A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid - Summary

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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 take. They left after a native rebellion but left behind their ways in which the natives now behave. They accuse natives of not understanding capitalist ideas but the natives resist them because they have been regarded as capital. Anything is better than what they became after the English came, even if she doesn't know what that.

III

Antigua is so beautiful it looks unreal. Not so to the natives however, who have no industrialized cities to compare the beaches and the sky to. Colonizers are always horrible and the colonized are always "noble and exalted". 

Jamaica Kincaid

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