A Small Place:
Ellsberg, Peggy
A SMALL PLACE Jamaica Kincaid Farrar Straus & Giroux, $13.95, 81 pp. Peggy Ellsberg Jamaica Kincaid is surely one of the most gifted and original young fiction writers working today. Her two...
...You do not realize that the delicious, locally-grown food served in your hotel was grown in Antigua, sold to Miami, and then sold back again at enormous profit...
...We are accustomed, or should be, in this age of raised consciousness, to encountering the resentment of colonized peoples...
...We should anticipate, not without remorse, the rage of our Central American and Caribbean neighbors who live in deprivation, danger, and despair while the predominantly white North benefits from the systematic assumptions that keep them poor...
...Perhaps you are unaware that as you wade blissfully in the beautiful sea, your ankle is being "gently grazed" by the contents of the lavatory that you flushed this morning, because these poor islanders have no safe sewage disposal...
...But still, we are surprised when Jamaica Kincaid-whose surging, mobile, radical talent has been trained on the most luminous fiction, whose bracing precision is laced with lyricism-opens fire on the privileged white tourist who symbolizes injustice, for here she becomes a sharpshooter with an unflinching hand...
...In the end, masters and slaves, we are all locked into the same human condition...
...to be frank, white...
...No doubt ' 'you are thinking of the hard and cold and dark and long days you spent working in North America (or worse, Europe) earning some money so that you could stay in this place where the sun always shines and the climate is deliciously hot and dry," and therefore you will not try to imagine what this is like for "real Antiguans" who live in constant drought and must' 'watch carefully every drop of fresh water...
...It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493...
...In a small place, on the other hand, certainly in the world Jamaica Kincaid created for Annie John, everyone and everything, for better or worse, is part of you...
...Still, not even the intimacy and compressed meanings of a small place are enough to spare its people from misery...
...pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that...
...Her two books of fiction, At the Bottom of the River (1983), and Annie John (1985), were set in Antigua, the Caribbean island owhere she grew up...
...You, the tourist, are "an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing...
...She tells you what you see and what you do not see as you arrive at the airport on the unbelievably beautiful ("too beautiful") island...
...In this new work, Jamaica Kincaid bursts into a different voice-no longer just sassy, but now really angry-and Antigua becomes the main character...
...Jamaica Kincaid admits that people who are too poor to live decently at home and too poor to travel envy to the verge of hatred those tourists rich enough "to leave their own banality and boredom" and find pleasure and exotica in the ordinary life of others...
...Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa...
...to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty-a European disease...
...The trick is to be aware of it, to open your mind and conscience...
...She addresses the change to the uncomfortably familiar second person: "You are a tourist...
...Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all that that adds up to...
...In these stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker, the heat, the sun, the astonishingly blue ocean, the very air so rich with distinctive detail, with foods, fragrances, fabrics, flowers, domestic rituals, and local intimacies, weave a folk art pattern of such interesting complexity that the beloved island becomes a great supporting character for the young protagonist...
...We should be prepared...
...Probably you stumble about in Europe and North America in a large, prosperous city, "surrounded by more people than you could possibly get to know in a lifetime that lasted for millennia...
...It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long...
...Antigua is a small place, a small island...
...In A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid turns her attention to nonfiction, to a sharp personal polemic against exploitation, racism, and corruption...
...Perhaps you do not know that the hospital on Antigua is so filthy and run-down that "when the Minister of Health doesn't feel well he takes the first plane to New York to see a real doctor...
Vol. 115 • November 1988 • No. 19
