Response--A Small Place

Kincaid does an excellent job of using the idea of the tourist gaze to deconstruct notions of nation and identity with regards to Antigua. Using the second person, Kincaid guides us through a different Antigua, one that is not all gorgeous, sandy beaches and lush condominiums. Using this gaze, Kincaid challenges us as tourists, to think about all of the corruption, injustices, and the effects of colonization on Antigua and other tourist locations, so that we might be aware of our role in this disenfranchisement and attempt to lessen its hold.

Kincaid uses many dualities when discussing Antigua like white/black, colonized/colonizer, and especially tourist/native. I found the tourist/native dichotomy especially striking. In the first section, she states, “For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere” (18). She explains that some natives, however, like those in Antigua, are too poor to go anywhere—to become tourists. They envy our ability to turn their own banality into our pleasure. This statement resonated with me because I have been guilty of engaging this same mentality as a tourist. When I lived in the Dominican Republic, I remember how proud I was of myself for living without constant electricity and hot water. Although my mentality changed the longer I was there, I remember how upon first arrival,  I found pleasure in being able to “live just like the natives,” taking for granted the fact that I had something many Dominicans didn’t have—the choice of being able to leave that lifestyle at any moment to return to my comfortable American home. Because I was there for a year, I didn’t consider myself a tourist, but now in hindsight after reading Kincaid’s essay, I realized that I was more of a tourist than I thought. By virtue of the fact that one of my main purposes of living in the Dominican Republic was to have an “authentic” experience (i.e. living with bare minimums, immersing myself with the “folk”) I didn’t realize how my perception of the Dominican Republic contributed to its assumed national identity—one where it is simply a place that exists just for the pleasure of tourists.

On a side note: Because some of Kincaid’s other work discusses mother/daughter relationships, I would have loved to see her weave the idea of motherhood and the motherland as a way of discussing its connections to Antigua.