The Suspension of Linear Time in A Small Place

"For the people in a small place, every event is a domestic event; the people in a small place cannot see themselves in a larger picture, they cannot see that they might be part of a chain of something, anything...The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account, of themselves...To the people in a small place, the division of Time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not exist," (52-54).

People living in large places (i.e. us, the tourists from the opening pages, the colonizers) do not experience history the same way the colonized do, we've established this. Kincaid's work is an account of what happens to the small places once the colonizers leave, how they continue to live in the legacy of slavery day after day. The excerpts from the above passage, which I found to be one of the most significant of the book, show not only how the social, political, and economic consequences of colonialism affect Antigua (the abandoned library, the government corruption), but also its effects on the national identity of the inhabitants of the island.

Kincaid's description of Antiguan's experience with history explains that colonialism and slavery didn't just happen and go away, are not limited to the past: "it is as if it, emancipation, were a contemporary occurrence, something everybody is familiar with," a fantastical England is still the standard by which European visitors to the island are judged (55). Our model of history leaves slavery in the past, debates our white guilt, attempts to put it at bay by recounting it, studying it, as if making sure we know as much as we can about what happened, nothing like it will ever happen again and everything will be fixed. Kincaid shows that it is more complicated than that, that history is not static. Things to do not simply begin and end, when a colonizing force leaves an occupied country, the imperialist agenda does not simply disappear, especially not in a globalized capitalists system. In addition to these questions of imperialism and linear history, A Small Place raises questions of the role of the global market it international relations today.