Who Is Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place?

In Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place”, she expresses her life in a world that is made to be an escape for pleasure for tourists who visit Antigua. In this memoir, the author illustrates a conflicted sense of life and identity on the island of Antigua. To tourists, it is a place of paradise, a sense of unreality, like the island is a stage that is set theatrically. It is a symbolically charged environment that creates a fictional world. It seems too good to be true. Consequently, Kincaid’s experience of Antigua is that it is both a “paradise” and a “prison.” She illustrates how the divided landscape of where she grew up, is a product of production and maintenance, in which we then see the relationship of these two dual visions of paradise and prison in Antigua.
The paradise she describes is that of how tourists see Antigua. She says, when we go to a place like paradise, we directly have a fantasy in our heads that we carry a narrative of paradise that is already in place. The tourist makes it their reality, for example, when the ticket is purchased, choose the right clothes to bring, we already know what the fantasy is. Kincaid says at a point in her memoir, “You see yourself taking a walk on that beach,…You see yourself meeting new people…You see yourself… You see yourself.” (13) Fantasizing in the moment and know the experience. Paradise is a symbol of