Daniel Apatiga
Reading Response #13/14
11/17/2014
The accusatory tone of the narrator affects the reader’s self-perception when visiting other countries in a positive aspect; it causes him/her to rethink what it means to be viewed as an outsider, essentially. The narrator’s accusatory remarks are founded on the narrator’s observations for the most part on white, typically European and American tourists, despite the novella being a fiction. And these observations that the narrator makes on a few institutions that are set up to create a sense of security, like airport customs, are defamiliarized to the reader when he/she realizes airport customs make it difficult for non-whites, who are considered untrustworthy, to be delayed and be abused—unless of course, one has experienced discrimination. Some of the observations of the androgynous narrator are only half the story in my opinion: “you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched. You emerge from customs into the hot clean air…” as not all white Europeans experience this level of ease in going through customs and most definitely, not people of radically different ethnicities (page 5, Kincaid).
Given the rich history of Antigua, I notice then that the novella’s initial dislike for English domination that is interwoven into the novel’s structure is elaborated on greatly: in regards to the Mill Reef Club, they “ who seemed not to like Antiguans (black people) at all, for the Mill Reef club declared itself completely private” (page 27, Kincaid). This dislike is often in loud complaints, but the 2nd person mode is omitted: “It’s possible that when [the English] saw how rich banking made them, they gave themselves a good beating for ending slave trading (for surely they would have opposed that)” (page 26, Kincaid). In the USA, a private resort would be exclusive of a lower class, unless one still lives in a racist community; if there are racial discrimination, there are also class disparities to complicate the matter. Kincaid’s novel has a narrator who changes tone when using the 2nd person towards the end of the novella.
At the end of the novella, the narrator refrains from accusing the reader of injustices against Antigua almost completely. Only a reference to former colonial domination is expressed, but the focus is clearly on how beautiful a country and innocent a people Antiguans are. Also, in the déneoument, its tone is almost that of begging the reader to visit as though the last chapter were a travel brochure, and so the narrator in a sense asks for forgiveness for his/her prior accusatory remarks.
Since being a tourist and being a non-tourist is natural for every human being to experience, depending on where you are and have been, we can all relate to looking like a fool and an idiot. Jordan’s essay, “Report from the Bahamas,” suggests that looking like a tourist does not necessarily imply one is from another country and is a tourist, rather, one might be a foreigner who dislikes the government. In the setting of A Small Place or any place for that matter, one might be from another part of the country who is exploring other regions of his/her country, which is still technically a tourist. Xenophobia, which is hardly addressed as seriously in this novel as it was in Welcome to our Hillbrow, seems to be rampant in the narrator’s diction that is against Europeans and their ways. I am almost empathetic to them, after reading this novel; however, having a dad who’s from a third world country and visiting Mexico myself, I can see how unfair things are when one is privileged and others are barely scraping by due to the lack of opportunities that we are blessed with in this country. The novella paints the situation in Antigua as hopeless due to corruption, Europeans who exert their power, and Lybians/Syrians who buy properties; but, the desire to climb out of their economic depravity is unaddressed. Rather, we read a frustrated narrator who rants about her legitimate concerns: corruption, unethical/morally bankrupt ministers, and pointless institutions such as the “ministry of culture.”
Racial prejudice in the novella, for me, was lightly touched upon. Between the English and Antiguan sides of the matter, such as: the narrator’s disdain for the private resort and the English and the European’s desire to colonize in underhanded ways like by building condos and buying land. Xenophobia on the part of the Antiguans exists with respect to the English, Libyans, Syrians, and Europeans in general for colonizing and using the Antiguans’ land. The novella also says in multiple places that these others, for instance, people at the Mill Reef Club did “not like Antiguans” (page 27, Kincaid).
The stylistic choice on the part of Kincaid to include instances of the parenthesis seems to denote, for me as a reader, instances of sarcasm and moments in which the narrator is sure that the reader needs to know something, yet, doesn’t know it and often it’s in the form of a geography lesson: “(the size of Antigua)” on page 9; “(while at the same time surrounded by a sea and an ocean—the Caribbean Sea on one side, the Atlantic Ocean on the other)” on page 9 . As for sarcasm, these instances most closely aligns itself with my opinion: “(which is to say special)” on page 5; perhaps more literally, “(or, worse, Europe) on page 4; and at the beginning of one of the chapters, the narrator complains about the unhappiness of the English people in general in one long parenthetical paragraph on pages 23-24. I find these statements helpful, because they offer a glimpse into the narrator’s own bitterness that are somewhat unrelated to the love-our-country-Antigua moral of the story. It exposes narrator as if to say, hey, I’m not perfect and perhaps I’m wrong, but don’t take what I say with a grain of salt.
As I mentioned earlier, I think the Mill Reef Club is a bad instance in which language such as, “private,” is meant as a method of exclusion, which symbolizes the people who-work-at-the-resort’s antagonism and racial prejudice against native Antiguans. Another instance is that of the rich Libyans and Syrians who buy land near the beach and build large condominiums who dirty their landscape, according to the narrator. While this is not my own prejudiced perspective, it does symbolize a new sort of colonial presence in which people from another part of the world build architecturally unsound and unharmonious buildings that conflict with the Antiguan’s own sense of archecture, according to the narrator.
I think the line, “the people in a small place can have no interest in the exact,” sums up the narrator’s argument: Antigua, which is a small place coincidently, has many people who don’t know these foreigners who visit and the Antiguan’s own sense of history and place isn’t necessarily as nuanced. The narrator concedes a lot from prior statements regarding the prejudice of the Europeans and North Africans who are greedy. Also, since the beginning of the new section about people “in a small place” on page 52 seems to apply to anyone who’s from a small place—could be a rural village, or a someone who has never been outside of his/her state, let alone, country. The theme seems to be on limitations by experience and not necessarily memory, in my opinion. But, connecting it to Rushdie’s ideas of memory from “Imaginary Homelands,” his memory is closely connected to photographs, which he states on page 9 of his essay. In relation to A Small Place, memory for the narrator is something it relies upon to push the narrative forward. There is not really any concrete characters in the novella, rather, little anecdotes from her memory that all seem disjointed from one another, such as the ministry who is corrupt in contrast with all the good ministers who lived on to be “taxi drivers.” Also, the mystery of the refrigerator that electrocuted intruders, which killed ambassadors to Libya. The narrator hardly mourns their deaths, but if I remember correctly, this is all memory from the narrator’s past. Either that or the narrator must have read a news reel. The narrator includes a lot of political criticism in the novella.
