An everlasting colonisation: a postcolonial reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s a small place

Abstract

This paper explores the portrayal of a long-lasting effect of Western colonisation in Antigua and Barbuda, a small country in Central America, in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. An imminent power of European colonisation appears to be gone as many of the old European empires started to disperse and many of the colonised countries have gained freedom and reformed their own countries in the new age of modern society. Yet, such gained freedom does not appear to be the real freedom in Kincaid’s mind-blowing memoir. As an Antiguan, Kincaid expresses her emotions and authentic experiences to address people’s stupidity for not realising the linkage between the past nightmare of colonisation and the ongoing suffering of the same colonisation in the present through the unfamiliar concept of time, the rewriting of Antiguan’s history, and the problematic representation of Antiguan tourism. Kincaid defies the familiar linear concept of time by presenting the unawareness of the past and the present and Antiguan’s unusual sense of time of Antiguans as a way to portray how the colonisation that happened in the past is still active in the present. She also rewrites Antiguan’s history through the integration of her personal experience to affirm Ramond Jurney’s claim that Antiguan’s history has been distorted by the coloniser and Antiguans are the only group of people who can write the history of Antigua. Additionally, Kincaid represents the image of Antiguan tourism in a new light in which the colonial past resurfaced in the present through the manifestation of tourism. In doing so, Kincaid put the colonisers and the colonised in the scenario of a tourist's itinerary through the country. Tourists from North America or Europe, the great empires in the past, are identified as the colonisers, whereas the native of Antiguans are compared to the colonised. Kincaid’s writing techniques are effective in showing the everlasting status of colonial manifestation in the modern world.