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

I The speaker/narrator addresses a tourist to Antigua. She points out discrepancies in the experience of being a tourist and living there. She walks through the tourist experience, from landing in Antigua to experiencing its various holiday offerings. She describes the corruption in the government, the bad education and health systems and relics from the day of British rule. She lays out the reasons for tourism and the difference between tourism and home life. II She tells of Antigua during British occupation. White people came and flourished in business, and excluded the Angtiguans or made them servants, which made them offensive to the natives. The natives thought the whites were being rude but years later the author came to understand that they were being racist. They partook in British traditions without understanding them and assumed that England was nicer than the Englishmen they encountered. The English are horrible because they took that which was not theirs to tak

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