Constructing a Nation:

Jamaica Kincaids A Small Place

Corinna McLeod

Abstract: Jamaica Kincaids A Small Place reveals the subalternity of Antigua as a tourist locale;
an identity which undermines Antiguas position as a nation. Through the use of a metafictional
discourse, Kincaids narrator deconstructs colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial myths, thereby
interrogating the tourists perspective and unraveling the continuing colonizing construction of
a place legitimized only by its visitors.

The question of Antiguas identity as a nationis it a tourist resort, a postcolonial nation,

a neocolonialist territory?is mimicked by the multiplicity of narrative elements found in
Jamaica Kincaids A Small Place. To attack the long-standing myth of the tourist colony, Kin-
caid must lead her resisting protagonist/antagonist through a voyage of self-discovery. And the
perspective of the touristwhich undermines our ability to perceive Antiguas nationhood
becomes the means by which nation and national identity are revealed. Through Kincaids
gaze, which has insight into the perspectives of both the native and that of the tourist, the
colonial construction of Antiguas history begins to unravel. The revelation does not yield a
clear picture of an uncorrupted Antigua; rather it yields a pathway by which the narrator (and,
vicariously, the reader) is able to conceive a nation. However, Kincaids summary at the end
of the text, which reads as an indictment of the black Antiguans who refuse to take respon-
sibility for their nation, also reads as a prediction that through voices like hers, Antigua will
see itself as a new country able to construct itself outside of the tourists disfiguring gaze. In
short, Kincaid (re)mythologizes Antigua.
The subalternity of Antigua as a tourist locale and its continued position of servility to
its former colonizers complicates Antiguas position as a nation. Indeed, Kincaids vitriolic
jeremiad leaves readers and book dealers uncertain where to file A Small Place on their shelves.
The Library of Congress has labeled the text as biography, travel, and the ubiquitous homes

small axe 25 February 2008 p 7792 ISSN 0799-0537

78 | SX25 Constructing a Nation

and haunts. But on the bookshelves in bookstores, the text appears under autobiography,
travel literature, fiction, and essay. A Small Place is all of these things. In fact, the dis-placement
of Kincaids text, the very ambiguity of its subject, reflects the complexities and challenges
faced in defining a postcolonial nation.
One of the first difficulties of understanding A Small Place is deciding how to discuss it.
The book is a surprisingly short composition, a mere eighty-one pages in the Farrar, Straus
and Giroux edition. Despite its small size (or perhaps because of it) the accumulation of such
postcolonial issues as nation formation, national identity, neocolonialism, and economic
underdevelopment that Kincaid addresses complicates the text and overwhelms the reader.
The back matter of the text trumpets this quality with a quote from Salman Rushdie, who
calls the work A jeremiad of great clarity and force that one might have called torrential were
the language not so finely controlled.1 In its density, the physical text becomes a metaphor
of Antigua. Like the island it describes, the work is a small place; and like that island, access
to its inner complexities is not as easily accomplished as one might think.
Also, like Antigua, it is difficult to find a place for the text in terms of genre. As a country,
Antigua has wrestled to find its identity. An island with little or no natural resources, Antigua
exists mainly as a convenient port for travelers. Though there is some agricultural production
in the form of cotton and pineapples, tourism and banking are Antiguas primary industries.
Antigua has made attempts at other commercial ventures, as evidenced by the rusting oil refin-
ery Kincaid mentions in her text, but the small island nation has been unable to establish its
identity outside that of a resort location and a tax haven.2 According to Kincaid, the industries
Antigua has developedservice and tourism are based on the fact that [Antiguans] have
made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction.3
Bonham Richardson, a scholar of Caribbean geography, blames the Antiguan government, as
well as other Caribbean governments, for promoting tourism as national industries:
Billboards throughout the region remind (black) local residents to put on happy smiles for (white)
tourists. ...So groups of tourists can be typically loud and offensive while expecting deferential
servility from their hosts. Caribbean governments, with an eye on tourist profits, reinforce these
expectations. It is perhaps needless to point out that this economically imposed servility is galling
in light of the obvious (at least to the Caribbean peoples) inequities. ...4

Richardson exposes the economic and social impact of tourism on Antigua and the govern-
ments active pursuit of tourist dollars, tracing one important source of the problem back to

1. Salman Rushdie, Back Matter, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988).
2. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988), 67.
3. Ibid., 69.
4. Bonham C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World 14921992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 127.
 SX25 February 2008 Corinna McLeod | 79

the Hotel Aid Ordinance, passed by the islands colonial government in 1952, that reduced
import fees on construction material for hotels. He also notes that the expense paid by the
government to renovate the airport, roads, and harbor to improve Antiguas image did not
result in an equivalent payoff in terms of alleviating the poverty of residents. To say, then, that
tourism is beneficial to locations without other predominant industry is inaccurate. Not only
does tourism, as Kincaid explains, make the native population an exhibit, but Richardsons
research shows that the population derives no benefit from their role in amusing tourists.5
Nonetheless, Antiguas role as a tourist destination came about when Americans sought an
alternative tropical haven after Cubas revolution in 1959. By the 1960s, tourism was an
economic staple of the island.6
The importance of tourism and its position as central in Antiguas identity continues in
the present day. The official homepage of the Antigua and Barbuda Department of Tourism
reads: Welcome to Antigua & Barbuda: The Caribbean Youve Always Imagined. Link after
link leads the websurfer to pictures of uncrowded, white, sandy beaches and blue, blue water.
There are 365 beaches on Antigua, the website gushes, one for each day of the year.7 There
is a link on the same page that reads: click here to see what visitors are saying about the
beaches of Antigua and Barbuda. On the website, the natives of Antigua are mentioned only
for adjectival purposes to describe pristine, undiscovered scenic areas or as a recommenda-
tion for good restaurants that serve authentic food where all the natives eat. The natives,
then, exist only as indicators to enhance tourists experiences. There is no place to click
here to see what natives are saying about the beaches. Antigua, then, is depicted as a place
of transience. It is a place that exists in dreams that can only be legitimatized by visitors. For
the websurfing tourist who longs to be a visitor, who longs to become a been to of Antigua,
who fantasizes about balmy, tropical weather during the North American or European winter,
Antigua is presented as a haven. The marketing of the island and its consequent identity on
the world stage thus create the complete antithesis of a tourists everyday reality: Antigua is a
place where dreams come true, where the visitor can invent whatever pleasure he or she desires.
Antigua is the Caribbean youve always imagined.8 It is this depiction of Antigua as a locale
that exists solely for the pleasure of its visitors that Kincaid so strongly condemns. A Small
Place is written both in praise of Antigua and as an attack on all that has made it the place it
is todayno longer a colony, but certainly not free from colonizers.

5. Ibid., 124127. Richardson cites Guyanese economist Clive Thomas as the source for his information regarding the
economic underdevelopment of the Caribbean and the influence of tourism. See Clive Thomas, The Poor and the
Powerless: Economic Policy and Change in the Caribbean (London: Latin America Bureau, 1988).
6. Richardson, The Caribbean Writer in the Wider World, 124.
7. Antigua and Barbuda in the official homepage of the Antigua and Barbuda Department of Tourism. http://www.
antigua-barbuda.org/agbeach1.htm (accessed November 28, 2000).
8. Ibid.
80 | SX25 Constructing a Nation

In A Small Place, Kincaid writes: The Antigua that I knew, the Antigua in which I grew
up, is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see now.9 The narrators voice throughout the text
covers derision of tourists who visit Antigua, anger towards these tourists (especially white,
European tourists), and anger towards the Antiguans. Like the above quotation, the narrative
also contains echoes of mourning. The mutually antagonistic voices that Kincaid uses in the
text create a space in which the mythical identity of Antigua is both upheld and debunked.
A Small Place is both a call to arms and a cry of frustration that aims to strip Antigua of its
glamorous taint of tourism, thereby exposing the islands crumbling infrastructure, unmasking
neocolonial facades and allowing for the rebuilding of a nation. To accomplish this task, Kin-
caid remythologizes Antigua and creates a national identity for the island by slowly destroying
the myth of Antigua as a temporary landscape that exists for the use of a visiting hegemony, a
myth created by the colonizers and neocolonialists who created and promote tourism.10 The
narrator is both guide and tourist: she paints the images of a pristine, harmonious, charm-
ing island only so she can follow in her own footsteps to shred these images. She promises
to be a native informant but at the same time preserves the distance between spectator and
spectacle.
To this end, Kincaid employs a strategy of doubleness in the text. By playing the dual
role of insider and outsider, Kincaid destabilizes the reader/author paradigm. At one moment,
Kincaid uses the second person you to reflect the emotional separation between narrator and
reader; at the next moment, her interior monologue disrupts the narrative and demonstrates
her own feelings of alienation. The complexity of Kincaids position as author/narrator illu-
minates Homi Bhabhas theory of doubleness in writing, which he discusses in The Location
of Culture. Bhabha writes:
If . . . we are alive to the metaphoricity of the peoples of imagined communitiesmigrant or
metropolitanthen we shall find that the space of the modern nation-people is never simply
horizontal. Their metaphoric movement requires a kind of doubleness in writing; a temporality
of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a centred
causal logic.11

Kincaids narrative strategy of using the fictional anti-travel narrative decenters her text
and allows for the doubleness described above. By first creating the palimpsest of narrator,
insider/outsider, native/non-native, and spectator/spectacle, Kincaid is able to peel away the

9. Kincaid, A Small Place, 23.

10. For additional discussion on tourism and cultural construction see Peter T. Newby, Literature and the Fashion-
ing of Tourist Taste, in Douglas C.D. Pocock (ed.) Humanistic Geography and Literature (London: Croom Helm,
1981), and Polly Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (London: Cassell, 1996).
11. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 141.
 SX25 February 2008 Corinna McLeod | 81

ideological layers comprising tourist Antigua. This doubleness, and Kincaids use of the ironic
second person you, create a commentary on neocolonialism in which the narrator also
assumes the role of the metafictional colonizer.12
So what is a nation and how can we witness a nations construction in A Small Place? Con-
trary to the metaphysical definition of nation offered by some theorists, Benedict Andersons
definition of nation ismore usefully, I thinkgrounded in religion and dynasty.13 For the
purpose of understanding A Small Place, the pivotal chapter in Andersons Imagined Communi-
ties is his Origins of National Consciousness, which explains his theory of national identity.
Though one may get caught in the chicken-or-the-egg argumentdoes national conscious-
ness precede nation or does a nation lead its citizens to a national consciousness?Anderson
sees the issue of national consciousness as the core of nationalism and the construction of a
nation. Anderson traces the importance of developments in print-media to the formation of
the modern nation by arguing that print languages created unified fields of exchange and
communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars.14 Putting words on paper
using print technology helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective
idea of the nation.15 This second point is crucial: according to Anderson, the identity of a
nation is grounded in its literary construction. When applying Andersons theory to the case
of Antigua, we see that western literary culture has created a nation conceptualized as a way
station; a place for scientific study of plants, animals, or marine life; a plantation economy;
and a tourist stopover.16 The colonizers literature creates memory that is permanent, somehow
inescapable, and gives rise to the postcolonialists dilemma of trying to rewrite the past.
Thus print gives power and a written, permanent voice to an otherwise subject population.
It can both preserve and circulate independent ideas and cultural concepts that can promote

12. Metafiction is a term used to describe novels that specifically and self-consciously examine the nature and status
of fiction itself and that often contain experiments to test fiction as a form in one way or another. Ross Murfin and
Supryia Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 2nd ed. (New York: Bedford, 2003), 210.
13. See, for example, Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? in Homi Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (London:
Routledge, 1990).
14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London, Verso: 1991), 44.
15. Ibid., 44.
16. Some examples include, Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Moira Fergueson (ed.) (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003); Vere
Langford Oliver, The History of the Island of Antigua, One of the Leeward Caribbees in the West Indies, from the First
Settlement in 1635 to the Present Time (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 18941899); George Pinckard, Notes on
the West Indies: Written During the Expedition Under the Command of the Late General Sir Ralph Abercromby: In 3
Volumes (1806; reprint, Westport, Conn: Negro Universities Press, 1970); and James A. Thome, Emancipation in the
West Indies: A Six Months Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837 (1838; reprint, New York: Arno
Press, 1969). Various amateur and professional scientists have used Antigua as a resource for the study of natural-
ism, for example, Albert Herre, Notes on a Collection of Fishes from Antigua and Barbados, West Indies (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1942).
82 | SX25 Constructing a Nation

a national identity.17 In A Small Place, however, Kincaid writes Antigua as a temporary space
that seems to lack awareness of both its past and its future. A Small Place, as a term analogous
to Antigua, becomes in Kincaids literary creation significant for its lack of place.
And so everywhere they [the English] went they turned it into England; and everybody they met
they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look
exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land
that came from that.18

Antigua, because it is not England, becomes a non-place. Its failure to become England marks
its failure to have any identity whatsoever. What was not England, according to Kincaid, was
destroyed in the process of colonization, leaving behind a vacant, peripheral space that could
be defined as not-England but not as a place with its own political or social distinctive-
ness, cultural history, or position of cultural centrality. Kincaids use of language becomes a
rhetorical device to paint a picture of emptiness. The rhetorical structure of Kincaids writing
and her use of the second-person are deliberately alienating creating an ambivalence even on
the national home front. Rather than bringing the reader into the text, the accusatory you
functions to preserve a text-reader distance. Neither does the second-person seem to come
from a voice that indicates a sense of belonging to the native population:
But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no
fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the
things an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue.19

Exacerbating the ambivalent alienation are the elements of forgetfulness and loss that
permeate Kincaids Antigua. For example, early on, when you first arrive in Antigua, one
of the sites Kincaid names is the old, dilapidated library damaged by an earthquake in 1974.
A sign hanging on the building reads, THIS BUILDING WAS DAMAGED IN THE
EARTHQUAKE OF 1974. REPAIRS ARE PENDING.20 As Kincaid points out, The
Earthquake occurred over a decade before. So the library, a sign of learning, lay neglected
and in ruinsor at least that is one reading of it. Another interpretation emerges as the author
relates, chronologically, the destruction of the library to Antiguan independence. She mentions
in her description of the librarys destruction that [n]ot very long after The Earthquake Anti-
gua got its independence from Britain.21 Unlike the date of the librarys destruction, however,
Independence Day is not given a date by Kincaid, and it does not have a memorial that we

17. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 45.

18. Kincaid, A Small Place, 24.
19. Ibid., 31.
20. Ibid., 9.
21. Ibid.
 SX25 February 2008 Corinna McLeod | 83

have seen so far on our short tour.22 This absence of recognition or celebration harkens back
to Kincaids statement, discussed earlier, that anything that was not England was destroyed.
Independence Day is not remarked because, in its most, or only, meaningful sense, it has
yet to happen. One can read the librarys sign as a memorial to lost knowledge and destroyed
education. At the same time, the librarys disrepair and neglect are also subversive signs of
movement toward independence: You have brought your own books with you, and among
them is one of those new books about economic history, one of those books explaining how
the West (meaning Europe and North America after its conquest and settlement by Europeans)
got rich ...23 The destruction and loss of the library, and its subsequent disrepair also pay
homage to the destruction of the history and the books the tourists bring into Antigua. The
destruction of the library means that its (the colonizers) books are no longer accessiblefor
when Kincaid describes the library she mentions that it was built in the colonial style, and the
sign is from splendid old colonial times.24 It is these colonial times that are truly in disrepair,
and it is these splendid colonial times that Kincaid and Antigua let languish, gathering dust
with disintegrating splendor. The tourists bring their books with them, books informing them
that North America and Europe:
... got rich not from the free (freein this case meaning got-for-nothing) and then undervalued
labour, for generations, of the people like me [Black West Indian] you [White Westerner] see walk-
ing around you in Antigua but from the ingenuity of small shopkeepers in Sheffield and Yorkshire
and Lancashire, or wherever.25

So as Kincaid constructs the text, she first must deconstruct the terms that had previously
been valued. Thus the destruction of the library was not a losshistory could be regained
only through its disuse.
The next buildings on the tour are government buildings. The experience of the library
and what is written in the tourist books is replaced, or enhanced, by descriptions of the
prime ministers office and the parliament building, next to which are the houses of known
drug smugglers and a courtesan. Scattered around the area are embassies. With knowledge
comes corruptioncould this be the code Kincaid is trying to send in A Small Place? In fact,
the library is a touchstone. It functions as a theme to which Kincaid returns every few pages
throughout the text. Indeed, the library functions as a metaphor of the postcolonial state,
in that its former, physical location marks the demise of colonial rule, but its new place, on
the top floor of a decrepit building, reflects the disorder, poverty, and neglect of postcolonial

22. The actual year of Antiguas independence is 1981.

23. Kincaid, A Small Place, 10.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
84 | SX25 Constructing a Nation

nations in terms of creating their own libraries and, thereby, their own anticolonialist values
and vehicles of learning.
The first section of A Small Place details the destruction of the physical location of the
colonial library. In the second section of the text, Kincaid returns to the old colonial library
prior to its destruction with more detail of its location on High Street. [Y]ou could cash a
cheque at the Treasury, read a book in the library, post a letter at the post office, appear before
a magistrate in court all along the same part of High Street.26 Close by, you could also obtain
a passport and visit Barclays Bank. According to Kincaids description, the library was located
at the colonial center. It is not surprising, then, that in a work that discusses postcoloniality,
its author moves from the colonizers center to the native periphery. And Kincaid symbolizes
this movement by detailing the librarys movement from center to periphery.
The colonial library ceases to exist after 1974, but the books were moved from their idyl-
lic location to a space above an old dry-goods store. The books are stored in cardboard boxes,
gathering dust and mildew and on their way to ruin.27 The difference in the position of the
library from High Street to the dilapidated store marks, for Kincaid, the decline of literacy in
Antiguas youth. She seems to say that under colonial administration, when the library held a
prominent if problematic position on High Street, at least it was used and Antiguas citizens
(or subjects) were at least literate. Kincaid writes of the librarian who wishes people from the
Mill Reef Club (white Antiguans whom Kincaid had lambasted) would provide the money and
materials for a new library. However, the people from the Mill Reef Club dont want to build a
new library (synonymous, Kincaid implies, with the building of a new Antigua). Instead, they
want to restore the old librarysymbolic, of course, of restoring the old Antigua.28
Kincaid links the conspicuous decline of the library to the conspicuous wealth of cor-
rupt government officials. How do these two elements relate to the description of nation? If
Renan is correct that, [f ]orgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial
factor in the creation of a nation29 then we must point out that by rejecting the established
library, by rejecting the foreign books and foreign histories of economics, the narrator of A
Small Place is writing a new account, a new history of Antigua. The dual role of tour guide
and coy native informant allows you to witness history as you read her travelogue. Your
first marker, the first event she records, is the earthquake of 1974. From there, your historical
tour continues as you learn about the realities of Antiguan government and become aware of
the true economy of a post-colonial state. There is no dynasty, no record of a dynastic past

26. Ibid., 25.

27. Ibid., 43.
28. Ibid., 45.
29. Renan, What is a Nation? 11.
 SX25 February 2008 Corinna McLeod | 85

as specified by Anderson as being one of the foundation pieces of a nation. Instead, Kincaid
unveils an image of Antigua through her metafiction. Antigua appears nearly as an existential
phenomenon; it exists as it emerges to the reader from the pages in the book, the physical
buildings (such as the library) acting as metaphors of colonialist subjugation and postcolonial
inertia rather than real locations.
Besides dynasty, race is sometimes used as a demarcation of a nation. And, indeed, there is
an unmistakable racial divide in A Small Place. The tourists, the you, the reader, are assumed
to be white. When Kincaid first introduces you to fellow tourists you notice a pastrylike-
fleshed woman walking on the beach with a pastrylike-fleshed man.30 The people on the
beach, Kincaid points out, are just like you. Therefore, Kincaid sets up a clear racial division
between the white tourist and the black native islanders of African descent, ex-slaves. It is
difficult to see a sense of camaraderie or comradeship linking these two cultures together to
form a nation. Returning to Renan who writes:
Several confidently assert that it [nation] is derived from race. ... There is thus created a kind of
primordial right analogous to the divine right of kinds; an ethnographic principle is substituted
for a national one. This is a very great error, which, if it were to become dominant, would destroy
European civilization. The primordial right of races is as narrow and as perilous for genuine progress
as the national principle is just and legitimate.31

Notice that Renan refers to European civilization, but though Antigua emerges from the ashes
of a European empire, it cannot be compared to the Europe that Renan describes. For though
Renan describes the importance of race for tribes and cities of antiquity, the real connection
within these communities was the fact that their citizens were relations within an extended
family. But an empire made from violence and conquest did not discern race, so Renan insists,
and when Christianity spread, ethnography became even less relevant. Although Renans argu-
ment might hold for the Roman empire, it hardly holds for the British empire, much of whose
policy relied upon racial differences. Thus, in terms of British conquest, a political nation and
a social nation emerge as two disparate entities operating within the same colonial space.
We can see a useful analogy in the history of racial civil rights in the United States.
During its long history of first legalized and then de facto segregation, the United States was
nevertheless clearly one political nation: American discriminated against American. Yet a social
divide existed so profoundly between white and black citizens that, from a socioeconomic
perspective, the United States could be viewed as two nations. The same can be said of South
Africa during the years of apartheid. Kincaids portrayal of Antigua also reveals an antagonistic

30. Kincaid, A Small Place, 13.

31. Renan, What is a Nation? 13.
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stratification: the Antiguan native non-white against the white enclave that happens to be
situated on Antigua. As part of his theory of nation, Renan writes: The truth is that there is
no pure race and that to make politics depend upon ethnographic analysis is to surrender it
to a chimera.32 But as we examine the divide Kincaid has so clearly painted in her portrait of
Antigua, this absolute claim by Renan is problematic. Is this the difference between the theory
of race and the actuality of nation? No matter how much Renan insists that race is a subject for
humanists or anthropologists and not for politics, one cannot help but see how race is part of
a nation33. When looking at a post-colonial state such as Antigua, race is irreparably tied into
independence: independence from Britain means independence from white colonizers. At the
same time, Renan would argue, not all British are white. But account after account, experi-
ence after experience, has shown that while theoretically not all British are white, in practice,
all ruling British are white. Theoretically (as Kincaid herself shows us) not all Antiguans are
black, but practically speaking, when describing a nation and its underdeveloped population,
the population is black.
A nation is therefore large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has
made in the past and those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it
is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed
desired to continue a common life.34

This metaphysical construction of a nation posits that a nation is held together as a nation
by its pastits collective pain, the violence is has suffered, and the struggles it has endured:
Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they
impose duties, and require a common effort.35 Kincaid endeavors to stir up Antiguas memo-
ries of its collective griefs, expose the violence suffered by the native population, and reveal
the flaws in that populations national concept, because what has prevented Antigua from
emerging from the facsimile of a nation is its lack of national mourning. Part One of A Small

32. Ibid., 14.

33. While I agree with many critical race theorists who point out that race was originally a product of geographic
history and persists today only as the result of social construction, race as a social category still plays an unfortunate
polarizing role in the politics of nationhood. Additionally, the construction of race differs according to geography.
For a discussion of the social construction of race, see, for example, J.M. Fish (ed.) Race and Intelligence: Separating
Science from Myth (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002); Joan Ferrante and Prince Brown Jr.
(eds.) The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 2001), 112 and 11328; Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New
York: New York University Press, 2001), 7577; Prince Brown Jr., Biology and the Social Construction of the
Race Concept in Ferrante and Brown Jr., (eds.) The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States,
14450; and Vivian Nun Halloran, Race, Creole, and National Identities in Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea and Phillipss
Cambridge Small Axe no. 21 (October 2006): 87104.
34. Renan, What is a Nation? 19.
35. Ibid.
 SX25 February 2008 Corinna McLeod | 87

Place becomes, therefore, an unlikely dirge for Antigua. In the bitter, mocking tone used to
address the tourist-colonizer, the colonized space gains a voice that defines a nation by what
it is not, rather than what it seems to be.
Certainly the ideology that informs island travel literature leads tourists to perceive
islands, especially leads Americans to perceive the Caribbean islands, as a place to retreat
from reality. To examine the relationship between literature and place would be to look at
Antigua as a place sold through travel literature.36 In this light, Kincaids work is an attempt
to take Antigua back from the colonizers (tourists) and in doing so, peel back the media faade
established by the tourist industry. In order to accomplish this task, Kincaid must also subvert
the tourists imagination by both engaging the fantasies associated with an island retreat and
attacking the fallacies of such fantasies. Islands, by their very geographic isolation, have always
suggested a removal from continental realities. In todays mythologizing of the islands, the
Caribbean islands have become a vacationers dream locale. The islands exist for the dreamer,
for the benefit of those who are able to pay for the tourist experience. They represent a
psychological as well as physical escape from the real world.
Unfortunately, one groups fantasy is another groups not-so-rosy reality. Kincaid attacks
the mythologizing of Antigua and reveals the forgotten perspective of one who lives in a place
constructed for and by outsiders. Because of neocolonial corruption and tourisms demand
that Antigua exist for the tourist, even as Antigua became fully independent from the United
Kingdom in 1981, it remained a colonial construction. No longer under official rule, the island
continues to be under the hegemony of tourism. Existing as a place for Others (white, North
American or European) fantasies, Antigua is frozen, undefinable, and unable to construct its
own identity outside of tourisms imagination. Tourism, as Kincaid shows us, has become the
new governor of Antigua.
The first part of A Small Place consists of Kincaids virulent attack on tourism. She imme-
diately confronts her reader with the name of the Antiguan airport. Fresh off the airplane,
the tourists first encounter with Antigua is through its airport, named for V.C. Bird. For
explanation of why an Antiguan prime minister has an airport named after him rather than a
school, hospital or public monument, Kincaid offers, You are a tourist and you have not yet
seen a school in Antigua, you have not yet seen the hospital in Antigua, you have not yet seen
a public monument in Antigua.37 As we continue to read, we see that the schools, hospitals,
and monuments are in disrepair, outside of the tourists lens, and hardly something a prime
minister would be proud to attach to his name. But the prime ministers link to the airport

36. See Newby, Literature and the Fashioning of Tourist Taste.

37. Kincaid, A Small Place, 3.
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is a link that operates between the government and tourism. The airport represents a tribute,
homage, to the tourist Other who arrives to colonize Antigua for a holiday activity.
The airport also represents a blurring of boundaries. By boarding a plane in one country,
flying in an enclosed space only to emerge, miraculously, in a foreign land adds to the sense of
unreality and escape that tourists long for in a vacation. Gillian Beer describes the impact of
plane travel as a reordering which does away with centrality and very largely with borders.38
While Beers essay focuses on Virginia Woolf s changing depiction of England due to the arrival
of the airplane, its validity is still apparent in consideration of the former British territory of
Antigua. The airplane and its passengers speak to the remoteness of a locale yet also its new
accessibility. They signify the surprising permeability of the islands isolation that prevents any
meaningful independence from its former colonizers. Yet now that there is no way to escape
the tourists, being caught in the trap of ones own island, Kincaid captures the frustration
of those whose territory is defined not by its livability, but rather by its visitability.
Kincaid shows the reader that it is the foolish tourist who perceives in Antigua a tem-
porary landscape, for her criticism is well aware of the visitor who is unable to imagine the
island as having a past or a future:
... and since you are on your holiday, since you are a tourist, the thought of what it might be like
for someone who had to live day in, day out in a place that suffers constantly from drought, and
so has to watch carefully every drop of fresh water ... must never cross your mind.39

The readers of the novel are tourists, and Kincaid is the tour guide that gives a different tour,
an off road tour that skips the beaches and looks behind the myth of Antigua. She counters
the tourists desire for Antigua to exist only for his or her pleasure with a dose of realism. Keith
Byerman describes A Small Place as an extended attack on colonialism, corruption, and tourism
as a kind of neocolonialism and says that Kincaid, through her narrative strategy, establishes
her authority by speaking in the second person to the tourist, which allows her to characterize
the audience and its voice in the text. She can offend without challenge.40 As an illustration:
An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing,
a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to
you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that
behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness ... They do not like you. They do not like
me! That thought never actually occurs to you. ...41

38. Gillian Beer, The Island and the Aeroplane, in Homi Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (London: Routledge,
1990), 265.
39. Kincaid, A Small Place, 4.
40. Keith Byerman, Anger in A Small Place: Jamaica Kincaids Cultural Critique of Antigua, College Literature 22, no.
1 (1995): 9293.
41. Kincaid, A Small Place, 17.
 SX25 February 2008 Corinna McLeod | 89

Perhaps Kincaid can indeed offend without herself being challenged, as Byerman describes.
However, her writings are very much meant to offend and challenge the reader to develop
a new perspective concerning tourist nations. In the following passage, Kincaid is clearly
challenging the reader to realize that his or her ideological position as tourist, no matter
how sensitive or benevolent he or she may try to be, is an inherently false and self-deluded
position.
Kincaids rhetoric echoes Albert Memmis discussion of the member of the colonizing
culture who has decided to become a conscientious objector to the harsh economic and social
inequalities to which the colonizers subject the colonized. The choice to become a benevolent
colonizer involves becoming, simultaneously, a turncoat and a moral hero.42 But accord-
ing to Memmi, the benevolent colonizer has difficulty maintaining his benevolence: instead,
he slowly shrugs off colonial guilt and begins to perceive the independence of the colonized
as a future ideal.43 Despite Memmis thesis that a tourist can maintain the necessary moral
ardor, at least for a time, to protest the conditions of the colonized, we clearly see in Kincaids
portrayal that this is not the case. If anything, according to Kincaids version, the tourist is
more determined to remain oblivious to local social ills; after all, the tourist has paid good
money for this fantasy, while the colonizer is either born in the colonized space or immigrates
there for personal and financial opportunity.
Just as Memmi explains to the colonizer why he is not liked by the colonized, so, too, does
Kincaid endeavor to explain the position of the native who is a spectacle for the tourist:
That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is
a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life
of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every
deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every
native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some nativesmost natives in the
worldcannot go anywhere. They are too poor. ... They are too poor to escape the reality of their
lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place
you, the tourist, want to goso when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy
your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, and they envy your ability to turn their own
banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.44

Kincaid not only questions and methodically destroys the mythologies of the tourist, but
through her native appropriation of the colonizers perspective, she turns the tables, so to
speak, on the tourist: just as the Eurocentric perspective reduces the colonized to objects of
ridicule and abuse, so here the visitor from the outside world is made the object of derision

42. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 2223.
43. Ibid., 26.
44. Kincaid, A Small Place, 1719.
90 | SX25 Constructing a Nation

by the natives.45 Kincaid confronts tourists not merely to offend them but also to instruct
them, to help the tourist understand that he or she encounters people caught in a reality that
they might wish to escape. For those visiting an island that is a product of media, industry, and
propaganda construction, remembering that the native population exists outside the tourists
photo-ops is a challenge. Moira Ferguson, claims that Kincaids use of tourism is a template
for colonial Antigua and [i]n exposing tourisms nefarious, centuries-old point of origin,
Kincaid aims indirectly to subvert the dominant paradigm of power as it presently exists on
the cusp of the nineteen-nineties.46 But Kincaids text is more than an indirect subversion of
power. Rather, I believe that her charge to tourists to become aware of the context, culture,
and environment in which they travel, constitutes a de-cloaking of neocolonial enterprise. By
refusing to accept tourisms (and the corrupt governments) constructed image of the island,
informed tourists can lessen the disenfranchisement of a nation that exists, even after the end
of slavery and colonial rule, to serve. In fact, Kincaids text is a direct challenge to the dominant
paradigms that would keep native Antigua an island of servants.
Kincaid thus attempts to move the reader beyond a tourists nightmare of not-so-clean
beaches to a study of the islands colonial history. The second section of the text offers an
even clearer indictment of the colonizers than the first. She emphasizes her frustration with
language, and this problematizing of language is at the core of her argument. She asks, For
isnt it odd that the only language I have in which to speak this crime is the language of the
criminal who committed the crime?47 And then later she continues, Have I given you
the impression that the Antigua I grew up in revolved almost completely around England?
Well, that was so. I met the world through England, and if the world wanted to meet me, it
would have to do so through England.48 Kincaid allows the reader to see clearly the rigidity
within which Antigua developed: Not allowed to be its own nation, Antigua was merely an
extension of Britain. The islands own beauty and position as a retreat kept it suspended from
self-realization.49
As we have seen, Kincaid uses tourism as the entry to a critique of colonialism, the neo-
colonial Antiguan government, and the colonizing elements of the tourist industry. Like the
theoretical positionings of Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth50 and Albert Memmis The

45. Byerman, Anger in A Small Place, 93.

46. Moira Fergueson, Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
1996), 79.
47. Kincaid, A Small Place, 31.
48. Ibid., 33.
49. Ibid., 7779.
50. Of additional interest is Fanons discussion of the role of tourism in making formerly colonized territories the
brothel[s] of Europe in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Press, 1963), 154.
 SX25 February 2008 Corinna McLeod | 91

Colonizer and the Colonized, Kincaids text is a searing indictment of the colonizer for leaving
his home in the first place, and then for deserting the country he colonized.51 The fact remains
that Antigua exists as a discarded space in Kincaids text. Rather than rejecting this space as
empty and unsignifiable, however, Kincaid and other Caribbean writers see it as the operative
place of new literatures, as a creative space from which can emerge literary works that destroy
old paradigms and reveal news ways of seeing the world, being in the world, and forging the
collective identities necessary to nationhood.
Finally, because Kincaid writes A Small Place as a metafiction, we can read this text as a
colonizing experience for the audience. In fact, I would suggest that Kincaids metonymical
metafiction leads to a carefully controlled audience reaction in which the audience reads its
own reaction through the reactions and comments of Kincaids narrator:
The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people
who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might be like;
I mean, supposing you were to think about it).52

The direct address spurs her readers to a self-reflexivity and heightened self-awareness that
fulfills Kincaids agenda. Her readers, with prompting, acknowledge the Antiguans as people,
not mechanisms that foster the illusion of escape for American or European tourists. Since
[m]etafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself,
Kincaids novel functions as an anti-guide (that serves to deconstruct in order to reconstruct)
and a self-conscious narrative (the work of a visitor describing to potential visitors their own
reactions) and thereby opens a third space for the play of fiction and criticism.53 Kincaid paro-
dies the form of a travel guide in order to deconstruct the outsiders (colonizers and tourists)
invention of the Caribbean. It is because of Kincaids narrative approach that A Small Place
functions as metafiction, and Kincaids metafiction moves beyond that which gives the text
its identity to giving her audience its identity as well.54
By predicting audience reactionsand because she is dealing with the stereotype of
the western tourist in addition to that of the nativeKincaid underscores her awareness of
her audience. She shows that the very predictability of the tourist is part of her critique. In
typical struggle against a defining hegemony (that of the author), the subaltern (written and
controlled) is both frustrated and empowered by this writing. The frustration of predictability
is easy enough to understand; the empowerment, though, is more complicated. By crafting
her audience, Kincaid creates a textual structure against which the audience can rebel. By

51. Kincaid, A Small Place, 80.

52. Ibid.
53. Robert Scholes, Metafiction, in Mark Currie (ed.) Metafiction (New York: Longman, 1995), 21.
54. Ibid., 43.
92 | SX25 Constructing a Nation

refusing Kincaids script, the reader not only frees him or herself from the rigidity of the
authors prediction of being a much maligned tourist, but also liberates Antigua from one
more neocolonial participant. Inevitably, in the postcolonial battleground, Kincaid wins. She
recreates that perfect situation of mimicry in which the reader becomes the colonized subject
and is a passive construction created through Kincaids use of you. Her reader wants both to
maintain his or her privileged identity as the colonizer and escape to Antigua yet is suddenly
unable to maintain the idyllic veil by which you had viewed Antigua as a tourist.
Kincaid becomes the colonizer in the space of the second person narrative. She both
speaks for the native and writes and interprets her audience through the body of the tourist.
The book is a tour. The readers are the bumbling tourists who sit and read as though hyp-
notized, while Kincaid peels back the layers of the Antiguan myth to reveal, not the native
behind the myth, but rather the white colonialist past that created and sustains the myth.
Kincaid employs mimicry to subvert the neocolonial government and the tourist economy.
She imitates the lofty, omniscient style of a tourist brochure, at one time reassuring tourists
that the island exists for their pleasure, yet she also subverts and counters that reassurance
with the revelation that the islanders do not welcome or like the tourists. We can see the two
strategies combined in the following example: Antigua is a small place. ... It is nine miles
wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long
after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe ...55 At one moment, you read factual
information about Antigua; the next moment the narrative becomes an anti-guide in order
to free Antigua from tourist fantasies and discourage the continuing damage the island suffers
by existing almost entirely as a tourist resort. Kincaids A Small Place is an invaluable text for
revealing the complexities of the ubiquitous and enduring damage done by the colonialist
myth of the island paradise and the destructive tourism it has thereby created.

55. Kincaid, A Small Place, 80.