Essay -- Not an Ode: On the Reader-Writer Relationship in Kincaid's A Small Place

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 an extremely loud voice but no actual say.

All eighty-one pages of A Small Place are written as a sustained apostrophe. The text begins: "If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see". Kincaid invents a journey for the imaginary visitor to Antigua, from his landing at the international airport named after Antigua's prime minister, to bathing in Antiguan waters, to unwittingly enjoying seafood imported from Miami. The second person has the effect of drawing the reader in: "you may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a prime minister would want an airport named after him" (3). At first, the reader is glad to fill the role of the tourist that Kincaid has carved out for him in her text. The intelligent Western reader would certainly identify with the "sort of tourist" Kincaid suggests he is, agreeing that he too, in the position of a tourist, would be a critical assessor of his surroundings. The intelligent Western reader, considering himself to have a sophisticated aesthetic sense, would also agree with the following statement: "As your plane descends to land, you might say, What a beautiful island Antigua is – more beautiful than any of the other islands you have seen" (3).

Kincaid thus causes the reader to eagerly step into the shoes of the Western tourist. Once she has done so, however, she proceeds to demonstrate that the tourist she has in mind may not be the flattering persona her reader thought he was. The tourist is glad, she says, that "the climate is deliciously hot and dry" (4), and gives no thought to the fact that the Antiguan native "suffers constantly from drought, and so has to watch carefully every drop of water used" (4). She goes on to blame the reader for not noticing that the Antiguans arriving at the airport are detained at customs while he, the tourist, is allowed to pass unchallenged, and even calls out the tourist for being "a North American or European – to be frank, white" (4).

At this point, the reader de facto of the text is shocked into resenting his identity with the implied reader. The apostrophic nature of the language compels the reader to continue reading, but its subject matter and accusatory tone has the opposite effect: "You see yourself taking a walk on that beach, you see yourself meeting new people (only they are new in a very limited way, for they are people just like you). You see yourself eating some delicious, locally grown food. You see yourself, you see yourself…" (13) As the narrator's bitterness toward the tourist becomes apparent, the de facto reader's involvement with the text ceases to be one of identification and begins to be one of dissociation. That is, instead of seeking equation with the implied reader, the reader seeks to reassure himself that the he is nothing like the leisure-seeking, self-involved Western tourist the narrator has in mind. The reader wants to retain the image of himself as that critical, intelligent visitor the first lines of the text indicated that he is, and so he is impelled to keep reading, even if the rest of the text is offensive, hostile and accusatory. This strategy seems to work: of the seven Amazon.com reviewers of A Small Place who rated the book "one star" out of five, only one reported an inability to finish the book, and most of them indicate that they read to its end. Several resented their implied identity with the text's addressees.

Although the second person is infrequently used in literature, it is by no means nonexistent. With this curious stylistic choice of directly addressing her readers, Jamaica Kincaid associates her work with other genres of written texts that utilize the same stylistic technique. The first that comes to mind is the apostrophic poem. Kincaid's style is certainly poetic, with her use of repetition and rich imagery: "You see yourself lying on the beach, enjoying the amazing sun (a sun so powerful and yet so beautiful, the way it is always overhead as if on permanent guard, ready to stamp out any cloud that dares to darken and so empty rain on you and ruin your holiday; a sun that is your personal friend)" (13). A long tradition of poetic odes precede A Small Place, with the Romantic poets' elaborate apostrophes perhaps most eminently coming to mind. Keats celebrated Grecian urns and nightingales, and Shelley celebrated the West wind and a skylark. Nature and Western civilization are present in both Keats and Shelley and in Kincaid; while the former are sincere in their adulation of the forces of nature and of the Western aesthetic, Kincaid's work is derisive of both. Instead of addressing the natural elements or the Grecian urn with the reverence of the Romantics, she addresses the Western tourist with disdain. Kincaid demonstrates that the Westerner, who feels himself a sort of Shelley or Keats when he pictures himself enjoying the sun that is "so powerful and yet so beautiful", in fact is the sort of person who bathes unknowingly with his own excrement: "you must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it" (13).

Another genre to which Kincaid seems to allude through her use of the second person is the travel advertisement. As Milette Shamir pointed out in her class on A Small Place, travel advertisements often idealize their subjects, depicting impossibly virginal beaches or exaggeratedly happy natives in multicolored dreadlocks or revealing bikinis. Quite often, travel advertisements are also phrased in the imperative: "come to _____ for your dream holiday!" The entire text is structured as a sort of extended travel brochure, explaining to the tourist what will await them on the island of Antigua. Instead of delivering the stereotypes expected of an advertisement, however, Kincaid challenges these preconceptions, discussing the realistic darker side of the tourist trade. The natives are not as eagerly welcoming as the adverts suggest. Rather, "every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression… Every native would like to find a way out" (18). The natives are not endlessly pleasing and hospitable, but in fact tell the tourists potentially fatal lies about island life: "ground-up bottle glass in peanut sauce really [is] a delicacy… rare, multicolored, snout-mouthed fish really [is] an aphrodisiac" (18). The natives are bored and vindictive, and Kincaid's reader gets nothing of the fun, wet glamour the Western tourist normally expects from an island holiday.

While Kincaid seems to subvert travel advertisements and romantic poetry through her use of the second person, A Small Place seems to sincerely subscribe to one genre of writing – the accusatory essay or open letter. A long line of political writers have chosen to challenge national leaders, official laws and unofficial trends through the accusatory essay. The essay is traditionally addressed to an individual or a group of people, but published to the public at large. Perhaps the most noticeable historical example is Emile Zola's "J'Accuse", an open letter published in France in 1898 by Émile Zola, in which the author protested the incarceration of Alfred Dreyfus for espionage as anti-Semitic. More recently and of higher geographical and thematic pertinence is Martin Luther King's 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail", also a letter-essay in which King explains and defends non-violent African American Civil Rights protests and denounces opponents of the peaceful demonstrations.

Like King, Kincaid takes issue with the attitude and actions of the white West toward a different ethnic group, specifically, the colonization of Antigua by Britain. "The English … don't seem to know that this empire business was all wrong and they should, at least, be wearing sackcloth and ashes in token penance of the wrongs committed, the irrevocableness of their bad deeds, for no natural disaster imaginable could equal the harm they did" (23). Her narrator blames the English for arriving in Antigua, eradicating its character, and Anglicizing the island: "everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English" (24). After the English left Antigua, they left behind carnage in the form of a corrupted government and a hypocritical tourist trade, without accepting responsibility for any of it. Unlike King or Zola, however, who attacked governmental or social leaders, Kincaid's narrator holds the individual responsible for the damage the natives suffered at the hands of the colonizers. "You leave, and from afar you watch as we do to ourselves the very things you used to do to us" (34). Even more radically, the narrator accuses the individual reader of abuse rendered to her own personal self: "Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you" (37). Just as identity is suggested between the tourist and the reader, identity is implied between the narrator and Kincaid herself. Because of the reader, the narration indicates, Kincaid had to get a proper English education; because of the reader Kincaid had to be shipped off, it is implied, away from her family to work in America as the caregiver to the children of a white family.

Through this subversion of some literary and commercial genres and affiliation with others, Kincaid creates a powerful and intimate relationship between the Western tourist readers of the text and the natives of Antigua, including herself. The grammatical second person endows the tourist in A Small Place with a particularly loud voice. We know exactly what the Westerner thinks, feels and expects of Antigua and the natives of the West Indies; he is self-centered, self-deceiving and self-glorifying. Ironically, however, this clear voice does not belong to the Western tourist at all. Despite the centrality of the tourist in the text – "you see yourself, you see yourself" – it is the native who imposes that voice upon the tourist, and so the voice of the native that emerges in the text loudest of all.

By addressing the Western reader, Kincaid succeeds in putting the emphasis on the natives of Antigua. The closeness fostered between the natives and the tourist through the second person, though not as pandering as a Romantic ode would have been, is an effective technique that is ultimately beneficial to all victims of colonization, as well as a potential preventative measure. The reader is forced to repeatedly examine himself, his attitudes and his actions, but all of these in relation to the islanders. Finally, the reader is encouraged, albeit in a blunt and often offensive manner, to take responsibility for the historical transgressions of his race against others. Although readers do not always find the tone of the text agreeable to their Western sensibilities, Kincaid's unorthodox methods achieve their purpose of raising awareness of the damage wreaked by tourism and colonization. Like it or not, the reader is made painfully aware of his own international vacation habits and his country's historical wrongs; he is made aware of the wrongs individual tourists are prone to commit against natives of holiday destinations, and will not be able to repeat these behaviors with a quiet conscience.

Photo by Ben White

Works Cited

Bookslayer, J. Sears, Calc Chick, Edward Aust "Raven", Anonymous, and C. Payne. "Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: A Small Place." Amazon.com. Web. 13 Feb. 2012.

Keats, John. "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The Oxford Book of English Verse. Ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch. 1919. Bartleby.com. Web. 10 Feb. 2012.

–      . "Ode to a Nightingale." The Oxford Book of English Verse. Ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch. 1919. Bartleby.com. Web. 10 Feb. 2012.

Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000. Print.

King, Martin L. "Letter From Birmingham Jail." Letter. 16 Apr. 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. Online. Web. 10 Feb. 2012.

Shelley, Percy B. "Ode to the West Wind." The Golden Treasury. The Harvard Classics. 1909-14. Bartleby.com. Web. 10 Feb. 2012.

–      . "To a Skylark." English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald. Ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch. 1919. Bartleby.com. Web. 10 Feb. 2012.

Zola, Emile. "J'Accuse." Trans. Chameleon Translations. L'Aurore [Paris, France] 13 Jan. 1898. Marxists.org. Web. 10 Feb. 2012.