A Small Place by Jamaica KincaidMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'm not sure I've ever come across a voice so forthright and beautiful at the same time. Jamaica Kincaid manages to reveal the underbelly of colonization (specifically in regard to her birthplace Antigua) while writing with blurry metaphor (blurry in the sense that things seems like metaphors and also not metaphors), wry humor, and a telling of political history in an almost folk-style narrative like a parable, but in reference to specific people. She unflinchingly deals out critiques yet manages to convey a sadness at the same time:
"And it is in that strange voice, then--the voice that suggests innocence, art, lunacy--that they say these things, pausing to take breath before this monument to rottenness, that monument to rottenness, as if they were tour guides; as if, having observed the event of tourism, they have absorbed it so completely that they have made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction." (69)
In eighty short pages, Kincaid shares a truthful experience of a land, the likes of which few get to see or experience when caught up in the "unreal beauty" of a tourist destination. Kincaid describes beauty as a prison, and in so doing, changes our understanding of that which might deserve a deeper look beyond the blue of the ocean and the colors of the sky.
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