72. A Small Place | Jamaica Kincaid
if you go to antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see ..
‘For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?’
Friends,
Just finished this powerful little book by Jamaica Kincaid. I'm surprised I haven't read her before! A beautifully written exploration of Antigua, her homeland, and the lingering legacy of the British colonisation. This was never meant to be a book in fact — it was meant to be a letter to her then editor, William Shawn1, to explain who she was and where she came from. How she was sent away from Antigua at aged sixteen to be a servant in the USA, and what she found when she returned twenty years later.
She writes ‘The tale of beauty and goodness I wanted to write for Mr Shawn, I could not find in me; instead I found my way at the beginning of a road, a way of understanding my world, as it began in 1492.’
The short story, in case you missed it, is that Britain colonised a large part of the West Indies, and Antigua was one of the islands where they built their sugar plantations2. These plantations required many workers, which led (in part) to the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade3.
The reviews once the book was published described Jamaica’s writing as ‘angry, unpleasant and untrue’ to which she responded ‘looking back at it now, I can say with certainty that the intention was to warn me that I should stop saying such things. They did not like me writing that the European adventures into the ‘New World’ were an unprecedented moral error and achieved quite the opposite of proving the superiority of that imaginary construction called ‘The West’.
In just 81 pages, Jamaica manages to summarise Antigua and her history with the most eloquently articulated rage I’ve ever read. I finished the book and read it again immediately, which I very rarely do. In fact, I visited Antigua, many years ago and couldn’t quite put my finger on why I disliked the island so much. I think a combination of the exorbitant tourist prices contradicting the poorer conditions I saw local Antiguans living in and also the weird naming of towns after English people. This book helped me understand where that discomfort came from — highly recommend!
The Antigua that I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see now. That Antigua no longer exists. That Antigua no longer exists partly for the usual reason, the passing of time, and partly because the bad-minded people who used to rule over it, the English, no longer do so. But the English have become such a pitiful lot these days, with hardly any idea what to do with themselves now that they no longer have one quarter of the earth's human population bowing and scraping before them. They don't seem to know that this empire business was all wrong and they should, at least, be wearing sackcloth and ashed in token penance of the wrongs committed, the irrevocableness of their bad deeds, for no natural disaster imaginable could equal the harm they did . . . The English hate each other and they hate England, and the reason they are so miserable now is that they have no place else to go and nobody else to feel better than.
The then editor at the New Yorker.
The wikipedia description under ‘Shipping Sugar’ reads as ‘from William Clark’s Ten views in the island of Antigua, in which are represented the process of sugar making, and the employment of the Negroes’ . Employment. 🤨
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade