The library in the Antiguan capital of St. John’s symbolizes Jamaica Kincaid’s ambivalent feelings about colonialism in her native land of Antigua. The old, colonial library was a grand, peaceful, and beautiful place which nurtured Kincaid’s love of reading when she was a child. In this way, the library seems to suggest her respect for the British or a belief in the superiority of their culture. This is especially true in comparison to the current library which, under the auspices of the independent Antiguan government, sits in an ugly warehouse and doesn’t take proper care of its books. Yet, while Kincaid on one level seems to yearn for the order and culture of the colonial government, she traces the current disregard for the library and the educational and cultural values it suggests to the lessons that native Antiguans learned from their colonial overlords. Thus, the library both allows Kincaid to acknowledge the culture that shaped her while also giving her the critical distance necessary to analyze the negative effects of colonialism on herself, the Antiguan people, and other formerly enslaved and colonized people around the world.
Library Quotes in A Small Place
You have brought your own books with you, and among them is one of those new books about economic history […]explaining how the West […] got rich: the West got rich not from the free (free—in this case meaning got-for-nothing) and then undervalued labour, for generations, of the people like me you see walking around you in Antigua but from the ingenuity of small shopkeepers in Sheffield and Yorkshire and Lancashire, or wherever; and what a great part the invention of the wristwatch played in it […] (isn’t that the last straw; for not only did we have to suffer the unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction to be had from “We made you bastards rich” is taken away too, and so you needn’t let that slightly funny feeling you have from time to time about exploitation, oppression, domination develop into full-fledged unease, discomfort; you could ruin your holiday.
But if you saw the old library, situated as it was, in a big, old wooden building painted a shade of yellow that is beautiful to people like me, with its wide verandah, its big, always open windows, its rows and rows of shelves filled with books, its beautiful wooden tables and chairs for sitting and reading, […] the beauty of us sitting there like communicants at an altar, taking in, again and again, the fairy tale of how we met you, your right to do the things you did, how beautiful you were, are, and always will be; if you could see all of that in just one glimpse, you would see why my heart would break at the dung heap that now passes for a library in Antigua.
(In Antigua today, most young people seem almost illiterate. On the airwaves where they work as news personalities, they speak English as if it were their sixth language. Once, I attended an event at carnival time called a “Teenage Pageant.” In this event, teenagers […] paraded around on a stadium stage singing pop songs […], reciting poems they had written about slavery […], and generally making asses of themselves. What surprised me most about them was […] how stupid they seemed, how unable they were to answer in a straightforward way, and in their native tongue of English, simple questions about themselves. In my generation, they would not have been allowed on the school stage, much less before an audience in a stadium.)
I then went to see a woman whose family had helped to establish the Mill Reef Club […] who was very active in getting the old library restored […] After I mentioned the library to her, the first thing she told me was that she always encouraged her girls and her girls’ children to use the library, and by her girls she meant grownup Antiguan women (not unlike me) who work in her gift shop as seamstresses and saleswomen. She said to me then what everybody in Antigua says sooner or later: The government is for sale; anybody from anywhere can come to Antigua and for a sum of money can get what he wants […] I could see the pleasure she took in pointing out to me the gutter into which a self-governing—black—Antigua had placed itself.
Library Symbol Timeline in A Small Place
