Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place

Antigua is a land of blue skies and waters, where the white sand sticks between your toes and you laugh as a wave splashes you in the face. But underneath all that beauty and seemingly paradisiacal lifestyle there lies a harsh and bitter story behind what Antigua is and how it is viewed by people inhabiting it. By emotionally explaining her ideas on Antigua 's role, Jamaica Kincaid, author of A Small Place, takes her audience on a journey of a direct relationship with the reader, thoughts on personal experiences, and factual evidence.

This book can be viewed through lenses that describe ways the book presents its claim. A post-colonial lens can be applied. This deals with how the events in her story were shaped by colonialism. Kincaid has strong negative views towards colonialism because of how it changed her native island. She hates the destruction and deprivation

Next, this relates to the next lens, which is reader response. There is an extremely strong reader response here: it makes you think and you can have mixed reactions. She intends to offend and make her point clear. Reader response is a huge part of her writing. Social issues and opinions are prevalent in a lot of her work. Jamaica wishes to provoke and enlighten. By analyzing her way of writing, we can apply this to the intention behind her claim. She talks in the second person continuously, using the words "you" and "the tourist" to describe the reader, Americans, and Europeans. It shows her disdain and outright attack on what she imagines North Americans and Europeans as. Her direct language to the reader can be aggravating and personal, which, when mixed with her emotion, can be a very effective form of literary communication. She says "an ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing..." (Kincaid 17). She feels no shame and won 't apologize. Firing up an audience to get a reaction is a great way to get a reaction, and she does