Jamaica Kincaid A Small Place Analysis

Tourism behaves similarly to colonialism to an extent. In A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid, she presents to the reader that her beautiful home country, Antigua is being regulated and profited by tourism. Consequently, the money the country profits from tourism does not necessarily go to the locals, but to the big corporations. She accomplishes this by utilizing second person narration, expressing her disgust of tourists to the reader. Furthermore, through the use of figurative language her tone and diction depicts how incredibly sarcastic she is when describing a tourist. Tourism is not necessarily a complete form of colonialism, but it perpetuates common characteristics. The first characteristic they share is capitalism, the money made from

This is significant because the constant use of the word “unreal” to describe Antigua hints at the fact that the Antiguans reality is actually a fantasy. To elaborate, they are creating a facade to the tourist to portray how happy and careless they are about their lives when in reality they are in detrimental circumstances. To expand, this demonstrates how Antigua has transcended into something ingenuine and how disconnected the author is from her home country. The usage of the word “unreal” is very prevalent to an extent, “Sometimes the beauty of it seems unreal…no real sky could be that shade of blue..no real day and no real night could be that evenly divided’ (79). Connecting this back to how the Antiguans create a facade for the tourist. They create a facade to the tourist so that the tourist in embelled in their circus--their “Angels from the Realm”. The Antiguas have ingrained in their mind that their purpose is to entertain the tourist. They make a lot of revenue solely from tourism therefore, they think that their purpose is to attract more tourist.It seems as though Antigua has depending solely on tourism for their economic growth therefore they feel as though they have to cater to the tourist. They have no other reliance in making

By doing this, it enables the reader to fathom how Antiguans view tourists from their perspective and not from the colonialist perspective. Kincaid imposes tourism in a sarcastic manner entailing from her tone, “An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this…” (17). Kincaid directly speaking to the reader, they are able to understand and acknowledge her feelings. By doing so, it evokes emotion therefore the reader feels shame and empathy. Furthermore, by using second person narration it allows the the tone to be more obvious and acknowledged by the reader, “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”