A Small Place
SynopsisPlot
Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up. Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.
Story
About this book
A Small Place is an extended essay by Jamaica Kincaid about Antigua, the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she was raised. Written in a direct, sometimes sardonic voice, the book addresses a visitor arriving on the island and gradually shifts from the surface beauty of the landscape to the political and social conditions underneath. Kincaid describes crumbling infrastructure, government corruption, and the lingering effects of British colonial rule on daily life in Antigua.
The essay moves between tones. At points it reads as sharp satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, turning a tourist's expectations inside out. At other points it becomes a personal account of what it means to grow up in a place shaped by outside powers and then to look back at it with adult eyes. Kincaid does not separate Antigua's present difficulties from its colonial history but treats them as connected.
The book is short, running under a hundred pages, yet it covers a wide arc: tourism, education, language, the local library, race, and the gap between how an island appears to visitors and how it is experienced by the people who live there.
