"A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid

Hi world, what's up? So I got to read Jamaica Kincaid's 'A Small Place' for my literature class (hooray!). Hey don't laugh about my 'hooray' it's a sincere 'hooray' (one can have fun even doing class work right?). Anyway, I started reading it and started feeling bossed around in the most gentle way ever, Kincaid starts by telling you that you are a tourist arriving to Antigua, a place you don't belong. She goes by the whole traditional 'arriving at your destination' thing in where she tells you how to look at the island and what it means, it's a journey from the airport to the hotel where you are going to be staying. This is all quite normal actually, the part that really shocked me is when she describes how locals look at tourists, they make fun of them, imitate them and envy them. Let's be clear, this are very poor people who probably aren't getting out of the island in their lifetime. It's a sad reality, but when one is a tourist either in Antigua, Mexico or Dominican Republic it's a reality you or me as a tourist will not notice. If you put yourself in their shoes you should understand, these people work at the hotels where guests come and go, hotels in their homeland, hotels where they will never afford to stay. This is a product of the incorporated world we live in, for example, after the 2004 Sri Lanka the villages that were in the coast got whipped off the map, what did the government do? They used something Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman liked to call "The Shock Doctrine" and privatized the coastal terrains granting construction permits to big hotel corporations . The government drives the people off their god-given land (something like Iron Maiden's The Clansman Song) and builds infrastructure to capitalize on, the people have no option but to work here if they want to eat. The feeling that locals had in Kincaid's essay is the same feeling that people will have in Sri Lanka (that is parting of the Kavafis point of view that every city is the same, only the people change), they will look at tourists like outsiders who are enjoying what they cannot. Journeys? They really make one feel special and different, but not everything that shines is gold, no one knows how a place is more than those who live and work in it, as it is the case with Antigua.








Image from the remains of the 2004 Indian tsunami.










The Clansman is a song by the British Heavy Metal band Iron Maiden that shows the feeling of native people seeking freedom when being driven off their land.  Click to listen.

Remember, 
Protect and love your country, don't let it fall on the hand of capitalist investors who just look at it as a big bag of cash. 

May the force be with you,
Gabriel Rosa.