Personal Narrative: A Small Place By Jamaica Kincaid

Growing up in a family that loves to travel means that I’ve come across many different types of people and places. Fortunately, I have been to several different countries as a tourist. However, it wasn’t until I read “A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid that I came to the recollection that I may possibly be a bad tourist. After reading about tourists through a native’s eyes in Kincaid’s novel, I have become ashamed of one specific vacation that my family and I took to Ambergris Caye, Belize in May of 2016. My day to day actions while on the trip such as eating in expensive restaurants and constantly videoing on a GoPro would definitely make it easy for a native of Ambergris Caye to resent me for being a privileged American tourist. When on vacation,
I always found these videos inspiring, exciting, and interesting. They are usually set to some sort of upbeat song and include short clips of people swimming in beautiful oceans, hiking through dense jungles, riding dune buggies over huge sand dunes, etc. As soon as I found out that I was going to Belize, I started to contemplate about how I would use my GoPro video camera to record the trip. Before being on the island, I never stopped to think about how I would look, a nineteen-year-old boy carrying around a $400 camera everywhere he went. However, when I was videoing a native family of four while walking along the street side, the mother of the family gave me a look that I had never seen before nor was I able to comprehend at the time. Of course, after reading “A Small Place”, I knew exactly what the mother’s look meant. Belize, like the rest of North and Central America, was colonized by Europeans and has a long history of oppression. And so, when Kincaid goes on to criticize tourists, the mother’s facial expressions replay in my mind. Kincaid writes, “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…” (Kincaid 17). The woman did not have a face which expressed all that Kincaid is expressing in her novel, however,
I also try to take into account their customs and traditions which differ from mine in order to not offend them. Yet, after reading “A Small Place”, I have come to the conclusion that my efforts are likely not enough. No matter how I try to act when in a foreign place with less fortunate people, my persona of a spoiled tourist will likely still shine through. I hope that with practice, I can avoid being thought of in the same manner that Kincaid thinks of tourists in