“Making a spectacle of yourself”: The art of anger in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid’s analysis of Antiguan society and culture in A Small Place has been much discussed, but comparatively little attention has been paid to rhetorical and argumentative practices that keep her analysis contemporary and give it continuing impact. This article takes up Kincaid’s use of the essay form, especially given the book’s problematic publication history, arguing for a reading that attends to the social anatomy carried out in the work as a whole, but also to individual essays, as the New Yorker pieces that Kincaid first intended. Kincaid adopts the trans-Atlantic essay for the purposes of local commentary, giving it a specifically Caribbean register by employing a Caribbean repertoire, in which argument and hostility convert into cultural quarrelling, theatrical events. The textual upshot is a complex representation of local experience that, in addition, possesses an affective charge, investing an insular history from colonialism to postcolony with remarkable force.

Keywords:

• Caribbean register
• small places
• essay
• double consciousness
• repertoire
• cuss-cuss

Notes

1. This familiar argument was not so obvious when Kincaid set about exposing neocolonialism’s problematic effects. Fanon, nevertheless, pointed at tourism as one of the means by which a “local bourgeoisie” profited from independence, serving as “manager” to “Western enterprise” but “vultures” on their own society ([1963] 2004, 101–102). V.S. Naipaul described Caribbean tourism as a “necessary degradation” but also a “new slavery” (1962, 210).

2. “Photogenic poverty! Postcard sadnesses!” (“The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”; Walcott 1988, 74).

3. Language and style are often treated in criticism of A Small Place, but little deals with the aesthetics of Kincaid’s work. For opposition between the aesthetic and the political, see Helen Scott’s (2002) rejection of Harold Bloom’s lament over the former’s disappearance and the latter’s dominance. Scott’s analysis is rigorous, but does not engage with arguments for a modern Caribbean aesthetics bound up with a text’s politics. The transformative potential of the artful text is explored by Maria Helena Lima (2002), especially in relation to the comparison Kincaid draws in My Brother between “conventional” English and the Antiguan vernacular, a local creole that “instantly reveals the humiliation of history [ … ] not remade into art” (78). Lima appears to find in this “double consciousness” a problematic dismissal of the local; my reading values Kincaid’s appreciation of the art and the humiliation, but insists on precise recognition of how this art works.

4. Often noted in interviews; see, for example, Kincaid (1992, 24; 1993, 132).

5. It is built especially into readings of the early works, tending to relate interpretation to Kincaid’s life; see J. Brooks Bousson (2009, chaps 2, 5).

6. To describe A Small Place as an essay is necessarily to appreciate the variety of interests it might address: “The Library of Congress has labeled the text a biography, travel and ubiquitous ‘homes and haunts’” (McLeod 2008, 78).

7. Salman Rushdie’s judgement that A Small Place is “a jeremiad of great clarity and force that we might have called torrential were the language not so finely controlled” is widely cited (see Simmons 1994, 19); for McLeod, this “jeremiad” is “vitriolic” (2008, 71). Kincaid’s polemic is reasonably described as jeremiad, but, although foreboding, it is not strictly done in the voice of the prophet, but in a more complicated Antiguan parlance: “They say”.

8. Besides its frequent anthologization, the first essay also based the introductory section of Stephanie Black’s (2001) documentary Life and Debt, where the ugly tourist arrives in Kingston, initiating analysis of Jamaica’s ruinous treatment by the American government, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

9. Senior emphasizes the importance of “sus-sus”, gossip, for her; when Gerhard Dilger, close to the publication date of A Small Place, asked Kincaid to comment on the origins of her writing, she likewise settled immediately on the gossip stories of her Caribbean childhood, while acknowledging the power of canonical, literary texts she had studied (Kincaid 1992, 21).

10. See Fludernik (1994); also Dannenberg (2001, 46–48), for analysis of a literary instance.

11. See Ryan (2001, 136–139) on the “hooking” power of “Second-person Narration”: “our instinctive reaction is to think me when we hear you, and to feel personally concerned by the textual utterance” (138).

12. For Olive Senior, “home” is marked by “a condition of resonance, or sound returned”; she describes speech as “relieving aggression”, by using a “throw-word”, or engaging in a “tracing match” (2005, 37–40).

13. See Scott on Kincaid’s “signature incantatory narrative voice” (2002, 987).

14. At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid 1984, 3–5). For another single-paragraph story, see “The Letter from Home” (37–39); also “Talk of the Town” pieces like “Notes and Comment” and “Mayor” (Kincaid 2001, 156–157, 158–159).

15. More recent memories date the essay itself, in recalling the song Kincaid heard at a teenage pageant in Carnival time, “a hideous song” called “The Greatest Love” (Kincaid 1988, 43) – surely Whitney Houston’s international hit from 1985–86.

16. Charles Gmelch ([2003] 2012) notes that tourism is “the primary earner of foreign exchange” (8) in the Caribbean, while pointing out that “the average tourist has little awareness that the real history is one of the annihilation of Amerindians, slavery and the plantation system, poverty and underdevelopment” (6). Polly Patullo (2005) cites Hillary Beckles on tourism – “a kind of new plantocracy reinventing the economic and social relations of slavery” (203).

17. The larger Caribbean region scarcely gets noted in A Small Place, except for Montserrat in the third essay and later references to “the event of Haiti and the Duvaliers” and Maurice Bishop’s Grenada, introducing the threat of American, military intervention in support of Antiguan, dynastic interests (Kincaid 1988, 73–74).

18. Anthony Alessandrini (2014) draws a striking parallel between Kincaid’s final positioning of Antigua and Fanon’s well-known conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks (“Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover the other?” [1952] 2008, 206]), but where he finds in both Fanon and Kincaid the desire for a “shared project”, I sense in Kincaid a pervasive ambivalence and irony.