Jamaica Kincaid on the colonization of the mind

A Small Place

Jamaica Kincaid, 1988

Key words

Colonialism, post-colonialism, racism, education, epistolary, second person POV

The past isn’t over

Last year, my students and I read A Small Place as part of a unit on post-colonial literature. Initially, I chose it for A) its slimness and B) because it is a rare use of the sustained second-person literary point of view (POV).

Reading and rereading it with the kids, I gained a deep appreciation of Kincaid’s coruscating insights on colonialism, education and the universality of self-deception.

Was it a challenging read for 13 and 14-year-olds?

Absolutely. Which they tackled with aplomb.

They deserve to be challenged: they face a challenging world. Appropriately designed and presented learning challenges give them a secure opportunity to explore the unfamiliar and tackle intractable problems.

The big idea

Colonialism never ended, Kincaid argues, it just got a self-actualizing makeover.

“If you go to Antigua as a tourist… this is what you will see…. Since you are a tourist, a North American or European – to be frank, white – and not an Antiguan black… with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap clothes and food for relatives, you move through customs swiftly… your bags are not searched… you emerge from customs into the hot, clean air: immediately you feel cleansed, immediately you feel blessed (which is to say special); you feel free.”

By turns ruthless and resigned – almost compassionate – Kincaid explicates the myriad ways in which the white tourist’s (any white tourist’s) sense of freedom is planking thrown over a historical quicksand of exploitation.

“A tourist is an ugly human being,” she writes, in the tone of a kindly physician breaking bad news. “You are not an ugly person ordinarily… From day to day, you are a nice person.”

But niceness is not a palliative for those living in the ruins of a past they did not choose. Good intentions may have paved the roads, but they raised hell.

Although written, as Kincaid notes in the preface, as a letter to William Shawn – her editor at The New Yorker (and, later, father-in-law) – it is hard to imagine she didn’t expect a larger audience. Much like Oscar Wilde’s prison letter De Profundis, her letter’s ferocious artistry and moral acuity burns to be witnessed.

A Small Place zooms out to give a glimpse of Antigua’s history: “We lived on a street named after an English maritime criminal, Horatio Nelson, and all the other streets around us were named after some other English maritime criminals.”

Education, like the built environment, was shaped (warped is perhaps the more accurate word) by colonialism. The young Northern Irish headmistress, Kincaid recalls, “told these girls over and over again to stop behaving as if they were monkeys just out of trees.”

Kincaid’s point is less about racism, ipso facto, than about the impossible psychological position of the colonized under colonization; of the unfree in any system of exclusion or apartheid.

“No one ever dreamt that the word for any of this was racism… We thought these people were so ill-mannered… We thought they were un-Christian-like; we thought they were small-minded; we thought they were like animals, a bit below human standards as we understood those standards to be. We felt superior to all these people; we thought that perhaps the English among them who behaved this way weren’t English at all, for the English were supposed to be civilised, and this behaviour was so much like that of an animal, the thing we were before the English rescued us, that maybe they weren’t from the real England at all but from another England, one we were not familiar with.”

The mental contortions required of the citizens of a small, subjugated place are as corrosive as colonial violence is destructive. Antigua was no longer a colony when Kincaid was writing, but it blundered under the burdens of the past.

J’accuse: “Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all people like me seem to have learnt from you is how to imprison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts?”

The easy conclusion, lest you jump, is not where Kincaid arrives; she leads the reader someplace simultaneously damning and hopeful:

“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 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.”

My take

Colonialism, racism and the legacies of oppression are alive and operational, making A Small Place as politically relevant and urgent in 2023 as it was in 1988. It is striking proof that one can wholly condemn subjugation without denying the agency of the subjugated.

Kincaid’s perspective and use of language make her polemic a literary delight. Epicures of words would do well to spend time in her world.

Their take

“At turns elegaic and vicious, self-pitying and proud, this electrifying work is a new classic in the literature of hate–and of love, for a tortured land and for the possibility, albeit dim, of changing things.” – Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 1988

Must read for

Those who want to understand how marginalization shapes identity; rhetoric buffs

Read also

• Everything is Now: New and Collected Stories by Michelle Cliff

• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

• Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka