Free Write Exercise on "A Small Place" by Kincaid
Free Write Exercise on "A Small Place" by Kincaid
“Let me just show you how you looked to us” (Kincaid 35). That is exactly what Jamaica Kincaid expressed, with malice, in A Small Place. The “you” is identified as being the reader, a tourist, someone who travels in the pursuit of pleasure. Kincaid feels strong resentment towards the tourist who comes to Antigua, a place where Antiguans suffer and want to escape. The natives suffer and slave in order to provide pleasure for the tourist. While the natives are trapped on their tiny island, living in poor conditions, working to make the tourist happy, they wish that they could be “you.” But because they can’t, they feel resentment. “They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself” (Kincaid 19).
The “you” created in A Small Place is as the reader. The reader may never have been to Antigua and visited, but Kincaid wants to put the reader in the shoes of a tourist in Antigua. By putting the reader in the shoes of a tourist in Antigua, Kincaid can express how she feels. While discussing in class, many students identified with the “you” only in the sense that they were not native to Antigua and that they are tourists at times. Whether or not they’ve ever been a tourist in Antigua doesn’t matter to Kincaid; she wants to put them in the shoes of someone who is coming to Antigua for pleasure. Using the word “you” to address the reader/ “tourist”, who in the book are both the same person, is more personal. Kincaid gets the reader’s attention and make them understand by using the word “you,” instead of “tourist,” to make it feel more personal. It seems almost as if she is actually speaking to you when she uses the word “you” in the book to address the reader. “By identifying with ‘you’ personally, I feel that...