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Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place

1129 Words5 Pages

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 …show more content…

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

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It is fair to argue that dissecting one’s own ignorance is not an easy task to accomplish without a great capacity for self-analysis. In her essay “In History”, Jamaica Kincaid appears to criticize herself by exposing her ignorance and vulnerability to her readers. Why would she want to be criticized in this way? Is she challenging her readers by openly inviting them to judge her—yet also hinting at the fact that they should observe their own limitations? Indeed, this is precisely what Kincaid does, and she chooses the perfect theme through which to explore~ the flaws of her thought-process: history.

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The passage “On Seeing England for the First Time” by Jamaica Kincaid uses repetition and figurative language to convey her resentment toward England. Jamaica Kincaid uses repetition in her passage to show how her attitudes toward England as it slowly erased the Antigua’s culture. Kincaid uses the words “Made in England” to express how the English had dominated their culture and their way of life; the Antigua people had been asphyxiated by the English and their culture so aggressively and for so long that they began feeling inferior for not being English which made them try even harder to strive and be just like them because they considered that their main goal, to be able to be part of the magnificence that was the english culture. She goes on to explain how she had to change personal aspects to be more acceptable by her society

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She achieves her aim in highlighting that the prohibitive laws which reduce people like her to mere sexual bodies is a psycho-social remnant of the colonial past. She addresses a number of audiences within the piece, including the human rights community, the governments of both her native Trinidad and Tobago and The Bahamas, and by extension all citizens of the Caribbean and wider world who have been disenfranchised by laws that diminish their humanity and highlight their perceived iniquity. The implication of her essay is clear: if not just any body can be a citizen, the democracy which we have set up is in need of some adjustment. It relates to us because it reminds us that for every time we deny any body rights, we have failed to live up to the principles on which are postcolonial societies are supposed to be

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Culture and Women In “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid and “ How to date a Brown girl, Black girl, White girl or Halfie “ by Junot Diaz, both authors elaborate on culture and how it shapes outlook on women. In Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” a mother enforces her culture’s strong beliefs on her daughter. As the result, she displays her parental authority with a sequence of short commands influenced by her culture. A sense of judgment can be seen in the young girl, after questioning her mothers’ request.

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In Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”, a very short story written in one single paragraph, is advice from a mother to her daughter on how to be a lady. As the reader, I felt overwhelmed reading all of the do’s and don’t’s the narrator tells her daughter “this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on;”(p.320) Perhaps Kincaid purposely wrote this story in one large paragraph to make the reader feel as stressed out with all this information as the daughter did. Although, the narrator never tells a place or time, her advice depicts where this story takes place. For example, “don’t sing Benna in Sunday school; this is how you grow okra; this is how to make a pepper pot;” (p.320-321) evidently,

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The book uses Miss Lou’s own personal writings to tell about her life in Jamaica as well as the culture of the island. In the description of the book on Amazon it says, “Louise Bennett Coverley, 'Miss Lou', has for decades represented the 'face' of Jamaican culture, the essence of what it is to be Jamaican.” Miss Lou served the Jamaican community in many ways. She was a poet, performer,

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No matter how people learn lessons, they will stay with the person forever, and help them through life. In the short stories “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara and “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, there is lesson that a character will learn about life. Although, in “The Lesson”, the teaching was more profound and had a deeper meaning behind it, while “Girl” was a parent forcing instructions on a child in order for the child to learn how a woman is to live. This being said, the teaching is more profound in “The Lesson” than the one given in “Girl.” “Girl” is a short story that teaches that there are many lessons we learn throughout life from parents, or in this case, a single parent.

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In her thought provoking essay “In History,” author Jamaica Kincaid explores the idea of naming things in a historical context through various anecdotes. Kincaid makes a purposeful choice to tell her story non chronologically, beginning with the tale of Columbus, putting her own reflection on plant nomenclature in the middle, and ending with an overview of Carl Linnaeus, the inventor of the plant naming system. This choice gives Kincaid the opportunity to fully vet out each point that she makes, an opportunity she wouldn’t have gotten had she written her essay in chronological order. Throughout each anecdote that Kincaid tells, the theme of names and giving things names is central. Kincaid argues that by giving something a name, one unrightfully takes ownership of it and erases its history.

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Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother signifies a pivotal point in her writing style. Her earlier novels have some semblance of her personal life, but, in this novel, the protagonist Xuela does not share a common experience with that of the author’s life. The mother-obsessed protagonists of her earlier fiction are absent. Instead, we have a seventy year old half-Carib Dominican.

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In the short story “Blackness” by Jamaica Kincaid, the narrator’s consciousness develops through a process of realization that she does not have to choose between the culture imposed on her and her authentic heritage. First, the narrator explains the metaphor “blackness” for the colonization her country that fills her own being and eventually becomes one with it. Unaware of her own nature, in isolation she is “all purpose and industry… as if [she] were the single survivor of a species” (472). Describing the annihilation of her culture, the narrator shows how “blackness” replaced her own culture with the ideology of the colonizers.

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With everyone now aboard the cruise ship, I can’t even hear myself think! The sound of adults and children overwhelmed with excitement and bursting with laughter fills the sea air. “We’ll be departing for the Caribbean islands shortly,” exclaims Captain George Johnson. This is my cue to start making way to my compact yet cozy room to unpack my belongings for my ten day trip.

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In Jamaica Kincaid’s essay “On Seeing England for the First Time”, she clearly voices her animosity towards the one place her whole life surrounded as a child in hopes of persuading her audience into understanding that there is a fine line between dreams and realities. As an adult, Kincaid finally is able to travel to England to witness firsthand what all the hype was about and why her childhood and education happened to be based around the fantasy customs of this country. Noticing that every detail of her life revolved around England, from the way she ate her food to the naming of her family members, Kincaid found her hatred growing more and more. Coming from a British colony, the obsession with England drove Kincaid crazy to the point that she finally traveled there one day. She says, “The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark” (37).

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Yet, she could not stands watching her people get hurt in front of her. Before going to Jamaica, where she clears her mind about the confusion, she had about the whole culture problem that led to her depression, she was

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