Analysis Of A Small Place By Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid is the author of “A Small Place”, a book about her real-life homeland Antigua, a struggling island. This island is doing poorly for a variety of reasons, such as the corrupt government, the economy being in shambles, the infrastructure crumbling, lack of resources. Almost all the people in Antigua are poor, with the few exceptions being privileged by the government.

A Broken Place

The government depends on tourism for nearly all of Antigua’s revenue. But that tourism can hurt unintentionally, as the ones in charge looked at how they were prospering from the current formation of the government, and decided to keep it. The government then thought to focus all of the resources on tourism, so they exploited the Antiguan people--

The poisonous seeds were first planted the colonisation by the English, "Antigua no longer exists… partly because the bad minded people who used to rule over it, the English, no longer do so" (Kincaid 23). The English were also corrupt and discriminatory in their ways, but they were the rulers. So when that colonisation ended, the Antiguans there ruled in the only way they knew how, the same way the Englishmen did. “Have you ever wondered… why… that… [we] seem to have learned from you how to imprison and murder… how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts?… why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault" (Kincaid 34). But this is just how societies are, there will always be people who are just corrupt. The difference is, Antigua is a small place; that corruption can spread faster, and have a bigger

Because Antigua is such a small place, it is easier to take control of resources and power. There is just simply less of it. But if Antigua was, say continent sized, the society and government would be closer to that of a more modern one perhaps. Firstly the land, if there was more land, there would be more of a chance it would have at the very least some fertile land. Also corruption would take longer to take hold, giving a chance to root it out. Geographically speaking. Again, the way Antigua learned to rule was from the British, so it may not have had as big of an impact. But it is something to think about, that Antigua could have been something