by Anthony Bongiorni
For any
Caribbean tourist who has wondered how the natives really feel about visitors
from behind the wall of their coral curtain, Jamaica Kincaid in A
Small Place has an answer:
An ugly
thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly empty thing, a
stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and
taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the
place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed
doors they laugh at your strangeness. [17]
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| Jamaica Kincaid. Photo Star Tribune |
This hatred
of the visitor stems not from any personality conflict or xenophobia but
because:
Every
native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of
somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing
banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and
bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out,
every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some
natives -- most natives in the world -- cannot go anywhere. They are too poor.
They are too poor to go anywhere. 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. [18-19]
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| Antigua. Photo @ Nicolas Kariem |
Kincaid
makes a point that resonates with all of us. We can all understand and
empathize with the envy and depression that happens when the glow of other's
wealth highlights our own poverty. Yet, what is harder to understand is how she
assigns blame for Antigua's colonial past and its present corruption. Kincaid
says of the English:
They [the
English] don't seem to know that this empire business was all wrong and they should,
at least, be wearing sackcloth and ashes in token penance of the wrongs
committed, the irrevocableness of their bad deeds, for no natural disaster
imaginable could equal the harm they did. Actual death might have been better.
And so all this fuss over empire -- what went wrong here, what went wrong there
-- always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong: they
should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they loved
so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere
they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned
English . But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not
look exactly like them would ever be English, so that you can imagine the destruction
of people and land that came from that. [23-24]
Kincaid
says that it was this colonialism that led to a master/slave system of
government and civic life on her island. The corrupt ministers on Antiuga
learned how to govern from the "Ill-mannered" British who preceded
them (34). Thus the drug dealing, prostitution, and wholesale selling of the
island's land to Middle Eastern foreigners, is a relic of Antigua's British
ruling class who then transferred their knowledge to the Antiguan politicians
that followed them.
As Kincaid
says, "all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every
stripe are noble and exalted; eventually the slaves [of] Antigua were freed, in
a kind of wayŠOf course, the whole thing is, once they are no longer slaves,
once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human
beings" (81). The ex-slaves have become normal people influenced, of
course, by the British. Once they aren't slaves they loose their innocence and
take up the ways of ill-mannered Europeans.
The problem
with this argument then is that given the corruption of Europeans that Kincaid
cites, why are their governments so much less corrupt than Antigua's? Kincaid
slides around the question by saying that "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). Here Kincaid argues that only the
"bad" Britons came and taught their corrupt ways to the Antiguan
people, while the "good" ones never touched the beaches of Antigua.
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| Antigua Sunset. Photo Beajas. |
The problem
with this argument is that it ignores the possibility that there are good
people in Antigua. Does Kincaid accuse herself of being a bad person, who
supports a corrupt government at home? Ostensibly, the British have a less
corrupt government than Antigua because there are more good people there than
bad ones. Given this logic, Kincaid says that there are more bad people in
Antigua than good. Yet, if the only ones who adopted Britain's corrupt colonial
ways were the few government ministers on the island, wouldn't the vast
majority of good people kick them out and create a better, cleaner government?
At the same
time as Kincaid passes the blame for corruption from Antiguans to the British,
she adopts a confrontational second person style. This style leads to
condemnations of "you" for colonialism, boredom, and hegemony over
innocent Antiguans. Why am I responsible for anything? Well," you will
forget your part in the whole setup, that bureaucracy is one of your inventions,
that Gross National Product is one of your inventions, and all the laws that
you know mysteriously favor you" (36). Kincaid's approach to rhetorically
focusing all of her society's problems on one person is yet another attempt to
shift the blame. To Kincaid, the buck mysteriously stops with the reader. Given
that the reader has the time to read the book, is likely literate and probably
lives in North American or Europe, he or she represents the corruptor of the
Antiguan people. However, how can an American reader (quite possibly from the
Caribbean himself or herself), take responsibility for the actions of a British
person hundreds of years ago? Trying to make someone feel guilty just for the
sake of it is not only wrong but if anything turns the reader away from
Kincaid's cause rather than pushing him or her towards it.
There are
certainly many postcolonial problems that Kincaid has every right to be upset
about. However, choosing to shift the blame to her own readers as well as to
unduly place the blame for present ills on the British is wrong. Her readers
are no more responsible for Antigua's problems than she herself is. Britain
cannot be whipped in perpetuity for the mistakes of colonialism. No one in
Britain caused an Antiguan government official take millions in bribes for an
industrial plant (66). No one made the confidants of the Prime Minister run a
brothel (59). These people did what they did because they wanted the enrichment
crime brings without having to suffer any penalties. Antigua's lax system of
government oversight has made the cost of criminality so low, that almost
anyone can make a profit on it. For this the British can only be blamed for not
ensuring that Antigua's government was full and fair before they left.
Anthony Bongiorni, Brown University
[from Literature of the Caribbean]
