Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place

Antigua was a small place. A beautiful island that gets a lot of tourist’s attention. These tourists effects Antiguans in so many ways. In small place, Jamaica Kincaid explained the effects of tourism and colonialism of English people on Antigua and how they affect the culture and education of Antiguans. This book “it is often seen as a highly personal history of her home on the island of Antigua” (Berman).
Jamaica Kincaid wrote “A Small Place” after she visited Antigua after twenty years. When she visited her hometown, she was disappointed. Her tone in the book is tense consist angry and sad. As she said “I wrote with a kind of recklessness in that book. I didn’t know what I would say ahead of time. Once I wrote it, I felt much radicalized

by it” (Unger). She was angry with her people for letting others rule them even after their independence and the fact that her country didn’t change for good instead turn way much worse than before. She was hoping after twenty years and especially after her country was finally independent, she’s going to see a country that is learning how to stand on their own feet, but instead she was welcomed to a country that was in a much worse situation than before she left.
One of the themes in the book that really stand out is colonialism. Her whole book is about the effects of colonialism in her country and her people. On the first chapter she mentioned ”
Antigua got its independence from Britain, making Antigua a state in its own right, and Antiguans are so proud of this that each year, to mark the day, they go to church and thank god, a British god, for this” (9). This statement shows no matter how independent Antiguans think they are, they’re still under British beliefs. They are still speaking a foreign language, English language. Their god is even a British god and not their own god.
Antigua was under British control and so the English people who were there changed everything in Antigua the way that they liked. “She emphasizes that Antigua is a ‘small place’ trapped by the big world around them” (Berman). Antiguans didn’t have anything from themselves. All their personality was formed by English or in general white people so they just knew how to act as one of them and not an Antiguan. They were thought to manner as English people like they don’t have manner themselves.
Kincaid was so angry with her people for being so ok with this situation.
“Kincaid is outraged by how Antiguans continue to accept the colonialist point of view, by how mired everything is in greed, by how illiterate young people are, and how small-minded the adults are. The people in a small place cannot see themselves in a larger picture … No action in the present is an action planned with a view of the future. When the future, bearing its own events, arrives … their mouths and eyes wide with their astonishment, the people in a small place reveal themselves to be like children being shown the secrets of a magic trick” (Unger).
Antiguans called themselves independent people but still they were following English and American people. They had no idea what they were doing and how much they were effected by those societies. They were so small mined that they couldn’t even see how much effect England had on them.
The white people who came to Antigua as tourists or as people who planned to stay there, they were all rich or somehow wealthy people, but the people of the Antigua were poor and “we can all understand and empathize with the envy and depression that happens when the glow of other's wealth highlights our own poverty”(Bongiorni). Kincaid was angry from the tourists because she felt bad for her people who were poor and were struggling with problems in their own country while other people from other countries were living a happy and wealthy life in Antigua.
Kincaid called the tourists ugly and by that she didn’t mean just physically ugly. “ The moral ugliness of tourism is inherent in the way tourists make use of other, usually much poorer, people for their pleasure” ( Miele). Tourists were the biggest source of income for Antigua and they couldn’t push them out and since a lot of tourists knew this fact, they started to act mean and bad towards the people of the island. They did not harm them physically, but the way that they acted, like the island belongs to them and Antiguans are foreigner, made Kincaid really mad because she could see what’s happening to her people, but they were blind enough to not realize it.
Colonialism had a lot of effects on Antiguans but one of the main effect of the colonialism was in their education. Anguine was an island that the education didn’t really matter to them. They didn’t have a school, their library was closed from a long time ago and nobody even mind to fix it. The building was there waiting to be repaired, but nobody made a move. The
only school that they really had and they were proud of it, was a servant school that taught them how to serve people. “Antigua is the Hotel Training School, a school that teaches Antiguans how to be a good servant, how to be a good nobody, which is what a servant is” (Kincaid 55). The British people who live in Antigua thought them that they are just servants and nothing other than that. They thought Antiguans to manner as a servant and just listen to their boss and don’t say a word.
Library, for example in this story is a symbol of education, it’s telling the story, that at first they had an education system or at least some type of education but after an earth quick they lost that. “Kincaid signals the degeneration of the public library as the transcendent symbol of outsider devastation, the silencing of a cultural institution that has traditionally been one of the sole and free instructors of the people. It has rendered the people voiceless” (Bloom 18). When people have no education or not enough education they will lose their voice. They have nothing in their mind to say and no clue about their right that they want to stand for.
The earth quick also could be a symbol of colonialism. People who came to destroy their education, their thoughts and left them with nothing.
Education is one of the most important factors in a country. People would have a better life if they have a better education because when they have a good education they know their right, their mind could think better, make better decision and stand for themselves. But when a country doesn’t have a system of education and the only education system is servant’s education, then they’re going to become small minded.
“Kincaid is outraged by how Antiguans continue to accept the colonialist point of view, by how mired everything is in greed, by how illiterate young people are, and how small minded the adults are. The people in a small place cannot see themselves in a larger picture… No action in the present is an action planned with a view of the future. When the future, bearing its own events, arrives … their mouths and eyes wide with their astonishment, the people in a small place reveal themselves to be like children being shown the secrets of a magic trick” (Bloom).
The other factor that colonialism has an effect on it, is the culture. Author said very specifically that they didn’t have a culture. Culture means art, custom, books, music, and etc. when they didn’t have any of these they didn’t have a culture. “In Antigua, cricket is sport and cricket is culture. (but let me just tell you something about Minister of culture: in places where there is a Minister of culture, it means there is no culture” (Kincaid 49). Antiguans counted a sport as a culture while sport doesn't count as a culture, especially when that sport belong to another country. This statement was trying to show that how poor Antiguans were in culture that the only represent or of their culture was a sport that come from another country.
That could also back up the fact that they have a lack of education. When there’s no education to teach them how to draw, play music, make a custom, introduce them to big authors and give them ideas to write new books then it would lead them to lack of the culture. They had no idea about what culture is. They were just focusing on tourists, how to please them and how to be good servants. They had no interest in art or any type of creative thing so they could create their own culture.
Another theme is tourism.

She started her book with tourism and ended it with it too. The tourists were the most important things that happen to their island. There were tourists in the island from the start. They had a big effect on the people of the island and their country. A lot of money came from them and a lot of places belonged to them. The tone of the author when she talked about tourists was filled with hates. She hated them and didn’t want them in their island. She hated them because it was her home, but she was the one that feels like a slave and unwelcome. Those people weren’t just tourists, some of them became the residents. People who stayed there and turned it to their home and acted like the island belong to them and not the original residents. They built their own buildings and then didn’t let the Antiguans to enter. They treated them unwelcome. “We Antiguans thought that the people in the Mill Reef Club had such bad manners, like pigs: they were behaving in a bad way. Like pigs. There they were, strangers in someone else’s home, and they refused to talk to their hosts or have anything human, anything intimate, to do with them” (Kincaid 27). They welcomed the tourists. They gave them a place to live and a food to eat, but they didn’t pay them back with kindness and that’s another reason that she hated

them.
Antigua was a beautiful place that welcomed tourists in the hope they welcome them back, but instead tourists treat them as unwelcome guests. They were under the influence of English and that affected their culture and their education. They weren’t thought to speak for themselves. They were and still are following white people blindly, but hopefully one day, soon enough, they will realize what their right is and stand for themselves and become independent in the real meaning of independence.