Previous
Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Small Place, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Slavery, Colonialism, and Independence
Racism and White Supremacy
Tourism and Empathy
The Local and The Global
Rot and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
Antigua’s exceptional beauty seems impossible. No real sunsets could be that beautiful; no real sea or sky could be that blue; no real sand so soft or pink or white; no real flowers, fruits, vegetables, houses, or clothing so vibrantly hued; no days could be so sunny or nights so black; no real cows so scrawny or real grass so desiccated. This makes the country seem more like a soundstage than a place. This impossible, unreal beauty starts to feel like a prison, trapping everyone involved inside and everyone else outside. Kincaid asks readers to consider what it might do to a person to live in such a beautiful, timeless prison. So little seems to change the character of the island’s people or the trajectory of its history. It’s just as fantastically beautiful now that its residents are free as it was when they were enslaved.
Antigua’s beauty explains part of its attraction to colonialists in the past and tourists in the present. But, as Kincaid has detailed throughout the book, the experience of living in Antigua as a citizen is very different from the temporary pleasantness of visiting there for a few days at a time. She muses that this unreal beauty might contribute to the cavalier and exploitative attitudes that outsiders have taken toward Antigua and its people. If the place doesn’t seem real, then the people who live—or are trapped—there don’t seem fully real. And people denied their full humanity become far easier to exploit and abuse.
Themes
Antigua is a small place, just nine miles wide by twelve miles long. Christopher Columbus stumbled on it in 1493; soon after, “human rubbish from Europe” occupied it, using “enslaved but noble and exalted human beings” to enrich themselves. Eventually, the masters left (in a way) and freed the enslaved people (in a way). Modern Antiguans descend from those noble and exalted human beings. But once the masters cease being masters, they cease being human rubbish. And once the enslaved become free, they cease being noble and exalted; former masters and former enslaved people all become just human beings once again.
Lest Antiguans take Kincaid’s denunciation of colonialism, slavery, racism, white supremacy, and tourism as providing absolution for their role in their own current subjugation to a corrupt government and the control of outsiders, Kincaid reminds them—and her readers—that everyone, from the most inhumane slaveowner to the most noble enslaved person, is ultimately human. And human beings are all responsible for their actions. For the descendants of colonialists and slaveholders, this means understanding the privilege that their race has conferred on them. It also means recognizing that their wealthy societies were built on stolen labor. For the descendants of enslaved people, this means taking ownership for their lives and societies now, unlearning the passivity and subjugation that slavery taught them, and forging a path in the world on their own terms.
Themes
