YOU ROBBED MY CULTURE

411 Words2 Pages
In chapter one of A Small Place written by Jamaica Kincaid, she paints a picture of the beautiful surroundings you will see as you come off the plane when you arrive in Antigua. She describes all that “the tourist” would love about Antigua, and she compares it to the reality of it all, within the life of a native. The hot climate, which as a tourist you yearn for the sunning that lays ahead of you for the next couple of days, which actually is just a reminder of the drought that over takes the island. She also mentions the “impractical” new Japanese cars that are used as taxis, the lack of hospitals and doctors, the gorgeous mansions that are owned by drug smugglers and government officials, with their beautiful view of the crystal clear ocean, that is filled with waste due to the lack of “ a proper sewage disposal system”, that you cant wait to swim. She goes on to describe what she thinks of “ tourist” and why the natives despise us for our “ bad manners, silly body gestures and strangeness”. She ends the chapter by explaining why she and other natives do not like “tourists”, ENVY. Kincaid spends the entire second chapter explaining in great detail why she despises the English for all the wrongdoings they have committed. She starts off with describing the “old Antigua, the Antigua that she used to know”. She tells how there were government houses, libraries, departments of Treasury, Banks that were owned by slave traders and the Mill Reef Club that “ declared itself completely private, in order to keep out the natives unless they were servants, on each corner. All that once was Antigua are the reasons why she hates the English. She calls them “pigs that behaved in a bad way”. She is upset because of the mistreatment that her and her people faced from the English, describing the personal experiences natives have had with the racist “so called doctors” that
Open Document