The Impossibility of Home in A Small Place

[Adjudicator's Comments: “As soon as we finished reading the entries we both looked at each other and said: ‘This is the one.’ It just stood out so much. The title of the essay is the ‘Impossibility of Home in A Small Place,’ and through analysing Kincaid’s work, Trenton’s essay reignites the conversation around the tourist colonial mentality and the concepts of localized displacement. The work is thoughtful and engaging, as it forces the reader—in this case, the Western reader—to acknowledge the fact that colonialism is never really a thing of the past, but instead a continuing presence that takes on new forms.” – Prof. Lamess Al Ethari, PhD]

Listed on the UW English Department Website.

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As its title might suggest, A Small Place is a work heavily concerned with place – how one defines it, creates it, makes a home of it – while arguing, to a certain extent, how such things are impossible. Through Antigua, Kincaid depicts a post-colonial world in which no one – even the colonisers – can ever feel at home. She characterises Europe, North America and the Caribbean as realms of displacement in which Westerners find themselves caught between two worlds in much the same manner as their colonial subjects, alienated by ‘the other’ and longing for home. This essay will examine the ways in which Kincaid reconceptualises the colonialist project as a symptom of the same feelings of displacedness driving the modern tourist; how this unhomeliness further manifests itself through interactions between neocolonialists and their former subjects; and how Kincaid uses the second person to enact the reality of this displacement within the text itself, through form as well as content. By complicating ideas of home, the text ultimately encourages Western readers to consider the possibility that they, as tourists, are no different from their ancestors – no more enlightened, no less cruel, equally implicated in the continuing realities of colonialism.

One of Kincaid’s more radical statements in the novel is her suggestion that the tragedies of colonialism – genocide, slavery, the seizure of land, the erasure of native cultures – were not perpetuated for profit, or for the sake of themselves, but as a symptom of the English longing for home. She writes, “They should never have left their home … no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that” (Kincaid 24). By characterising the destruction of foreign lands as a direct result of English frustration at not seeing themselves reflected in the diverse cultures of the world, Kincaid reduces the colonialist project to a purely emotional endeavour, one defined by absence: the English citizen, homesick in foreign lands, lashes out in a sort of childish temper-tantrum. While the colonisers have displaced their subjects, so too are they displaced in their movement away from home. As Homi Bhabha suggests, “the petit-european's identity is split as it returns its gaze to an image of home … [it] must repress both a lack (of home, of the displaced origin) and an excess (of the ‘native’ presence pressing on the colonist)” (Baucom 7-8). The colonist is thus displaced in the same manner as the colonial victim: their home exists only as an absence, while their present identity is fragile, dis-unified, and alienated in confrontation with an ‘other’ of opposing race and culture. The colonialist, however – as perpetrator rather than subject – is empowered to inflict their discontent on others. Kincaid thus suggests that the modern discontent of former colonialist powers lies in the fact that they no longer have any outlet (i.e. further exploitation and expansion) to placate this feeling: “The reason they [the English] are so miserable now is that they have no place else to go and no place else to feel better than” (Kincaid 24). While her claim that the English are “miserable” is a disputable generalisation, the point being made is that the problems of colonialism do not come about solely through conflict between oppressor and oppressed but originate with the coloniser. While overt colonialism has disappeared, the realities motivating it – a desire to go somewhere else, to feel better than another – remain. Kincaid thus explains the motivations of the modern tourist through the same lens: “One day … that awful feeling of displacedness comes over you … and though the words ‘I must get away’ do not actually pass across your lips, you make a leap … to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin” (16). Kincaid describes the modern tourist almost exactly as she does the coloniser: as a person defined by displacedness, looking to satisfy their discontent through the practice of visiting foreign lands. By aligning the two roles, she effectively suggests they are one in the same – that the modern tourism industry is merely colonialism by another name, and its practitioners no different than their ancestors. While the motivations of every tourist are varied and individual, her frank presentation of this framework as ‘truth’ serves a rhetorical purpose in that it implicates her white readership, forcing them to closely examine their own motivations and experience of tourism through a neocolonialist lens.

The reality of tourism as presented by Kincaid is that it (as a form of colonialism) enacts the same sense of displacedness that characterised the earlier colonial era: interaction between Western vacationers and their former subjects produces a sense of alienation and displacement felt by both parties, suggesting that any contact-zone between peoples in the post-colonial era is a nowhere-place – one in which it is impossible to ever feel ‘at home.’ This is seen first in the fact that Kincaid characterises the tourist experience as one of alienation, of feeling “uneasy … foolish … a little out of place” (18). The tourist leaves their native country motivated by a feeling of displacedness – a desire to get away – yet when they are confronted with the difference presented by native Antiguans, they encounter that same sense of being out of place. In coming up against the supposed “backwardness” of the non-white ‘other,’ the tourist is merely reminded of the ways in which the place they are visiting does not reflect home (16). As it was in the colonial era (as discussed previously) this sense of displacement is only strengthened through the tourist’s attempts to isolate themselves from it. Kincaid mentions “The Mill Reef Club … built by some people from North America who wanted to live in Antigua and spend their holidays in Antigua but who seemed to not like Antiguans (black people) at all” (27). The Mill Reef Club is its own world within Antigua, designed to isolate white tourists from those who might remind them that Antigua is not a part of the white, Western world; they wish to enjoy the beauty of the island without coming into consciousness of their distance from home. As Baucom writes, exclusive clubs in colonial nations are “attempts to re-inscribe in the external space of the colony the cultural space of England … [the home-country] can be fetishized on the walls of the bar, but the fetish signals its own displacement” (Baucom 8). This isolation of place within a place does not actually solve the problem, but intensifies it, calling attention to the absence. The native Antiguan likewise experiences displacedness in that they are technically ‘at home,’ but despite the end of overt colonisation this home is still occupied by “strangers … refus[ing] to talk to their hosts or have anything human, anything intimate to do with them,” while at the same time attempting to re-inscribe the cultural identity of another place onto that home (Kincaid 27). This is a displacement operating on multiple levels, in which native Antiguans are at once dehumanized and subject to the constant presence of the tourist – an arrangement in which no one feels comfortable. This is doubly true in the reality that exposure to the modern tourist merely reminds their former subjects of the immense gap in wealth between them, as well as the fact that what little they have is the second-hand inheritance of these same people. As Kincaid writes, Antiguans are “too poor to escape the reality of their lives … too poor to live properly in the very place … the tourist want[s] to go” (19), a place whose people have “no motherland, no fatherland, no gods … no tongue” of their own (31). Everything they have is English, and the constant presence of the English prevents them from making Antigua a home for themselves. This is where Kincaid’s book differs from traditional narratives of the contact zone: Antigua is not a place of disparate cultures brushing up against one another – it is a place of absence confronting absence. Antiguans struggle to create a culture of their own while being assaulted on all sides by the influence of Western culture, while the Westerners themselves feel alienated in their distance from home and proximity to foreign peoples. The only possible escape for both parties seems to be to cut off contact entirely. When writing about European motivations for colonialism, she suggests: “There must have been some good people among you, but they stayed home. And that is the point. That is why they are good. They stayed home” (35). Her particular use of the word ‘home’ in this instance seems to imply that displacement only occurs in the spaces of interaction between two peoples; the only way for a place to remain a ‘home’ is if one never leaves it to begin with.

Kincaid’s book is especially effective in communicating the realities of the postcolonial world in that she not only presents displacedness through her content, but constructs her rhetoric around the use of the second person (the ‘you’ voice) to make her reader feel implicated and displaced themselves in their reading of the text. This is seen even in the opening pages, as the book is narrated from the perspective of someone visiting Antigua. She writes, “You disembark your plane. … you are a tourist, a North American or European – to be frank, white … you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs with ease” (Kincaid 4-5). By framing the novel in this way Kincaid effectively forces the role of tourist – of coloniser – onto the reader. The novel is counter-travel literature, yet it is still defined by the same precepts governing the original genre: the reader is taken on a journey, being led through Antigua as if they were a voyeur. While the reader may not be white, and may not travel, by making them embody the role she nevertheless implicates them: for is it not true that most readers of Kincaid’s text bought it for the purpose of consuming minority literatures? To visit a small place as though a tourist, taking novelty in new (i.e. foreign) lives and perspectives? As Lesley Larkin writes, the novel “critique[s] contemporary reading practices for their affinity with global tourism and imperialism” (Larkin 194). As important as it is to read and promote minority literatures, one’s motivations for doing so may lie in conceptions of voyeurism and racism – the very injustices which necessitate the promotion of minority literatures in the first place. This creates a sort of dissonance in the reader in that they presumably agree with Kincaid’s politics but are attacked as though they are ignorant of them. Kincaid writes: “The Caribbean Sea is very big and the Atlantic Ocean even bigger. It would amaze even you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed up” (Kincaid 14). The “even you” of this statement is significant in that it assumes the reader is familiar with the realities of the slave trade, but that ordinarily they would not be amazed at the staggering numbers of lives lost across the Atlantic passage; Kincaid invokes the reader’s supposed background knowledge of slavery only to insinuate that they have at best normalised it, and at worst been complicit in it, placing the reader in a continuum of black exploitation continuing into the neocolonialism of the modern day (as they are, again, consuming black perspectives and lives through the book’s guided tour of Antigua). The ultimate result of Kincaid’s use of the second person is that the private, privileged position of the reader is disrupted: she makes one feel maligned in their own identity and in their own home. When she writes lines such as, “You needn’t let that slightly funny feeling … about exploitation, oppression, domination, develop into full-fledged unease, discomfort,” she does so for the express purpose of evoking discomfort (10). She is forcing the reader into uncomfortable recognition of the realities of colonialism in the same way that encounters with the ‘other’ create discomfort within the context of Antigua as depicted in her novel. Kincaid evokes displacedness in order to communicate the realities of it.

Ultimately, Kincaid effectively paints an image of the postcolonial world as one defined by displacement on both sides by grounding it in the past, arguing that tourism is a symptom of that same desire for movement that created colonialism, and a clear example of confrontation with the ‘other’ which ultimately sustained those same practices of oppression and domination. By framing the work in this way, she is able to communicate that tourism, as it expresses itself through mutual displacedness among both coloniser and colonised, is a direct continuation of colonialism – neocolonialism – without ever actually saying the word.

Works Cited

Baucom, Ian. “Dreams of Home: Colonialism and Postmodernism.” Research in African

Literatures 22.4 (1991): 5-27. JSTOR. Web. 5 Nov. 2018.

Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Print.

Larkin, Lesley. “Reading and Being Read: Jamaica Kincaid's ‘A Small Place’ as Literary

Agent.” Callaloo 35.1 (2012): 193-211. JSTOR. Web. 5 Nov. 2018.