ESSAY CEMETERY

Not an Ode: On the Reader-Writer Relationship in Kincaid's A Small Place Jamaica Kincaid's personal essay A Small Place is a highly polemical text. Written by the Antiguan native in 1988, A Small Place encompasses two voices: that of the impoverished, post-colonial Antiguan native and that of the luxuriating, capitalist Westerner. In the text's very syntax resides a meeting between these two very different types: its narrator is an Antiguan native who utilizes the second person throughout the entire text, a style generally associated with poetry, advertisements and open letters. The narrator accuses its presumably Western reader of being a personal contributor towards the suffering of the natives. With its inflammatory language, its breathless-angry style, and unapologetic imagery the text binds its readers to the natives of Antigua through discomfort and guilt. Kincaid creates a debate between the natives of Antigua and the Western tourist, in which the tourist has

Jamaica Kincaid Style ·        Addressing the reader ·        Run on sentences ·        Sarcasm ·        Accusatory tone, hostility Themes ·        Discrepancy between living in Antigua and coming there as a tourist ·        Difference between Antigua and America ·        Cheating tourists ·        Search for authenticity ·        Government corruption in Antigua ·        The paradoxical influence of the british over Antiguans – they wanted and got independence but have deteriorated and become corrupted since ·        Racial guilt transferred down generations ·        Affluent people are foreigners and drug smugglers ·        Weather as friend or foe ·        Difference between tourism and homelife ·        Closed-mindedness of locals ·        Native resentment of tourists stems from their own desire to be a tourist but their inability to do so ·         Accusing the criminal in the criminal's language is problematic ·        The