lay neglected and in ruins—or at least that is one reading of it. Another interpretation emerges as the author relates, chronologically, the destruction of the library to Antiguan independence. She mentions in her description of the library’s destruction that “[n]ot very long after The Earthquake Anti- gua got its independence from Britain.”21 Unlike the date of the library’s destruction, however, Independence Day is not given a date by Kincaid, and it does not have a memorial that we

Anderson, 17. Imagined Communities, 45. Kincaid, 18. A Small Place, 24. Ibid., 31.19. Ibid., 9.20. Ibid.21.

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have seen so far on our short tour.22 This absence of recognition or celebration harkens back to Kincaid’s statement, discussed earlier, that anything that was not England was destroyed. Independence Day is not remarked because, in its most, or only, meaningful sense, it has yet to happen. One can read the library’s sign as a memorial to lost knowledge and destroyed education. At the same time, the library’s disrepair and neglect are also subversive signs of movement toward independence: “You have brought your own books with you, and among them is one of those new books about economic history, one of those books explaining how the West (meaning Europe and North America after its conquest and settlement by Europeans) got rich . . .”23 The destruction and loss of the library, and its subsequent disrepair also pay homage to the destruction of the history and the books the tourists bring into Antigua. The destruction of the library means that its (the colonizer’s) books are no longer accessible—for when Kincaid describes the library she mentions that it was built in the colonial style, and the sign is from “splendid old colonial times.”24 It is these colonial times that are truly in disrepair, and it is these “splendid colonial times” that Kincaid and Antigua let languish, gathering dust with disintegrating splendor. The tourists bring their books with them, books informing them that North America and Europe:

. . . got rich not from the free (free—in this case meaning got-for-nothing) and then undervalued labour, for generations, of the people like me [Black West Indian] you [White Westerner] see walk- ing around you in Antigua but from the ingenuity of small shopkeepers in Sheffield and Yorkshire and Lancashire, or wherever.25

So as Kincaid constructs the text, she first must deconstruct the terms that had previously been valued. Thus the destruction of the library was not a loss—history could be regained only through its disuse.

The next buildings on the tour are government buildings. The experience of the library and what is written in the tourist books is replaced, or enhanced, by descriptions of the prime minister’s office and the parliament building, next to which are the houses of known drug smugglers and a courtesan. Scattered around the area are embassies. With knowledge comes corruption—could this be the code Kincaid is trying to send in A Small Place? In fact, the library is a touchstone. It functions as a theme to which Kincaid returns every few pages throughout the text. Indeed, the library functions as a metaphor of the postcolonial state, in that its former, physical location marks the demise of colonial rule, but its new place, on the top floor of a decrepit building, reflects the disorder, poverty, and neglect of postcolonial

The actual year of Antigua’s independence is 1981.22. Kincaid, 23. A Small Place, 10. Ibid.24. Ibid.25.

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nations in terms of creating their own libraries and, thereby, their own anticolonialist values and vehicles of learning.

The first section of A Small Place details the destruction of the physical location of the colonial library. In the second section of the text, Kincaid returns to the old colonial library prior to its destruction with more detail of its location on High Street. “[Y]ou could cash a cheque at the Treasury, read a book in the library, post a letter at the post office, appear before a magistrate in court” all along the same part of High Street.26 Close by, you could also obtain a passport and visit Barclay’s Bank. According to Kincaid’s description, the library was located at the colonial center. It is not surprising, then, that in a work that discusses postcoloniality, its author moves from the colonizers’ center to the native periphery. And Kincaid symbolizes this movement by detailing the library’s movement from center to periphery.

The colonial library ceases to exist after 1974, but the books were moved from their idyl- lic location to a space above an old dry-goods store. The books are stored in cardboard boxes, gathering dust and mildew and on their way to ruin.27 The difference in the position of the library from High Street to the dilapidated store marks, for Kincaid, the decline of literacy in Antigua’s youth. She seems to say that under colonial administration, when the library held a prominent if problematic position on High Street, at least it was used and Antigua’s citizens (or subjects) were at least literate. Kincaid writes of the librarian who wishes people from the Mill Reef Club (white Antiguans whom Kincaid had lambasted) would provide the money and materials for a new library. However, the people from the Mill Reef Club don’t want to build a new library (synonymous, Kincaid implies, with the building of a new Antigua). Instead, they want to restore the old library—symbolic, of course, of restoring the old Antigua.28

Kincaid links the conspicuous decline of the library to the conspicuous wealth of cor- rupt government officials. How do these two elements relate to the description of nation? If Renan is correct that, “[f ]orgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation”29 then we must point out that by rejecting the established library, by rejecting the foreign books and foreign histories of economics, the narrator of A Small Place is writing a new account, a new history of Antigua. The dual role of tour guide and coy native informant allows “you” to witness history as you read her travelogue. Your first marker, the first event she records, is the earthquake of 1974. From there, your historical tour continues as you learn about the realities of Antiguan government and become aware of the true economy of a post-colonial state. There is no dynasty, no record of a dynastic past

Ibid., 25.26. Ibid., 43.27. Ibid., 45.28. Renan, “What is a Nation?” 11.29.

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as specified by Anderson as being one of the foundation pieces of a nation. Instead, Kincaid unveils an image of Antigua through her metafiction. Antigua appears nearly as an existential phenomenon; it exists as it emerges to the reader from the pages in the book, the physical buildings (such as the library) acting as metaphors of colonialist subjugation and postcolonial inertia rather than real locations.

Besides dynasty, race is sometimes used as a demarcation of a nation. And, indeed, there is an unmistakable racial divide in A Small Place. The tourists, the “you,” the reader, are assumed to be white. When Kincaid first introduces “you” to fellow tourists “you” notice a “pastrylike- fleshed woman” walking on the beach with a “pastrylike-fleshed man.”30 The people on the beach, Kincaid points out, are “just like you.” Therefore, Kincaid sets up a clear racial division between the white tourist and the black “native” islanders of African descent, ex-slaves. It is difficult to see a sense of camaraderie or “comradeship” linking these two cultures together to form a nation. Returning to Renan who writes:

Several confidently assert that it [nation] is derived from race. . . . There is thus created a kind of primordial right analogous to the divine right of kinds; an ethnographic principle is substituted for a national one. This is a very great error, which, if it were to become dominant, would destroy European civilization. The primordial right of races is as narrow and as perilous for genuine progress as the national principle is just and legitimate.31

Notice that Renan refers to European civilization, but though Antigua emerges from the ashes of a European empire, it cannot be compared to the Europe that Renan describes. For though Renan describes the importance of race for “tribes and cities of antiquity,” the real connection within these communities was the fact that their citizens were relations within an extended family. But an empire made from violence and conquest did not discern race, so Renan insists, and when Christianity spread, ethnography became even less relevant. Although Renan’s argu- ment might hold for the Roman empire, it hardly holds for the British empire, much of whose policy relied upon racial differences. Thus, in terms of British conquest, a political nation and a social nation emerge as two disparate entities operating within the same colonial space.

We can see a useful analogy in the history of racial civil rights in the United States. During its long history of first legalized and then de facto segregation, the United States was nevertheless clearly one political nation: American discriminated against American. Yet a social divide existed so profoundly between white and black citizens that, from a socioeconomic perspective, the United States could be viewed as two nations. The same can be said of South Africa during the years of apartheid. Kincaid’s portrayal of Antigua also reveals an antagonistic

Kincaid, 30. A Small Place, 13. Renan, “What is a Nation?” 13.31.

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stratification: the Antiguan native non-white against the white enclave that happens to be situated on Antigua. As part of his theory of nation, Renan writes: “The truth is that there is no pure race and that to make politics depend upon ethnographic analysis is to surrender it to a chimera.”32 But as we examine the divide Kincaid has so clearly painted in her portrait of Antigua, this absolute claim by Renan is problematic. Is this the difference between the theory of race and the actuality of nation? No matter how much Renan insists that race is a subject for humanists or anthropologists and not for politics, one cannot help but see how race is part of a nation33. When looking at a post-colonial state such as Antigua, race is irreparably tied into independence: independence from Britain means independence from white colonizers. At the same time, Renan would argue, not all British are white. But account after account, experi- ence after experience, has shown that while theoretically not all British are white, in practice, all ruling British are white. Theoretically (as Kincaid herself shows us) not all Antiguans are black, but practically speaking, when describing a nation and its underdeveloped population, the population is black.

A nation is therefore large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desired to continue a common life.34

This metaphysical construction of a nation posits that a nation is held together as a nation by its past—its collective pain, the violence is has suffered, and the struggles it has endured: “Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.”35 Kincaid endeavors to stir up Antigua’s memo- ries of its collective griefs, expose the violence suffered by the native population, and reveal the flaws in that population’s national concept, because what has prevented Antigua from emerging from the facsimile of a nation is its lack of national mourning. Part One of A Small

Ibid., 14.32. While I agree with many critical race theorists who point out that “race” was originally a product of geographic 33. history and persists today only as the result of social construction, race as a social category still plays an unfortunate polarizing role in the politics of nationhood. Additionally, the construction of “race” differs according to geography. For a discussion of the social construction of race, see, for example, J.M. Fish (ed.) Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002); Joan Ferrante and Prince Brown Jr. (eds.) The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), 1–12 and 113–28; Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 75–77; Prince Brown Jr., “Biology and the Social Construction of the ‘Race’ Concept” in Ferrante and Brown Jr., (eds.) The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States, 144–50; and Vivian Nun Halloran, “Race, Creole, and National Identities in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Phillips’s Cambridge” Small Axe no. 21 (October 2006): 87–104. Renan, “What is a Nation?” 19.34. Ibid.35.

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Place becomes, therefore, an unlikely dirge for Antigua. In the bitter, mocking tone used to address the tourist-colonizer, the colonized space gains a voice that defines a nation by what it is not, rather than what it seems to be.

Certainly the ideology that informs island travel literature leads tourists to perceive islands, especially leads Americans to perceive the Caribbean islands, as a place to retreat from reality. To examine the relationship between literature and place would be to look at Antigua as a place sold through travel literature.36 In this light, Kincaid’s work is an attempt to take Antigua back from the colonizers (tourists) and in doing so, peel back the media façade established by the tourist industry. In order to accomplish this task, Kincaid must also subvert the tourist’s imagination by both engaging the fantasies associated with an island retreat and attacking the fallacies of such fantasies. Islands, by their very geographic isolation, have always suggested a removal from continental realities. In today’s mythologizing of the islands, the Caribbean islands have become a vacationer’s dream locale. The islands exist for the dreamer, for the benefit of those who are able to pay for the tourist experience. They represent a psychological as well as physical escape from “the real world.”

Unfortunately, one group’s fantasy is another group’s not-so-rosy reality. Kincaid attacks the mythologizing of Antigua and reveals the forgotten perspective of one who lives in a place constructed for and by outsiders. Because of neocolonial corruption and tourism’s demand that Antigua exist for the tourist, even as Antigua became fully independent from the United Kingdom in 1981, it remained a colonial construction. No longer under official rule, the island continues to be under the hegemony of tourism. Existing as a place for Other’s (white, North American or European) fantasies, Antigua is frozen, undefinable, and unable to construct its own identity outside of tourism’s imagination. Tourism, as Kincaid shows us, has become the new governor of Antigua.

The first part of A Small Place consists of Kincaid’s virulent attack on tourism. She imme- diately confronts her reader with the name of the Antiguan airport. Fresh off the airplane, the tourist’s first encounter with Antigua is through its airport, named for V.C. Bird. For explanation of why an Antiguan prime minister has an airport named after him rather than a school, hospital or public monument, Kincaid offers, “You are a tourist and you have not yet seen a school in Antigua, you have not yet seen the hospital in Antigua, you have not yet seen a public monument in Antigua.”37 As we continue to read, we see that the schools, hospitals, and monuments are in disrepair, outside of the tourists’ lens, and hardly something a prime minister would be proud to attach to his name. But the prime minister’s link to the airport

See Newby, “Literature and the Fashioning of Tourist Taste.”36. Kincaid, 37. A Small Place, 3.

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is a link that operates between the government and tourism. The airport represents a tribute, homage, to the tourist Other who arrives to colonize Antigua for a holiday activity.

The airport also represents a blurring of boundaries. By boarding a plane in one country, flying in an enclosed space only to emerge, miraculously, in a foreign land adds to the sense of unreality and escape that tourists long for in a vacation. Gillian Beer describes the impact of plane travel as “a reordering which does away with centrality and very largely with borders.”38 While Beer’s essay focuses on Virginia Woolf ’s changing depiction of England due to the arrival of the airplane, its validity is still apparent in consideration of the former British territory of Antigua. The airplane and its passengers speak to the remoteness of a locale yet also its new accessibility. They signify the surprising permeability of the island’s isolation that prevents any meaningful independence from its former colonizers. Yet now that there is no way to escape the tourists, being caught in the trap of one’s own island, Kincaid captures the frustration of those whose territory is defined not by its livability, but rather by its visitability.

Kincaid shows the reader that it is the foolish tourist who perceives in Antigua a tem- porary landscape, for her criticism is well aware of the visitor who is unable to imagine the island as having a past or a future:

. . . and since you are on your holiday, since you are a tourist, the thought of what it might be like for someone who had to live day in, day out in a place that suffers constantly from drought, and so has to watch carefully every drop of fresh water . . . must never cross your mind.39

The readers of the novel are tourists, and Kincaid is the tour guide that gives a different tour, an off road tour that skips the beaches and looks behind the myth of Antigua. She counters the tourist’s desire for Antigua to exist only for his or her pleasure with a dose of realism. Keith Byerman describes A Small Place as “an extended attack on colonialism, corruption, and tourism as a kind of neocolonialism” and says that Kincaid, through her narrative strategy, “establishes her authority by speaking in the second person to the ‘tourist,’ which allows her to characterize the audience and its voice in the text. She can offend without challenge.”40 As an illustration:

An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness . . . They do not like you. They do not like me! That thought never actually occurs to you. . . .41

Gillian Beer, “The Island and the Aeroplane,” in Homi Bhabha (ed.) 38. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 265. Kincaid, 39. A Small Place, 4. Keith Byerman, “Anger in 40. A Small Place: Jamaica Kincaid’s Cultural Critique of Antigua,” College Literature 22, no. 1 (1995): 92–93. Kincaid, 41. A Small Place, 17.

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Perhaps Kincaid can indeed offend without herself being challenged, as Byerman describes. However, her writings are very much meant to offend and challenge the reader to develop a new perspective concerning tourist nations. In the following passage, Kincaid is clearly challenging the reader to realize that his or her ideological position as tourist, no matter how sensitive or benevolent he or she may try to be, is an inherently false and self-deluded position.

Kincaid’s rhetoric echoes Albert Memmi’s discussion of the member of the colonizing culture who has decided to become a conscientious objector to the harsh economic and social inequalities to which the colonizers subject the colonized. The choice to become a “benevolent colonizer” involves becoming, simultaneously, a “turncoat” and a “moral hero.”42 But accord- ing to Memmi, the benevolent colonizer has difficulty maintaining his benevolence: instead, he slowly shrugs off colonial guilt and begins to perceive the independence of the colonized as a future ideal.43 Despite Memmi’s thesis that a tourist can maintain the necessary moral ardor, at least for a time, to protest the conditions of the colonized, we clearly see in Kincaid’s portrayal that this is not the case. If anything, according to Kincaid’s version, the tourist is more determined to remain oblivious to local social ills; after all, the tourist has paid good money for this fantasy, while the colonizer is either born in the colonized space or immigrates there for personal and financial opportunity.

Just as Memmi explains to the colonizer why he is not liked by the colonized, so, too, does Kincaid endeavor to explain the position of the native who is a spectacle for the tourist:

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 escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where 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, and they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.44

Kincaid not only questions and methodically destroys the mythologies of the tourist, but through her native appropriation of the colonizer’s perspective, she turns the tables, so to speak, on the tourist: “just as the Eurocentric perspective reduces the colonized to objects of ridicule and abuse, so here the visitor from the outside world is made the object of derision

Albert Memmi, 42. The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 22–23. Ibid., 26.43. Kincaid, 44. A Small Place, 17–19.

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by the natives.”45 Kincaid confronts tourists not merely to offend them but also to instruct them, to help the tourist understand that he or she encounters people caught in a reality that they might wish to escape. For those visiting an island that is a product of media, industry, and propaganda construction, remembering that the native population exists outside the tourist’s photo-ops is a challenge. Moira Ferguson, claims that Kincaid’s use of tourism is a “template” for colonial Antigua and “[i]n exposing tourism’s nefarious, centuries-old point of origin, Kincaid aims indirectly to subvert the dominant paradigm of power as it presently exists on the cusp of the nineteen-nineties.”46 But Kincaid’s text is more than an indirect subversion of power. Rather, I believe that her charge to tourists to become aware of the context, culture, and environment in which they travel, constitutes a de-cloaking of neocolonial enterprise. By refusing to accept tourism’s (and the corrupt government’s) constructed image of the island, informed tourists can lessen the disenfranchisement of a nation that exists, even after the end of slavery and colonial rule, to serve. In fact, Kincaid’s text is a direct challenge to the dominant paradigms that would keep native Antigua an island of servants.

Kincaid thus attempts to move the reader beyond a tourist’s nightmare of not-so-clean beaches to a study of the island’s colonial history. The second section of the text offers an even clearer indictment of the colonizers than the first. She emphasizes her frustration with language, and this problematizing of language is at the core of her argument. She asks, “For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?”47 And then later she continues, “Have I given you the impression that the Antigua I grew up in revolved almost completely around England? Well, that was so. I met the world through England, and if the world wanted to meet me, it would have to do so through England.”48 Kincaid allows the reader to see clearly the rigidity within which Antigua developed: Not allowed to be its own nation, Antigua was merely an extension of Britain. The island’s own beauty and position as a retreat kept it suspended from self-realization.49

As we have seen, Kincaid uses tourism as the entry to a critique of colonialism, the neo- colonial Antiguan government, and the colonizing elements of the tourist industry. Like the theoretical positionings of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth50 and Albert Memmi’s The

Byerman, “Anger in 45. A Small Place,” 93. Moira Fergueson, 46. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 79. Kincaid, 47. A Small Place, 31. Ibid., 33.48. Ibid., 77–79.49. Of additional interest is Fanon’s discussion of the role of tourism in making formerly colonized territories “the 50. brothel[s] of Europe” in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 154.

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Colonizer and the Colonized, Kincaid’s text is a searing indictment of the colonizer for leaving his home in the first place, and then for deserting the country he colonized.51 The fact remains that Antigua exists as a discarded space in Kincaid’s text. Rather than rejecting this space as empty and unsignifiable, however, Kincaid and other Caribbean writers see it as the operative place of new literatures, as a creative space from which can emerge literary works that destroy old paradigms and reveal news ways of seeing the world, being in the world, and forging the collective identities necessary to nationhood.

Finally, because Kincaid writes A Small Place as a metafiction, we can read this text as a colonizing experience for the audience. In fact, I would suggest that Kincaid’s metonymical metafiction leads to a carefully controlled audience reaction in which the audience “reads” its own reaction through the reactions and comments of Kincaid’s narrator:

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).”52

The direct address spurs her readers to a self-reflexivity and heightened self-awareness that fulfills Kincaid’s agenda. Her readers, with prompting, acknowledge the Antiguans as people, not mechanisms that foster the illusion of escape for American or European tourists. Since “[m]etafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself,” Kincaid‘s novel functions as an anti-guide (that serves to deconstruct in order to reconstruct) and a self-conscious narrative (the work of a visitor describing to potential visitors their own reactions) and thereby opens a third space for the play of fiction and criticism.53 Kincaid paro- dies the form of a travel guide in order to deconstruct the outsiders’ (colonizers’ and tourists’) invention of the Caribbean. It is because of Kincaid’s narrative approach that A Small Place functions as metafiction, and Kincaid’s metafiction moves beyond that which gives the text its identity to giving her audience its identity as well.54

By predicting audience reactions—and because she is dealing with the stereotype of the western tourist in addition to that of the native—Kincaid underscores her awareness of her audience. She shows that the very predictability of the tourist is part of her critique. In typical struggle against a defining hegemony (that of the author), the subaltern (written and controlled) is both frustrated and empowered by this writing. The frustration of predictability is easy enough to understand; the empowerment, though, is more complicated. By crafting her audience, Kincaid creates a textual structure against which the audience can rebel. By

Kincaid, 51. A Small Place, 80. Ibid.52. Robert Scholes, “Metafiction,” in Mark Currie (ed.) 53. Metafiction (New York: Longman, 1995), 21. Ibid., 43.54.

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refusing Kincaid’s script, the reader not only frees him or herself from the rigidity of the author’s prediction of being a much maligned tourist, but also liberates Antigua from one more neocolonial participant. Inevitably, in the postcolonial battleground, Kincaid wins. She recreates that perfect situation of mimicry in which the reader becomes the colonized subject and is a passive construction created through Kincaid’s use of you. Her reader wants both to maintain his or her privileged identity as the colonizer and escape to Antigua yet is suddenly unable to maintain the idyllic veil by which “you” had viewed Antigua as a tourist.

Kincaid becomes the colonizer in the space of the second person narrative. She both speaks for the native and writes and interprets her audience through the body of the tourist. The book is a tour. The readers are the bumbling tourists who sit and read as though hyp- notized, while Kincaid peels back the layers of the Antiguan myth to reveal, not the native behind the myth, but rather the white colonialist past that created and sustains the myth. Kincaid employs mimicry to subvert the neocolonial government and the tourist economy. She imitates the lofty, omniscient style of a tourist brochure, at one time reassuring tourists that the island exists for their pleasure, yet she also subverts and counters that reassurance with the revelation that the islanders do not welcome or like the tourists. We can see the two strategies combined in the following example: “Antigua is a small place. . . . 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 . . .”55 At one moment, “you” read factual information about Antigua; the next moment the narrative becomes an anti-guide in order to free Antigua from tourist fantasies and discourage the continuing damage the island suffers by existing almost entirely as a tourist resort. Kincaid’s A Small Place is an invaluable text for revealing the complexities of the ubiquitous and enduring damage done by the colonialist myth of the island paradise and the destructive tourism it has thereby created.

Kincaid, 55. A Small Place, 80.