A Small Place - Kincaid

            Kincaid’s entrance to this book was something anyone can relate to. It was funny, not in a literal or non-literal sense, but in a sense that I (as a tourist and as a native) have had those exact conversations in my head.

            In Tuscaloosa where my family has lived for generations upon generations, I think of how different Tuscaloosa looks to me in comparison to students and especially tourists. How they come here, take over the city for an entire day (or weekend, or semester), and leave it trashed, downing in leftover beer, for the city (and tax payers’ dollars) to clean up.  My Tuscaloosa doesn’t look like game day.

Even being raised in a small town that splits the Alabama-Tennessee border, I think of the disruption any high-dollared lottery brings to my little town and the surrounding ones. Unwanted tourists, who barge into a town that isn’t theirs, take over restaurants and convenience stores that aren’t theirs, and act as if we should be thankful for their mere presence because they brought precious tax dollars that will one day pay for my (or my kid’s) education.

But from a tourist standpoint, I’ve visited cities and places and wandered in awe of how these people live in places like New York City, Floridian beaches and Colorado mountains. Am I, a tourist skier, a burden to the Colorado homeowner?  

            These are minor examples that honestly can’t even be used in comparison, but Kincaid’s entry gave me a sense of both sides immediately. I could relate (in my very Western sense) and see what Kincaid was trying to get to. What life does the maid, cook, taxi driver, convenient store owner, etc. lead outside of serving angry, tired, frustrated tourists who are oblivious to their surroundings (in both a historical sense and literal sense). She’s also making the larger statement of vacationing for a tourist is work for the native; indulgence for the tourist is despair for the native. Kincaid points out at the end of this section that even the tourist, at the end of the vacation, returns home in need of another vacation or another day of rest.

            Moving on, I read the rest of the book from a tourist standpoint. Because Kincaid was so purposeful in writing the introduction in a way to frame the tourist side and the native side, I felt she wanted the reader to not dismiss it immediately after the page turned. I also think it was helpful to enter the book from this mind frame because I was aware of my ignorance of Antiguan culture and history, so I tried to distance my Western mind frame in the reading.

            The most interesting part I found from the entire book was this: “But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue” (30). This quote saddened me in a way that the initial introduction to the book hadn’t. This land, these people that were left with no native genealogy, no history (outside of that written by it’s oppressors), no religion, nothing that was entirely theirs: they were orphans. Orphans who were still, although “free,” silenced by their oppressors because of the lack of native language.

            This continued to frustrate me because Kincaid spoke so much of the library and the ill image of its perpetual non-repair. Kincaid sought for the library, a building literally meant to contain collections of literature and history (that distort and erase Kincaid’s history while glorifying its own), to be rebuilt. Yet, Kincaid failed to inform the reader of the history that would have filled it (and the history that would have been erased from it). Because I am ignorant to the history of Antigua, her focus on the library in particular intrigued my want to know the background she in particular came from.

            Kincaid’s perspective is an interesting one that opened my eyes to the less-Western sense of tourism (and put my disdain for tourism in the U.S. to shame). But because she failed to inform the reader of the histories behind the tourism industry and government grievances, I found the book – though interesting and informative – to resemble a monologue of issues rather than a solid argument. 

That being said, I would like to point out that I just finished reading Portnoy’s Complaint, which actually is a monologue of complaints so I'm not sure how that may have affected my reading.