A Small Place By Jamaica Kincaid - Essay Example

We analyze every bit of her approach using careful consideration of possibilities and methods that she could have used. A unique way to create a personal touch in a narrative that is created to be a social bookmark, the author’s personal voice which keeps the reader acquainted with her thinking and experiences provide new reading experience indeed. Many argue that if she would have used a third person narrative, the book would have touched a higher realm of intellectual thinking and presentation of history.

The process however, is reversed here. Both the fields of history and literature take a bow on this highly original creation by a native of Antigua and it is through the subjective narration of facts and happenings that the chapters in history come slowly forward to us. Using an objective narration would have only allowed the events to be chronologically set in a neutral backdrop, while her subjective narration instantly familiarizes the reader with the bias that she holds towards considering her country’s people more precious than tourists and outsiders.

It may sound odd to the worshipper of white power initially, but her conviction in the superiority of the natives and the inferiority and misery of the colonizers. The need to keep tourists reminded of the colonized past of Antigua has propelled the narrative to a direction wherein the writer is convinced that every white tourist that walks in her motherland is a descendent of the brutes of the past, who had initially walked in as a tourist but had eventually colonized the place and tried to turn it into England, the lad that they belonged to and adorned.

History is replete with such incidences and if Jamaica has chosen to eye every tourist with the same perspective as the slaves saw the colonizers, then the entire picture, though brutal, still appears justified. We