A Small Place as artistic consciousness

I’d like to respond, in part to Alexander’s post about Kincaid’s book. This is the first time I have read A Small Place, but I have heard sections of it before in a documentary film called Life and Debt by Stephanie Black, which is about the tourism industry and world financial structure’s impact on Jamaica. I showed the film, which has a similar take on tourism and tourists, last year in my English 102 class. The film uses large portions of the book as its narrative voiceover, interspersed with interviews of World Bank executives, political and academic leaders from Jamaica, and Jamaicans involved in the agricultural and tourism industries. As might be expected, some students were less than receptive to the assertions about structural iniquity. (I even had a semi-veiled accusation that I was “anti-American” for showing the film). The comments in our blog point to a potential problem with the mood of the writing if we take it primarily as an argument or attempt to inform people about the conditions of life in Antigua (or Jamaica in the case of the film). However, in addition to this motivation to shock and awe an American readership, I think we can read A Small Place as an artistic attempt to represent the lived consciousness of someone who identifies as an Antiguan and therefore has obvious reasons to criticize the tourism industry, but also as a writer whose primary audience could be the U.S., and who participates in some ways in a European-American literary tradition.

This interpretation of the book turns on the line at the end where she describes the colonists who overran Antigua and imported African slaves as “human rubbish from Europe” (80). The OED defines rubbish in one entry as “waste or refuse material, in early use … Also, a heap of rubbish,” and as “worthless stuff; trash. Also, a worthless person” in another (OED.com). Based on this definition we can clearly take Kincaid’s use of the word as a justified critique of the people responsible for the colonial history of Antigua, which would enlarge the gulf between she and them. On the other hand, we can also read it as a (perhaps subliminated) attempt to recognize something in common with these people. Seeing colonists as rubbish could be in relation to the rest of Europe and not necessarily an ontological state of being. The colonists would be the litter, the “useless matter” ejected from Europe by the growing capitalist economic system, who, despite their obvious complicity, were themselves victims of a kind. Reading the line as a sympathetic gesture leads to the assertion she makes on the final page that

once you throw off your master’s yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings. (81)

It seems like part of what she’s trying to do is to point out a hidden commonality between both groups of people (the fact that their everyday is banal and boring). The attack might be read as a kind of necessary purging and calling to attention of a lived material reality. Or, it could be that the oscillation between this view of commonality and self-righteous anger represents the reality of human identity; the moments in the text that are more conciliatory reflect a desire to connect with others who do not share our immediate circumstance, and whom we might encounter as tourists. But, the fact that these encounters are never in neutral territory makes this desire hard to enact. In other words, the book’s schizophrenic style reflects the real lasting effect of colonial expansion and then withdrawal. Her oscillation between poetic expressions of commonality and virulent critique is emblematic of a consciousness formed in a world that sees the lived experiences of a North American and Antiguan (or West Indian) as diametrically opposed. The book is then both an attempt to raise awareness about the structural iniquities between the two regions, but by doing so in an artistic representation of one example of modern consciousness (in her oscillation) she makes it accessible and perhaps more understandable, thereby taking a first step to bridge the perceived gap.

Andy DuMont