A Small Place

A Small Place

I took my first trip to New Orleans last year to attend an academic conference that was being held at a “historic hotel” in the center of the French Quarter. Rather than sleep each night at that particular hotel, though, I chose to stay at a less expensive place in town. This meant that I walked through the French Quarter each evening and each morning on my way to and from the conference. As I did so, I couldn’t help but take in the stark difference between nighttime and daytime on the streets. It was almost unimaginable; it felt like two different places. The night was an intersection between a forced, fabrication of some sort of bacchanal and a light show that overwhelmed the senses to the point of total discomfort. This, of course, was contrasted against the alarming calm at daybreak. As I walked atop the cobblestones and past the colorful doorways on my way to the conference each day, my thoughts about the district as well as the early morning’s silence were just barely broken by the rhythm of the locals’ scrub brushes as they pushed the sudsy bleach water and the evening’s backwash into the streets’ drains. I couldn’t help but wonder: How much of what I have seen here is actually real? And this daily cleaning ritual seems symbolic of something more… when the locals wash away the residue of tourism, are they cleaning? Or are they really just attempting to preserve themselves, some part of their town – its culture?

Now, I do not mean to say that the people, the place, or the history of Antigua and New Orleans are the same. As one reads Jamaica Kincaid’s perspective of her homeland, it is clear that they are not. But there are many tragic parallels between her tiny island and the post-Katrina landscape. In particular, these are the colonization and the outsiders who profit in the name of capitalistic expansion, the exploitation of both the native people and the land they should own but don’t, the nepotism and governmental corruption, and the onslaught of spoiled ‘voyeurs’ who desire to see only the façades that have been fabricated for their pleasure. Kincaid gives a strong voice to the native, the exploited, or the ‘fodder’ who resides in a place that is overrun by outsiders and cruelly ironic power structures. Drawing upon her rage, she humanizes the position of the silenced and the intentionally excluded. And her perspective artfully engages the reader (me, a white woman, a North American, a tourist) in a dialogue that I had been begging to have since I left New Orleans. See as a visitor, I felt a great internal struggle over my own presence in that town. Although Kincaid’s position focuses on the perspective of an Antiguan, she poignantly articulates what I imagine to be a commonly held perspective among locals (or natives) when they reflect on the tension and their relation to tourists and the tourist industry.

I cannot pretend to understand the countless ways that centuries of exploitation come to affect a people or how long such damages will plague a population. But Kincaid does superbly describe the residues of capitalism and corruption, and she certainly leads one to believe that they have permanently contaminated her island’s culture (p. 34). I know that, try though we may, none of us can successfully escape our history or our experience, and when this is coupled with Kincaid’s perspective, it is hard to avoid nihilistic feelings. Really, as Kincaid suggests, will there never be a way to heal the pains of racism and exploitation? Is there no way to amend the past?