A Small Place

Product Information

Ultimately, this book of essays is great because it feels like listening. It's a taste of what Antiguans think about the situation in their country. I think this book is applicable for the entire conversation about tourism and traveling, as well as the longtime impacts of colonialism. Kev: *snorts dismissively* Right... So I'm seeing nice beaches, cheap booze, bad water, corruption and a bunch of people who always moaned we were in control, but everything went pear shaped when we left. That kind of place? Kev: Meh. Maybe? I don't know, it still sounds like you're reading it so you can think you're better than me. And the Antiguans sound like the real racists for not liking tourists. White men are the true oppressed group now, afterall-

Kincaid observes the quality of education on Antigua, as well as the minds of its inhabitants, and remains deeply ambivalent about both. She herself is the product of a colonial education, and she believes that Antiguan young people today are not as well-educated as they were in her day. Kincaid was raised on the classics of English literature, and she thinks today’s young Antiguans are poorly spoken, ignorant, and devoted to American pop culture. However, one of the things Kincaid despises most about the old Antigua was its cultural subservience to England. If young Antiguans today are obsessed with American trash, in the old days they were obsessed with British trash. One of the insidious effects of Antiguans being schooled in the British system is that all of their models of excellence in literature and history are British. In other words, Antiguans have been taught to admire the very people who once enslaved them. Kincaid is horrified by the genuine excitement the Antiguans have regarding royal visits to the island: the living embodiment of British imperialism is joyously greeted by the former victims of that imperialism. Garis, Leslie (1990-10-07). "Through West Indian Eyes". New York Times on the Web . Retrieved 2016-03-22. Kev: Ri-ght, so she's complaining about tourists, is she? Bet she'd whine even more if they didn't bring in the cash for some gift shop tat. Oblomov: Yeah, honestly. She does, and her ire is very much directed at the English. How we were snooty, rude, condescending, had a superiority complex. How the behaviour was so normalised it was seen as our country's 'bad manners' rather than the actual racism it was.She speaks of the old Antigua she remembers, named, built, run by the badly behaved English who imposed their ways and built things that would exclude locals or take from them, she removes all politeness and false exteriors and says the things that nobody ever says, let alone puts them into print. Kincaid describes the way that so much of the country circles around the tourists and such tourists often don't want to face the actual country, they want the beaches and vacation. Truly, 50% of Antigua and Barbuda's GDP is tourism based. This statistic feels unbelievable because it's just such a big number and that really does mean many people will be dealing solely with tourists. This forces the country to work in a specific way. Ali ostaviću to trenutno po strani, iako tema nije uopšte beznačajna. Kinkejd piše vešto i izrazito nenakinđureno. Dobra joj je jezička ekonomija – nema repova i nema rasipanja. I uprkos tome što je u pitanju esej, čita se kao sasvim kratak roman, u kome je glavni junak upravo sama Antigva i njena postkolonijalna sudbina. Antigva, kao i mnoga karipska ostrva, jeste raj, ali raj nikad nije raj svojim žiteljima, već samo putnicima. Kritička oštrica uperena prema turizmu je ovde izvrsna; otvorivši svoju knjigu pripovedanjem u drugom licu, odnosno, obraćanjem hipotetičkom drugom, Kinkejd mapira ključne segmente susreta putnika sa ovom ostrvskom zemljom, pokazujući kako se vizura groteskno izobličuje. Postepeno, a sa lakoćom uporedivom sa slušanjem uzbudljivih sagovornika, povećava teret. Antigva od božanstvene destinacije postaje prostor suštinski određen svojom kolonijalnom prošlošću i sadašnjošću. Dok nacionalna biblioteka oštećena u zemljotresu ne može da se renovira više od decenije, najvažnija ostrvska banka, koja je, inače, produžetak nekadašnje kompanije za trgovinu robljem, samo nastavlja da umnožava kapital. Antigva ima zdravstvenu zaštitu (tri lekara), a sam ministar zdravlja bi prvim avionom otišao za Njujork, ako mu nešto, daleko bilo, fali. Antigva ima vojsku, ali ta vojska je u najboljem slučaju ukras za usputna događanja. Antigva je, nažalost, nedovršen državni i društveni projekat, o kome, kao što je to inače slučaj sa malim, ostrvrskim zemljama, ni ne razmišljamo kao o samostalnim entitetima, a, istini za volju, čini se da ni njihove državne strukture ne razmišljaju na taj način. Kev: Not directly, but it's always implied, isn't it- If you say 'projecting' one more sodding time, your next cider's going in as an enema. S tim u vezi, osim političke dimenzije dela, nimalo manja nisu značajna razmatranja vezana za malu sredinu. Šansa da je Kinkejd čula za Radomira Konstantinovića je maltene nepostojeća, ali krajnje je interesantno da su im neka razmišljanja identična. Koga zanima može uporediti šta ovde, a šta u „Filozofiji palanke” piše o tome kako mala sredina doživljava protok vremena.

urn:lcp:smallplace00kinc_0:epub:3ce9fdfd-96d3-4379-a2b8-24be0a541ef1 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier smallplace00kinc_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t2v41v05m Isbn 9780374527075 Kev: I really hate how whenever you talk about our history, you concentrate on the crap stuff. You're a masochist. I mention a funny Churchill quote and you have to bring up how he was sexist, or rascist, or the Bengal famine. You have to bring the mood down, don't you?So, maybe it takes one to know one. Jamaica Kincaid's 'A Small Place' seems to me to be a scream of rage and frustration over her past and because of the intentionally created decrepitude and degradation of Antigua. Like me, she has good reasons to scream in rage. Perhaps her heightened sense of unending injustice is more noble than mine, idk, too, as her agony is about the overall legacy of slavery rather than a subset like mine of child abuse or gender inequality. She certainly writes better than I can. That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.” A Small Place is an unusual novel in that it is written in the second-person perspective, placing the reader, "You", as a tourist who has arrived in Antigua, with Kincaid's voice, the narrator, speaking to you directly. The narrator is a unique force in the story: sometimes, Kincaid merely describes the scenery; sometimes, she provides her own outlook on it; but she also aggressively targets the reader, asking them critical, thought-provoking questions. For this reason, A Small Place is a book that does not merely seek to tell a story, but also fully and completely immerse the reader in the scenes of Antigua. Oblomov: The 2008 crash was over a decade ago and we're still feeling the effects of that. You think seven years is that long a time after centuries of colonial rule? The new Antigua, self-ruled, run by corrupt yet elected rulers, all of whom have had US green cards and most with Swiss bank accounts, each foreign investment has a suspect story attached to it.

If you're thinking, "wow, I'm so sad I can't travel this year," this book is a fantastic read because it will make you rethink the entire tourism industry both in Antigua and in general.Oblomov: You've literally wished death on every country in the Middle East for 9/11, you hypocrite. Never in my life have I been so perturbed by something I read than by Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. I love and hate this book at the same time. This is the kind of book that makes me uncomfortable with myself, and forces me to think about my world in a way that I don't like to admit. Maybe that’s why I lean more towards not liking this book. Maybe there is some uncomfortable deficiency within myself that she brings to the surface like an angry boil. But I don’t think that is wholly the reason. This book is beautiful, poetic, and deeply personal, but as an intellectual, I feel like it is also a work of flawed sensationalism. Jamaica Kincaid is an angry woman, with an unchanneled misanthropic perspective. It is astounding that such an unstructured, bombastic piece of ill-thought out, almost drunken, rambling would ever be published.