Vere Cornwall Bird Character Analysis

[A]n institution that is often celebrated in Antigua is the Hotel Training School, a school that teaches Antiguans how to be good servants, how to be a good nobody, which is what a servant is. In Antigua, people cannot see a relationship between their obsession with slavery and emancipation and their celebration of the Hotel Training School [… or] between their obsession with slavery and emancipation and the fact that they are governed by corrupt men, or that these corrupt men have given their country away to corrupt foreigners […]. In accounts of the capture and enslavement of black people almost no slave ever mentions who captured and delivered him or her to the European master. In accounts of their corrupt government, Antiguans neglect to say that in twenty years of one form of self-government or another, they have, with one five-year exception, placed power in the present government.

The people who go into running the government were not always such big thieves; nor have they always been so corrupt. They took things, but it was on a small scale. For instance, if the government built some new housing to be sold to people, then a minister or two would get a few of the houses for themselves […] Everybody knew about this. Some of the ministers were honest. One of them, a famous one in Antigua, a leader of the Trade and Labour Union movement, even died a pauper. Another minister, when his party lost power, had to drive a taxi. It is he, the taxi-driving ex-minister who taught the other ministers a lesson […] All the ministers have “green cards”—a document that makes them legal residents of the United States of America.

And so they anchor the merchant-importer’s books being burned to the event of the original, honest leaders of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union being maneuvered out of the union they founded and dishonest people taking their place; and they anchor that to the decline of one sort of colonialism and its debasement and its own sort of corruption; and they anchor that to this man, this Prime Minister, who from time to time had seemed like a good man, so well could he spell out the predicament that average Antiguans found themselves in.

[A]n institution that is often celebrated in Antigua is the Hotel Training School, a school that teaches Antiguans how to be good servants, how to be a good nobody, which is what a servant is. In Antigua, people cannot see a relationship between their obsession with slavery and emancipation and their celebration of the Hotel Training School [… or] between their obsession with slavery and emancipation and the fact that they are governed by corrupt men, or that these corrupt men have given their country away to corrupt foreigners […]. In accounts of the capture and enslavement of black people almost no slave ever mentions who captured and delivered him or her to the European master. In accounts of their corrupt government, Antiguans neglect to say that in twenty years of one form of self-government or another, they have, with one five-year exception, placed power in the present government.

The people who go into running the government were not always such big thieves; nor have they always been so corrupt. They took things, but it was on a small scale. For instance, if the government built some new housing to be sold to people, then a minister or two would get a few of the houses for themselves […] Everybody knew about this. Some of the ministers were honest. One of them, a famous one in Antigua, a leader of the Trade and Labour Union movement, even died a pauper. Another minister, when his party lost power, had to drive a taxi. It is he, the taxi-driving ex-minister who taught the other ministers a lesson […] All the ministers have “green cards”—a document that makes them legal residents of the United States of America.

And so they anchor the merchant-importer’s books being burned to the event of the original, honest leaders of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union being maneuvered out of the union they founded and dishonest people taking their place; and they anchor that to the decline of one sort of colonialism and its debasement and its own sort of corruption; and they anchor that to this man, this Prime Minister, who from time to time had seemed like a good man, so well could he spell out the predicament that average Antiguans found themselves in.