A Small Place By Jamaica Kincaid

The obvious clues on the corruptness of a nation can sometimes be overlooked when placed behind a beautiful scenery. The library, a place of learning is also the place in which a nation keeps track of its history and other types of information. When it is left to rot after its destruction with the promise to be repaired decades ago, it says a lot for what sort of government or powerful individuals think about a place that stores knowledge. It paints a picture of an authority that lies and cares not of the condition of its society. In the short creative nonfiction book titled A Small Place, the author, Jamaica Kincaid, sheds light onto the cruel realities of corruption surrounding the tourist industry, Antiguan government, and troubles left

By doing this, Kincaid gets straight to the point and pulls in a reader’s interest so that she can lay out her reasons for believing the debauchery occurring on the island is in clear view of the public through an important building such as a library. She uses imagery to illustrate how the wooden walls are “painted a shade of yellow that is beautiful to people like me” and through this phrasing creates the thought that the idea of what is “beautiful” to one person is completely different to another person. In this case, the author is referring to the culture of the native people of Antigua and not the foreigners and tourists who invade her home. Kincaid speaks of wealthy outsiders who “build enormous (for Antigua), ugly (for Antigua), concrete buildings in Antigua’s capital, St. John’s” (11). These concrete buildings are typical in America and look completely out of place on the island of Antigua. The dull gray colors contrast from the bright and vibrant assortment of colors that the natives enjoy. The old library is “wide,” “big,” and “always open” just like how the island of Antigua used to be, before foreigners stole their land. This sharply contrasts the makeshift library that is too small to hold much of anything. The author’s description of the

In the above block quote, Kincaid talks about how her people would congregate like “communicants at an altar” to the library into order to read about the “fairy tale” the “beautiful” colonizers had the “right to do the things [they] did.” Due to the wording these sentences, the author depicts a dream-like image of the natives learning about the history of their colonizers and their “beauty” that is often proved to be quite the opposite in every experience these people ever had with the English. The author claims that the foreigners “were un-Christian-like,” “small-minded,” and behaved “like animals” (29). In the library, the people of Antigua have access to knowledge of what the colonizers have caused them, but due to the condition that the government has left the building after the earthquake, no one will be able to learn about methods in which they can change their nation’s infrastructure. The wealthy outsiders will continue to abuse the island through bribes and loans, eventually driving away the Antiguans from their own island. They are “millions of people” who are “made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to things excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue” (31). By refusing to repair their source of knowledge, the government is severing the people’s link to