A Small Place

Kincaid opens the text from the perspective of tourists visiting Antigua on holiday. From the sky, these (American or European) tourists see only Antigua’s superficial beauty, which seems tailor-made for their desired change of scenery. When they disembark from the plane, they feel special for the treatment they receive and feel free to move as they want. As they drive around Antigua, Kincaid describes what they might see: expensive but deteriorating cars driving recklessly on unpaved roads, a school that looks like a set of latrines, a run-down hospital that government ministers won’t use, and a library that hasn’t been fixed for over a decade after being damaged in an earthquake. Tourists also pass a slew of mansions, each housing people with notoriously ill-gotten wealth. Kincaid notes that tourists won’t inquire too deeply about how Antigua came to be in such an impoverished state because the reality may ruin the fun of their holiday.

The reality is that Antigua is still living with the fallout of colonialism and slavery, but popular narratives erase this history and the West’s involvement in it. If tourists read a book on Western economics, Kincaid asserts, they’d learn only about Western entrepreneurial innovations, not the exploitative labor and cultural destruction inflicted on hundreds of thousands of Africans.