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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Small Place, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Slavery, Colonialism, and Independence
Racism and White Supremacy
Tourism and Empathy
The Local and The Global
Rot and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
Jamaica Kincaid grew up in an Antigua that no longer exists, so you, the tourist, wouldn’t recognize it. In part, the changes arise from the passage of time, but they also result from the specific event of Antiguan independence from Great Britain. Kincaid sees the English, who used to rule Antigua, as a “pitiful lot” because they don’t seem to understand the grave immorality of their imperial project. Instead of repenting it, they fret about what went wrong for them. Any formerly colonized person could explain that the error lay in leaving England. And their pain comes from the irony that they chose to leave England but tried to make the rest of the world English. It seems only having a sense of superiority over others gives the English any happiness.
Kincaid grew up under colonial rule—Antigua achieved independence from Britain in a peaceful transfer of power in 1981. To former colonial subjects like Kincaid, colonialism telegraphs colonialists’ moral vacancy to the rest of the world. The fact that the English—former colonizers of not just Antigua but many parts of the world—don’t understand their colonial project as inherently immoral and still seem surprised that the people they formerly oppressed remain upset over the oppression points to their sense of racial and cultural superiority.
Themes
Kincaid describes the thoroughly colonial Antigua of her childhood: she lived on a street named after “English maritime criminal” Horatio Nelson in a neighborhood where all the streets were named after English naval officers. Government House, where the Queen’s representative lived, stood behind a high white wall that no one dared to deface with graffiti.
Kincaid identifies Horatio Nelson—a naval officer known as a hero in England for his service during the late 18th- and early 19th-century Napoleonic Wars between England and France—as a maritime criminal because in his early career, he acted as a privateer. Essentially ordered by the crown to capture and loot the vessels of the British Empire’s enemies (often, rival colonial powers like the Spanish and French), Nelson became rich on others’ suffering. And, as a friend of many colonial planters and traders living in Antigua in the 18th century, he espoused pro-slavery views. The different perspectives from which the former colonial subjects and British people view figures like Nelson betray a nearly unbridgeable gulf between the two groups. And Antiguans’ inability to even imagine making a statement against the colonial powers suggests the degree to which their history of colonial subjugation and forced servitude has deprived generations of Antiguans of political autonomy and empowerment.
Themes
High Street housed the library, treasury, post office, the court where local magistrates applied British Law, and Barclays Bank. The Barclay brothers were slave traders who turned to banking when England outlawed slavery. They grew their fortune by lending money to the descendants of the people they enslaved. It feels unfair to Kincaid that both the Barclay brothers and their victims died without any justice being served for the brothers’ abuses; in her mind, eternal punishment or reward cannot sufficiently balance the scales.
Under colonial rule, Antigua ran like a tiny replica of England; English law and custom held sway over any other customs or forms of government that native Antiguans might have claimed. Although by the time Kincaid was born slavery had long since been outlawed, its long legacy persists in the generational wealth it provided people like the Barclay brothers and the institutions they founded.
Themes
The Mill Reef Club also represents the Antigua of Kincaid’s childhood. North Americans founded the members-only, invitation-only club because they wanted to live in Antigua but keep themselves apart from the locals. Antiguans (in other words, Black people) could only go there to work as servants. Club members made it so hard for native Antiguans to enter that practically everyone remembers the date and identity of the first Black person to eat at the clubhouse or play a round on the golf course. As a child, Kincaid and the people around her considered Mill Reef Club residents unmannered pigs, strangers who refused to acknowledge the humanity of their hosts even while occupying part of their home (Antigua itself).
The Mill Reef Club operates almost like a colony within colonial Antigua, a place made to insulate white tourists from Black Antiguans. The Mill Reef Club shows how tourism functions as a form of neocolonial exploitation. Black Antiguans provide the necessary labor to make it comfortable, but the Mill Reef Club’s founders barred from using the place’s amenities for many years. The fact that small events—a person playing a round of golf or eating a sandwich—become momentous points toward the stranglehold that colonial attitudes and racism had (and still have) on Antigua.
Themes
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In Kincaid’s mind, the kinds of people the Mill Reef Club represents seemed to enjoy behaving in inhuman ways. She remembers a Czechoslovakian refugee who fled to Antigua from Europe to escape Hitler. Although he was just a dentist, he set himself up as a doctor on the island. He would make his wife inspect any patients to make sure that they were clean enough to enter his presence for exams. Kincaid’s mother innocently assumed that this “doctor” feared germs, just like she did. Similarly, a Northern Irish headmistress sent by the colonial authorities to run a local girls’ school constantly characterized her students as “monkeys just out of trees.” Local Antiguans interpreted these as examples of shockingly bad manners, betraying outsiders as small-minded, un-Christian, or animalistic. The word racism never occurred to them. In fact, the Antiguans felt superior to these allegedly civilized outsiders.
Kincaid’s tone, as she coolly discusses examples of overt racism, suggests the commonplace nature of events like these, implying that racism and colonial superiority went unquestioned. Notably, the school’s headmistress comes from Northern Ireland—not only another colony of Britain, but also one of its earliest and most enduring. Still, the headmistress has a sense of superiority based on of her British citizenship and her white skin. The fact that local Antiguans interpret gross acts of racism as poor manners points toward the gap between the colonialists’ claims to cultural superiority and their actions. And it suggests the degree to which generations of oppression taught Antiguans to passively accept being victims of abuse and exploitation.
Themes
Kincaid remembers celebrating Queen Victoria’s birthday as a national holiday. She (and others) appreciated the holiday and never questioned why they continued to celebrate an “extremely unappealing person” who had been dead for decades. Later in her life, Kincaid mentioned this celebration to an Englishman, who replied that his school celebrated the day that she died. Kincaid bitterly replied that at least they knew she had died. These kinds of memories inspire anger in Kincaid when she hears North Americans waxing lyrical about how they love England and its beautiful traditions. They don’t see the millions of people the British made into orphans by stealing their motherland, traditions, religion, and language and replacing them with English rule, traditions, religion, and language.
Kincaid’s negative attitude toward Great Britain (as a former colonial subject) puts her at odds not only with British people but also with a surprising number of the Americans among whom she lives. She suggests that only people personally unaffected by racism and oppression can unquestioningly appreciate British heritage. By extension, she implies that if readers find themselves among the appreciators of British culture, they need to pay more attention to history. This kind of appreciation can only grow from willful blindness to the pain and suffering the British colonial project caused worldwide—of which Antigua provides just one small example.
Themes
The imposition of English—the language of the oppressor—particularly bothers Kincaid. The criminal’s language inherently privileges the criminal and silences the agony and humiliation the criminal inflicts on victims. If she calls something “wrong” or “bad,” the criminal hears his own concerns, not hers. Therefore, he cannot understand why she feels such rage or why he gets angry when she tries to make his life uncomfortable. She does this because nothing can erase the rage she feels except the impossible—somehow preventing what happened from happening.
Kincaid considers the loss of a native language the most harrowing of all the abuses perpetrated by British colonizers. Because she can only critique the colonial project in the exact same language and terms with which others praise it, her words have little power. And expressing pro- and anti-colonial or pro- and anti-slavery arguments in identical language creates a false sense of equivalence between the stories of the oppressors and the stories of the oppressed.
Themes
Kincaid learned to speak English at a school that an English princess dedicated. Later, she learned that the royal family dispatched this princess on a tour that included Antigua to get over a failed romance. The contrast between this mundane, everyday heartbreak and the lengths Antigua went to to entertain the princess—repairing and repainting buildings, making public beaches private—shows how the Antigua of Kincaid’s childhood revolved entirely around England. Kincaid anticipates criticism of her argument—all these terrible things happened long ago; her ancestors would have done the same if they’d had the opportunity; everyone behaves badly. But she points out how the Antiguans couldn’t understand this kind of behavior. They refused to see racism where they could blame bad manners.
The fact that the native Antiguans couldn’t imagine racism animating the abuses and oppression they experienced suggests how deeply they had internalized colonial belief systems about their cultural, political, and social inferiority to their colonial rulers. This disconnect arises from their willingness to take the British at their word—to believe that the colonialists possessed a better form of government or more advanced cultural standards. But taking the British at their word only highlights the extent to which lies about cultural superiority support colonial power.
Themes
Kincaid asks the reader if they have wondered where people like her—formerly colonized and enslaved people—learned to murder, steal, and govern poorly. Their oppressors taught them these lessons by coming and taking what they wanted without even pretending to ask politely first. They murdered those who stood up to them. They put stolen wealth into their own bank accounts. Only after their victims resort to enough violence do they pull up stakes and leave. And then, from afar, they watch the dysfunction of the government returned to its own citizens and take this as proof that formerly colonized and oppressed people will never be able to command themselves. They never acknowledge how their policies, bureaucracies, and laws have interfered in their victims’ societies. And the victims cannot remember how they did things before the colonialists came.
In the closing lines of the second section, Kincaid directly attacks the hypocrisy underlying colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy. Believing in the superiority and advanced state of their culture, white outsiders from North America and Europe tend to look down on places like Antigua, taking their corrupt governments and low standards of living as proof that formerly colonized people cannot govern themselves. That’s why, according to this line of thinking, Antiguans were liable to colonization or enslavement in the first place. Kincaid exposes the lie at the heart of this argument. Colonialists, in taking land, resources, and autonomy from colonized people, taught uncivilized behavior like lying, theft, and murder. Claiming to have a superior civilization cannot cover up the uncivilized actions that colonizers perpetrated—at least as long as people (and readers) willingly face the truth of their actions and their history.
Themes
