A Small Place Study Guide

Jamaica Kincaid was born in the Antiguan capital of St. John’s while the country was still under colonial British rule. Despite the relative poverty in which Kincaid grew up, she received a high-quality education from the island’s colonial British schools and from her mother, who was a well-read and intelligent woman. When Kincaid was nine years old, her mother and step-father had three sons in quick succession. After this Kincaid felt increasingly isolated and neglected by her family, especially her mother. When she was 17, her parents withdrew her from school and sent her to the United States to work as a nanny with the intention that she would send her paychecks back to Antigua to support the family. Instead, Kincaid kept her own pay and began taking classes at a community college. Eventually, she found work in journalism, writing for teen magazines, New York City’s alternative paper The Village Voice, and Ms. magazine before landing at the New Yorker. As she began writing for publication, Kincaid adopted her pen name as a way to create a new, freer identity for herself. She married Allen Shawn, the son of the New Yorker’s chief editor, in 1979. The couple had two children before divorcing in 2002. Many of her novels, including Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990) draw on events from Kincaid’s own life. Both her fiction and nonfiction frequently explore themes of colonialism and imperialism, gender and sexuality, class and power, mother-daughter relationships, and gardening. In 1992, she was appointed professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the English Department at Harvard University. She lives—and grows a luxurious garden—in Vermont. 

Because it deals with Antigua—among the first Caribbean islands to be settled by European colonizers, A Small Place engages with a broad swath of history, dating back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1493. Other key moments in the island’s history include the arrival of the British in 1632, the British abolition of the trade in enslaved people in 1807 and the emancipation of people formerly enslaved by the British in 1830. More recently, the Lesser Antilles Earthquake of October 1974 destroyed many buildings, including the beautiful colonial library, in the Antiguan capital city. However, more recent history animates much more of the book’s consideration of the long legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. Antigua became a Commonwealth state in 1967, and it was formally granted its independence from British rule in 1981. Prime Minister Vere Cornwall Bird came to power in 1967 and led the country until 1994 with a brief period of political and physical exile from 1971 to 1976 while George Walter and the Progressive Labour Movement controlled the government. Coming as it did in the early 1980s, Antiguan independence fit into a decade of post-colonial and neo-imperialist political shifts worldwide. These include the final stages of the apartheid regime in South Africa, where a brutal system of institutionalized racial segregation that allowed the descendants of white colonizers to oppress and terrorize the country’s Black citizens between the 1940s and the 1990s. Closer to Antigua, the book invokes the situations of Grenada and Haiti. In Haiti, decades of political and social upheaval driven by the forces of imperialism gave way in the 1950s to the Duvalier Dynasty, in which one family seized and held political power through the 1980s, oppressing Haitians and enriching themselves through their corrupt government.

A Small Place offers an extended narrative exploration of long-term effects of colonialism and slavery on former British colony Antigua. It also weaves some of Jamaica Kincaid’s own personal history into the broader narrative of her country’s past. In these ways, it serves as a narrative nonfictional companion to her novels Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990). Annie John describes the coming of age of its Antiguan protagonist, intelligent and precocious Annie John, while Lucy follows a young woman from the West Indies whose departure from her homeland (strongly implied to be Antigua) gives her the critical distance necessary to consider and understand her relationship to her homeland, her family, and the historical forces of colonialism and racism. Kincaid’s work also fits into broader imaginative and literary criticisms of colonialism, especially in the West Indies. In particular, her extended musings on the ironies and challenges of critiquing the oppressor in the oppressor’s language foreshadow Santa Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s prize-winning epic poem Omeros, which loosely borrows the plot of Homer’s Iliad and the poetic style of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Walcott applies these to a Caribbean context to explore the burdens of colonialism and the way that colonialism and the legacy of slavery fragment the identities the descendants of enslaved and oppressed people. Finally, Kincaid’s work connects with more recent Caribbean diaspora writers publishing books like Marie-Elena John’s 2006 Unburnable, which traces the family history of Lillian Baptiste, a native-born Dominican who had emigrated to escape a familial—and cultural—history of betrayal, murder, and vengeance.