Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Small Place, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Slavery, Colonialism, and Independence
Racism and White Supremacy
Tourism and Empathy
The Local and The Global
Rot and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
The book addresses the reader directly, casting them as a tourist and describing an imaginary trip to Antigua. As the tourist, you arrive at an airport named after the Antiguan Prime Minister at the time of the book’s publication, Vere Cornwall Bird. You might feel surprised that he would choose to put his name on an airport instead of a school or hospital, but only because you haven’t yet seen the state of Antiguan schools, hospitals, or other public services.
The book spends a lot of time considering the moral emptiness of the tourism industry, so it’s disconcerting for readers to be cast into the role of “the tourist” in the first section. The contrast between the tourist’s freedom to travel and hints about the rot and corruption that characterize the island’s political system creates a distinct sense of unease.
Themes
From the air, you, the tourist, might consider Antigua beautiful. Tourists like you chose to come here from Europe or America to enjoy the sunshine, since it hardly ever rains. You will leave soon, so you don’t worry about what it might be like to live here permanently, in a land surrounded by oceans yet parched for useable fresh water, because it almost never rains.
The dry, warm climate that makes Antigua attractive to tourists makes it inhospitable for residents. The moral bankruptcy of tourism arises in part from the fact that tourists stay in a place for such a short time that they can ignore (or not realize) the difficulties a place’s climate, politics, or history creates for its inhabitants.
Themes
When the plane lands, you, the tourist, disembark. You pass through customs seamlessly, unlike the native Antiguans returning from abroad with boxes of cheap clothes to give to their relatives. As you step outside, you feel cleansed and purified by the hot, dry air. You hail a taxi to take you to your hotel, and when he quotes a ridiculously high price, you show your travel savvy by asking for the official price list and refusing to pay a cent more. On the ride to your hotel, you notice the difference between the terrible state of the road, the taxi driver’s erratic and dangerous driving, and the taxi itself—a new, high-end Japanese car. Its engine makes a terrible noise, however; despite being designed for unleaded fuel, only leaded gasoline is available on Antigua.
As the tourist takes a taxi to the resort, the book draws a comparison between the ways that white colonizers and slaveowners took advantage of Black people in the past and the ways that modern white tourists continue to extract an unfair bargain from Black workers in the tourism industry. The contrast between the terrible roads and the fancy Japanese cars points toward the corruption and rot that characterize the government and its officers. And the privileges accorded to white travelers over Black citizens show how white supremacy continues to operate in Antigua despite its independence from its former colonizers.
Themes
In fact, most of the cars are new and expensive, although their engines make a terrible grinding sound. You, the tourist, don’t realize that the government makes loans for cars accessible because government ministers own most of the island’s car dealerships. And it won’t occur to you to wonder about this, really, because you are on holiday. You drive past what looks like a public bathroom, only to notice a sign identifying it as a school; you drive thoughtlessly past the hospital. You should know that Antiguans don’t trust the hospital and avoid it at nearly all costs; those who can afford to travel to the United States for healthcare—including the Minister of Health and almost all other government officials—do so. But you don’t.
Pretty much everything the tourist encounters on the taxi ride points toward the rot and corruption of the government, which seems to exist more to improve the lives of government ministers at the expense of normal Antiguans. The tourist’s focus on escaping their mundane life blinds them to the implications of the strange juxtapositions they notice, such as nice cars with bad engines or schools that look like outhouses. The tourist’s ignorance and lack of concern recalls colonizers’ callous attitude toward their subjects and highlights the ugly selfishness of tourism.
Themes
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Luckily, you, the tourist, brought your own books to read, since an earthquake—referred to by native Antiguans including Jamaica Kincaid as “The Earthquake”—hit in 1974, destroying the splendid, graceful, colonial library that used to grace the Antiguan capital. Soon afterward, someone put up a sign promising repair. But you pass it nearly a decade later and no repairs have been made. The sign seems quaint to you, as if the islanders can’t distinguish between 12 minutes, 12 days, and 12 years.
The fact that enriching themselves takes higher priority than repairing the library points toward Antiguan government ministers’ corruption. But the tourist ignores this truth and instead observes a quaint and less-civilized approach to time among the island’s natives that drips with racist condescension. Notably, at this point Jamaica Kincaid’s narrative voice first identifies itself as an Antiguan native—asserting its separation from the tourist/reader.
Themes
Soon after “The Earthquake,” Antigua gained independence from Great Britain. A national holiday marks the date, during which Antiguans go to church and thank a British God for this blessing. But you, the tourist, should not worry about this irony or the permanently damaged library. You have your own books to read, including an economic history describing how the West got rich by economic ingenuity and inventing wristwatches, not by exploiting the free and undervalued labor of enslaved and marginalized people. You shouldn’t ruin your holiday by letting any uncomfortable feelings about oppression or exploitation blossom now.
The destruction of the library—a colonial icon—reminds readers that the island has achieved independence from its former masters. Yet, the failure of the independent government to repair an important cultural and educational institution lays the foundation for Kincaid’s later argument that some of its failures are worse than its fate under colonialism. The fact that the loss of the library doesn’t affect the tourist negatively reminds readers that traveling through but remaining unaffected by a place’s troubles makes tourists morally bankrupt and ugly. Finally, the book that Kincaid imagines the tourist reading shows how white supremacist beliefs gloss over the fact that the societies in the global north—North American and Europe—benefitted from colonialism and slavery but fail to acknowledge or atone for this. As such, Antigua stands as a representative example for all former colonies, colonial subjects, and enslaved people.
Themes
As you, the tourist, pass the Government House, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Parliament Building, and the American Embassy, you feel some pride for your people’s role in helping the Antiguans achieve these modern institutions. Then you pass mansions belonging to immigrants who have enriched themselves by leasing property to the government, drug smugglers, and the mistresses of government officials. You notice that the roads improve in this part of town; the government repaved them for Queen of England’s 1985 visit.
Colonialism and white supremacy have many points of connection. The tourist’s pride in their culture’s contribution to Antiguan society, like democracy, overlooks the island’s brutal history of slavery and oppression. Like the streets improved for the Queen’s visit, these “benefits” are all too often superficial and incomplete. The slaveholders and colonialism of the past have a modern counterpart in foreigners who use their superior monetary wealth to come from the outside and gain control over aspects of Antiguan society and politics.
Themes
By now you, the tourist, feel tired and anxious to get to your hotel. Through the windows in your room, you can see the breathtakingly blue waters of the ocean, the soft white sand of the beaches, and the fat, pastry-fleshed tourists walking there. You imagine the rest of your vacation: basking in the sun, walking on the beach, meeting new people, and eating delicious local foods. Just don’t think about where the sewage wastewater goes. Antigua lacks a functioning sewage-disposal system other than the vastness of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. And don’t think about how the delicious “local” food mostly comes from the United States via plane.
The natural beauty that makes Antigua attractive to tourists contrasts sharply with the decay and corruption the tourist observed on their way to the hotel. Yet this decay remains inescapable: the rot and corruption remain even if the tourist cannot or will not see the sewage in the seawater. Looking out the window at the resort beaches also forces the tourist (and readers) to confront the ugliness of the tourism industry. It requires massive resources (for example, importing delicious foods from elsewhere) that benefit only a few people.
Themes
You, the tourist, may suspect that tourists are ugly. It’s true; they are. This doesn’t mean you’re always ugly. In your normal, day-to-day life, you are nice, appreciated, loved, and others think you’re important. You feel comfortable in your own skin, you enjoy your house with its nice backyard, and you participate in your local communities. But being ordinary in this way requires great effort, so when a feeling of displacement comes over you, you can’t look into yourself to discover its source. Instead, you decide to escape to another place where you can lie on a warm beach, marveling at the colorful, exotic, and ingenious practices of people living in some distant place. And there, you become ugly when you consider these people inferior because their ancestors weren’t as clever as yours.
At this point, the book states one of its main claims: the corruption and moral emptiness of tourism makes tourists into ugly people. While the narrative voice of the book, Jamaica Kincaid, draws this conclusion, she forces readers to reckon with it by casting it as the tourist’s—and readers’—realization. Several things contribute to the tourist’s ugliness, including white supremacy (which causes the white tourist to believe that their privilege comes not from their ancestors’ oppressing and enslaving Black people but from their natural superiority), a lack of connection to the local community, and the voyeuristic enjoyment of quaint—by implication, inferior if not backward—local practices.
Themes
On some level, you, the tourist, realize that the people who live in this place where you come to visit don’t like you. It becomes so exhausting to have to figure out whether the things they tell you are true or lies that you will need to recover from your stint as a tourist when you get home. But it is easy to understand why natives hate tourists: the life of a native is banal and boring. Everyone would like to escape it. But the natives of most parts of the world lack the resources necessary to do so; too poor to live properly in their native country and too poor to escape it, they envy you, the tourist, for your ability to leave and for deriving pleasure and diversion from their banal, inescapable lives.
Tourists exist outside the bounds of community relationships. This sense of freedom makes travel attractive to the tourist. But it also renders tourists untrustworthy in the eyes of locals, who remain bound to their local context. And because tourism requires privilege in the form of excesses financial and time resources, it reinforces the disparity between the largely impoverished and stuck native Antiguans (who descend from enslaved people and colonial subjects) and tourists (who mostly descend from the enslavers and colonizers).
Themes
