Jamaica Kincaid A Small Place Analysis

Mary Louise Pratt, a professor at NYU and travel writer, coined the term “travelee” to describe travel writers who write about their native lands. Jamaica Kincaid, native to Antigua and an established travel author, wrote the 1988 essay, A Small Place, describing her feelings towards tourists and British colonialists and her native land of Antigua. Born in 1949 in British colonized Antigua, Kincaid and her family lived in relative poverty. Antigua gained its independence in 1981, so Kincaid spent her childhood under the British colonial cultural systems. Kincaid is an example of a travelee who wrote postcolonialism works expressing her anger towards the injustice and exploitation colonialism caused and its continuing effects on the Antiguan
Kincaid is particularly provocative when she writes, “you [the tourist] make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling inspired by the sight of it” (16). Tourists travel to get away from their normal lives and to see the landscape but are ignorant of their actions related to the destruction of the landscape, people, and similarity to their normal life. As Kincaid points out, “When you sit down to eat your delicious meal, it’s better that you don't know that most of what you are eating came off a plane from Miami” (14). This exemplifies how small nations, much like Antigua, are economically exploited even on a global scale by larger nations.The food came from a small island, was sold to a bigger nation, and then sold it back and bigger nations made a profit off of it. Kincaid uses irony, provocation, and confrontation to make her point. Tourists are an outlet for Kincaid’s anger towards the inequality of the world she knows. She was born in an imperialistic Antigua, and although Tourism is not the same level of inequality as imperialism, the principles are the same. The people of the higher class can escape and leave, but the people who are lower in the class system are trapped. In a provocative
A paradox exists between the place where she learned the language she hates and the cherished memories of the library. In her essay, Kincaid describes the feeling the library gave her using every sense, which gives her a full body experience and makes her feel whole. She remembers “the smell of the sea”, how you could “hear the sound of its quietness”, feel “the heat of the sun”, and see “its beautiful wooden tables” and “beautiful painted yellow color” (42). The ironic realization Kincaid makes later in life is that the British are the ones who put the library there. She is grateful for the library but it is a reminder of what she hates about the British. Kincaid calls the library a “fairy tale” (42). This paints the image of the reason the British came to Antigua, to make a profit off of the exploitation of the native land and people for a profit on sugar, thus increasing her conflicting view of the British and tourists. This formative part of her life, Kincaid later detests. The British took the ability for Kincaid to experience history through her eyes, and not the