Jamaica Kincaid, born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson in St. John’s, Antigua, is not just the holder of the 21st century’s greatest pen name. She is a novelist, gardening writer, and Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University. In 1988, she published A Small Place, a work of non-fiction in which she describes the poverty and corruption behind the idyllic façade of her home place. In the Preface to the 2018 edition, Kincaid recalls the first reviews of her book: “[i]t was regarded as angry and unpleasant and untrue, and those three adjectives arranged and rearranged themselves in different orders.”
A Small Place is an angry book, and it’s quite unpleasant to read. Perhaps it’s a testament to changing literary tastes, but “angry and unpleasant to read” doesn’t seem like criticism at all, nowadays – it’s dustjacket material, particularly if it’s accompanied by a phrase like “a damning account”. I don’t know which reviewers called the book “untrue”, but I know that’s a profound criticism of a work of non-fiction. I can rather unqualifiedly say that there was nothing in A Small Place that seemed untrue to me, except Kincaid’s assertion that “in places where there is a Minister of Culture it means there is no culture”. To me, this is inaccurate no matter what you think about Josepha Madigan, Ireland’s current Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht; granted, Ireland did not have a Minister for Culture when the book was published. Rather, the book reinforced beliefs I hold firmly: tourism to Caribbean idylls like Antigua both sustains its economy and helps perpetuate the poverty of its inhabitants; a booming tourism industry, whether in Ireland or Antigua, leads to “native” people propagating a false version of their country and themselves in order to maximise revenue. I’ve never been to the West Indies, but I’ve been a tourist in, say, Italy, so I agree when Kincaid writes, “[t]he thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being”.
Even so, I find the book bothersome. Kincaid addresses her indictments directly to an audience she refers to as “you”, by which she might mean me, or you, or someone else. The villains of the text are corrupt Antiguan government officials and the English, whom Kincaid writes should wear “sackcloth and ashes” as “penance” for their ancestors’ atrocities. Kincaid also asks, “[d]o you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and forget?” What function, then, would the penance she herself recommends serve? And if “you”, I, am being instructed to engage in some unlikely and, by Kincaid’s own formulation, unproductive act of self-flagellation, how am I to square that with the fact that I am, as a Catholic Irish person, the historical victim of colonial oppression? Am I to be secretly and shamefully relieved at my forebears’ suffering because it absolves me from Kincaid’s ire?
Lucy is one of Kincaid’s novels, published in 1990. It concerns a young Antiguan woman, the eponymous Lucy, who goes to work as a nanny for a seemingly perfect North American family. I think it’s excellent; the characters are convincing, its complex structure is well put together – revealing and engrossing rather than distracting – and just about every sentence is either well written or very well written. The voice of the narrator sounds direct, probably because detail and adornment are, though present, unobtrusive and never used superfluously. Because of these stylistic features, the narrative voice of Lucy seems more direct than that of A Small Place, even though the latter takes the form of a direct address.
It’s a funny book, too. Lucy remembers, as a child, asking whether the crowds at Bethsaida, when Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, ate their fish fried or boiled – that the Four Evangelists could have neglected this detail confounds her. Lucy harbours a similar anger to that of the narrative voice in A Small Place, yet this is the anger of an individual character; we can accept flaws in a character in a work of fiction, but not glaring issues on the side of an argument against which we, “you”, have been cast as the antagonist, as is the case in A Small Place.
Vivek Chibber, in his book Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital, argues that much of modern postcolonial writing serves, unintentionally, to reinforce a binary between the West and the Global South. A Small Place doesn’t fail because it’s “angry”, but because it’s antagonistic, and constructs a binary between the dispossessed narrator and “you”, an oppressive force we can choose either to identify with or not. Lucy, on the other hand, presents an antagonistic character in the context of a story that, because its characters retain their humanity both when they are at their most cruel and when they are oppressed, collapses the boundaries between “us” and “them” – whoever it is we, in Ireland, are.
