Drawing from Audre Lorde's ideas on power and language, extant
essays about Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, and the text itself,
"What If You're an 'Incredibly Unattractive, Fat,
Pastrylike-fleshed Man'?" develops a strategy for teaching A
Small Place that emphasizes how students might learn to read it, despite
and because of its provocative style. This essay describes how Frederick
taught students' unmediated responses to the text to introduce a
discussion of how Kincaid places them as readers. She supported this
emphasis with a close reading that paid particular attention to the
author's multiple definitions of "tourist" and of
"white people," as well as to Kincaid's shifting subject
position. Finally, Frederick tested the resultant interpretation by
using it to analyze Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove
Back. Guiding students through this process allowed her to foreground
Kincaid's writerly strategies and concerns--specifically her
concerns with power. ********** When power enters the playing field,
[mainstream students'] desires for a common humanity often give way
to something else. Irritation. Impatience. A wish that "they'd
just get over it" so that everyone could just get on with their
lives, not having to bother with trying to work out where they fit in
this overwhelming picture of global oppressions. (Lindsay Pentolfe
Aegerter, "A Pedagogy of Postcolonial Literature")
People need self-consciously to shape the direction of their
desiring and to struggle against the decline and deformation of the
possible. (Peter McLaren, "Critical Literacy and Postcolonial
Praxis")
Sadly, to sell itself, the Caribbean encourages the delights of
mindlessness, of brilliant vacuity, as a place to flee not only winter
but that seriousness that comes only out of culture with four seasons.
So how can there be a people there, in the true sense of the word? Derek
Walcott, "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory")
During my first year of full-time teaching, I designed an
introductory Caribbean literature course. My desire was to expose
students to the literature and to extend their knowledge of the region
beyond its beaches. To introduce some of the extra-literary issues that
informed our primary readings, I assigned Jamaica Kincaid's A Small
Place among other texts. This text, more than any other, forced me to
ask: "what kinds of productive pedagogical strategies can result
from teaching A Small Place to students at a U.S. university, students
who are likely to be 'tourists'?" In thinking this
question through, I learned something about my role as teacher and about
my pedagogical methods. Through reading A Small Place, I hoped my
students would be open to another perspective and that such openness
would allow them to be able to interrogate their own subject positions,
to initiate a reorientation of their (presumably) Western worldviews,
and to foster a recognition of the workings of oppression. However, I
found that--initially--students were angry, defensive, or otherwise
closed to Kincaid's text. These attitudes necessarily challenged my
teacherly goals. (1)
Such "diversions" put me in search of advice on how to
teach through them. I found several useful essays, ones that shed light
on my students' responses and enabled me to solidify my own
approach to teaching Kincaid's essay. In "A Pedagogy of
Postcolonial Literature," Lindsay Aegerter confesses to be being
worn out by "mainstream students'" less-than-positive
responses to A Small Place and similar texts, and integrates into her
classes reading assignments (identified as "pre-readings" in
the essay) that discuss colonialism, racism, economic exploitation, and
their impact on oppressed peoples. These pre-reading assignments are
designed to prepare students for Kincaid's provocative style and
content; additionally, they might assist students who "have a
tendency to see themselves ... in opposition to the literature--as the
enemy--rather than recognizing that in postcolonial representations of
contradictory subjectivity ... there is a space for at least momentary
alliance" (1997, 149). Finally, Aegerter encourages teachers to
identify and foreground points of alliance where students can empathize
with post-colonial and multicultural writers' ideological
positions.
In "Critical Literacy and Postcolonial Praxis," Peter
McLaren diverges from Aegerter's emphasis on points of
identification. Such an identification lacks an analysis of power,
particularly as it is imbricated in language and in "specific forms
of practical competency-literacies--that ... have been pressed into the
service of the dominant culture" (1992, 7). McLaren claims that
literacy restrains when it "is merely functional. It harnesses
ideology to social relations of domination, encouraging individuals to
form their values, politics, and reading of the world in static, reified
images produced by the dominant culture" (10). He develops this
idea of stasis when he says, "if we conjure only those ideas we
already have the words to express, then our presence in history remains
more or less comfortably static. Part of this crisis is reflected in the
unavailability of subject-positions in which students are permitted to
practice forms of radical critique" (16). By encouraging students
to appreciate "others'" views merely through recognition
of their own "otherness," we teach the functional kind of
literacy that McLaren describes. It is the possibility for more than
functional literacy that I find intriguing. Whether or not students
radically change their positions, I believe it is important for them to
witness ideas that they do not "already have the words to
express."
Postcolonial and multicultural writers often write out of their
differences from dominant culture; they also articulate the various ways
they have been made marginal to that culture. Drawing from their
challenges to racial and ethnic stereotypes, their cultural differences,
and differences that have been effaced and/or perverted in traditional
narratives, these writers often break down divisions between the
literary (non-fictional and fictional) and the "real."
(Breaking such barriers demonstrates how important creative expressions
of experience can be, particularly for students who believe that
literature is merely entertaining.) Overemphasis on moments when reader
and writer are "the same" can reduce, or worse, continue to
efface differences that motivate postcolonial and multicultural writings
and may re-establish boundaries between literary and extra-literary
worlds. If read in this context, emphasis on identifying points of
congruence re-presents differences as "things" to be
negotiated and eased, rather than the "fund of necessary polarities
between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic" (Lorde
1984, 111). If students are directed merely to see themselves in the
work of Jamaica Kincaid, I worry that they might "overlook"
important differences between their experiences and those Kincaid seeks
to articulate.
In offering an alternative to empathy, I intend to shift emphasis
from points of identification between privileged students and
postcolonial/multicultural writers and ideologies to investigations of
"new ways of being in the world" (Lorde 1984, iii), ways that
might productively engage intersections between the world and the
classroom. The difficulty in making this shift is manifest; nonetheless,
I believe that an attempt even a somewhat successful attempt--at a
different kind of reading/teaching strategy is more productive than
teaching students to fold difference into their already familiar
worldviews. If it is true that "how we talk about our world largely
shapes our understanding of why things are as they are, which images of
'that which is not yet' are possible and desirable, and what
needs to be done for matters to be otherwise" (McLaren 1992, 15),
teaching methods designed to placate students' angry responses
advance an understanding of the way things are rather then the ways they
could be.
Pre-readings designed to minimize the impact of A Small Place can
make for a less stressful classroom. However, there are other approaches
and I am particularly interested in those that advance critically
engaged analyses of Kincaid's text. Audre Lorde makes this point
quite effectively. In "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle
the Master's House," she asks, "what does it mean when
the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that
same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change
are possible and allowable" (1984, 110-11). (2) Speaking explicitly
to white women and about women of color, Lorde argues that:
A stark schematic of this quotation can highlight its import. When
speaking of oppressions, women still bear more of the burden of
responsibility than do men; similarly, women of color continue to bear
more of the responsibility than do white women. Stated as such, it is
clear that these responsibilities are burdens, ones that lock women and
women of color into constructs that confine them as well as work against
substantive change. In other words, systems of patriarchy and white
supremacy "understand" women and people of color as
"others" and as those especially charged with identifying
oppressions. Under such a model, oppressed peoples are
"understood" even when they try to resist: they are angry
people with "chips on their shoulders" they blame
"everyone else for their problems," and they practice
"reverse racism" (Aegerter 1997, 142, 143). Lorde suggests
that this kind of "understanding" is limiting and affirms
patriarchy and white supremacy as the only ways of being in and
interpreting the world. In "Master's Tools," she argues
that this mindset must be challenged in order to make room for
oppositional worldviews. Lorde persuasively argues that "the
master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They
may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will
never enable us to bring about genuine change" (1984, 112).
Drawing from Aegerter, McLaren, and Lorde's essays, I
developed a strategy for teaching A Small Place. Importantly, I also
drew from Kincaid's text as well as my knowledge of Caribbean and
African American literatures. I sought to let A Small Place teach
students how to read it, largely by using Kincaid's writing
strategy as a critical resource. I encouraged and taught students'
unmediated responses to the text to introduce a discussion and analysis
of how Kincaid places them as readers. I supported this emphasis with a
close reading of the text, one that paid particular attention to the
author's multiple definitions of "tourist" and of
"white people," as well as to Kincaid's shifting subject
position. Finally, I tested the interpretation that resulted from this
method by using A Small Place to interpret Terry McMillan's novel
How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Guiding students through this process
allowed me to emphasize Kincaid's writing strategies and her
writerly concerns--specifically her interest in issues of power. This
process also helped students improve their reading and interpretive
skills; it assisted their evolution into critical readers. I do not
believe I can force students to be conscious of "where they fit in
[an] overwhelming picture of global oppressions" (Aegerter 1997,
142), but I can instruct them on the skills necessary to begin this
process.
Notwithstanding students' dramatic first reactions, I found
this teaching strategy singularly productive. I learned that teaching A
Small Place is not merely about teaching one of Kincaid's works;
neither is it only about teaching a piece of post-colonial literature.
It is about both of these things, but as I am interested in a pedagogy
of change, A Small Place offers students a different and generative
strategy of reading, interpreting, and understanding themselves, as
individuals and as scholars. In the end, my method acknowledges
McLaren's idea that "the task of the critical educator is to
enable individuals to acquire a language through which to reflect upon
and shape their experiences" (1992, 8).
Even a cursory reading of Kincaid's oeuvre supports the
assertion that she is interested in evoking strong reactions from her
readers. This idea is most apparent in A Small Place where she uses 81
pages to deliver critiques of English colonialism, tourism in Antigua,
racism, corruption in the Antiguan government and local corporations,
and local peoples' responses to these issues. Yet what appears to
be the most provocative aspect of the essay--at least in a U.S.
context--is the author's use of the second person singular pronoun
"you." She defines this "you" as a tourist, as North
American "or, worse," European (1988, 4, 5), as white (male
and female), and as "incredibly unattractive, fat, [and]
pastrylike-fleshed" (13). It is not surprising, particularly with
regard to the last two descriptions, that students who identify as
"tourists," as "North Americans" or
"Europeans," or as "whites" are angered by A Small
Place. (3) But it is significant to note that Kincaid's writing
prevents readers from distancing themselves from the text and her
criticisms; on the contrary, it firmly places readers where Kincaid
decides they should be. I want to emphasize these points because I begin
my teaching of this text by focusing on the relationship between writer
and readers. Unless readers of A Small Place are Antiguan (or of
Antiguan descent), they have to be "incredibly unattractive, fat,
pastrylike-fleshed" people; Kincaid does not allow them any other
option. As a consequence, I behave the author's narrative actively
works against a strategy that encourages students to find "points
of identification or congruence between [their] own lives and those
being represented in their reading" (Aegerter 1997, 143). Because
Kincaid uses the second person singular deliberately, it is our task as
readers to determine why she does so and to identify what purpose it may
serve. To this end, I guide students through a close reading of A Small
Place. In addition to the previously mentioned reason, this close
reading can move students beyond their initial reactionary and defensive
postures. A close reading of Kincaid's essay reveals multiple
definitions of "tourists" and of "white people" and
offers attentive readers insight into the author's narrative goals.
I would posit that mainstream students have rarely questioned--and
have rarely been asked to question--the centrality of their own beliefs.
I believe this is why, when oppressed peoples articulate their concerns,
such students can respond with statements like: "can't she get
beyond all that, everything happened so long ago" (Kincaid 1988,
34). Only in the absence of this kind of self-critique can mainstream
students believe that "everything happened so long ago" For
others, however, "everything" continues to have an effect. It
is in this context that I find A Small Place singularly instructive.
Kincaid's use of tourist discourse (what some might describe as
"brochure discourse" or "the language of tourism")
seduces readers, particularly potential "Spring Breakers" from
the U.S.; then her content demands that they consider the position in
which she places them. She makes her U.S. readers part of and witness to
the world--and world-view--of an African descended, culturally Antiguan,
naturalized American who is profoundly disturbed by what she perceives.
But they are not yet agents in this world. Kincaid's artistry,
then, lies in her ability to destabilize readers' established ways
of knowing themselves. (4) As a teacher, rather than comfort students
and restabilize their subject positions, I want to teach them to treat
Kincaid's rage as a language, and one that is best suited to speak
her experience (McLaren 1992, 9). I begin our analysis of A Small Place
at the stage where "you," "tourist," and readers are
rendered most simply.
Although I find it productive not to simplify either A Small Place
or my approach to teaching it, for clarity's sake I want to
describe my process as twofold. First, by treating the essay as
"text"--genre, form, style, technique, reading strategies,
etc.--I can facilitate the development of students' critical
skills. Second, by focusing on Kincaid's content, I can manifest
Lorde's idea that there are different ways of seeing and responding
to the world, one of which is Jamaica Kincaid's. I want students to
use--rather than simply react to--the view that Kincaid provides them.
By "use" I mean that students must add her perspective to
others that engage oppressions to get a broader picture of the issues
and to facilitate the kind of change Lorde suggests. Again, although I
conceive of my teaching strategy in parts, I do not want to suggest that
they are separate. It is vital that students understand that
Kincaid's form informs her content, and vice versa.
Kincaid's accusatory "you" is evidence of a
distinction between author and reader. In the essay, she describes
tourists as "white," "ugly," "empty,"
"stupid," "fat," and as "rubbish." But,
significantly, careful reading will reveal that she makes a distinction
between white people who remain at home and white people who travel
abroad. She makes further distinctions between white North Americans and
white English people. These distinctions suggest that Kincaid is not
solely interested in attacking white people or otherwise making them
"feel bad." Although the author occasionally resorts to name
calling (I cannot interpret the following references to white people as
"blobs" and "boobs" as anything other than this), I
argue that she chooses her descriptive adjectives to draw attention to
the process through which whites, North Americans, and English people
become tourists and benefit from the exploitation of Antiguans.
Ultimately, through her arresting language (and through shifting
subject positions that I address below), Kincaid foregrounds power
relations and the implications of such power. It is in this context that
I ask students to reflect on where Kincaid's "you" places
them. The author contends that "you" never consider "that
the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot
stand you," that "they do not like you" (1988, 17). She
continues by imagining the trajectory of this line of thinking:
It is important to remark on where the shift occurs in this
quotation, between "you feel a little out of place" and
"but the banality of your own life...." Kincaid notes tourists
move from a suspicion of being disliked (and presumably some intuition
about the causes of this dislike) to their interest in their own
boredom.
Directing her comments to the above-mentioned people, Jamaica
Kincaid says that "you are not an ugly person all the time.... From
day to day, you are a nice person" (1988, 14). She continues by
mapping the process through which a "nice person" becomes a
"tourist," suggesting that the transformation results from a
modern ennui. She says that
Rather than identify, examine, and then attend to the issues that
cause feelings of "displacedness" in their everyday lives,
nice white people leave their homelands and possessions--escape their
lives--and become tourists. This interpretation suggests that the
problem is not merely that nice people leave home; rather it is the
"simple-minded" way in which they do it. I use the phrase
"simple-minded" deliberately, for Kincaid argues that North
American and English peoples abandon complex selves and complex lives to
become, simply, tourists. To further this argument, Kincaid lists some
issues that make nice peoples' home lives complex:
Yet unlike these people, "tourists" often are not
"whole." They want sun, fun, and pleasures, but they do not
want to he reminded of the home--and problems--they left behind. In
fact, they attempt to escape into Antigua's paradisiacal
"reality." Geographer Bonham C. Richardson supports
Kincaid's observations when he states that:
The Caribbean-as-paradise is a myth so strong that oppositional
stories hardly register for Western tourists. But for the region's
local residents, the myth is inextricably tied to racial, economic, and
political exploitation; in addition, local peoples are not able to
divorce the myth from other realities. Escapism and simplicity are
luxuries that people from "a small place" like Antigua can
little afford. They do, instead, immediately recognize the benefits that
tourists reap, whether or not tourists are aware of them. Disparities
become apparent as soon as tourists arrive at Antigua's airport.
Kincaid observes, "since you are a tourist, a North American or
European--to be frank, white--and not an Antiguan black returning to
Antigua from Europe or North America ... you move through customs with
ease. Your bags are not searched" (1988, 4-5). Although tourists
desire simplicity, both Richardson and Kincaid make it clear that they
move within contexts that are far from simple. But again I want to
stress that the latter does not simply represent white people as
simple-minded, but that she is most concerned with how and in what
context they become so.
In her focus on power relations, Kincaid is less concerned with
empathy than with more productive responses. The author uses the second
person singular strategically to position readers in her world. This
technique indicates that she does not speak to tourists who might share
her opinion; her initial concern is not with readers who know what she
knows. Rather, she seeks to identify the havoc wrought when tourists do
not understand the implications of their vacations or their roles in
various systems of power. My pedagogical approach to A Small Place seeks
to maintain and employ the author's goals. I also engage Audre
Lorde's call for a different ideological system, one that does not
merely replicate patriarchal or white supremacist positions. However,
these intentions do not eliminate student resistance; instead, my plan
for teaching Kincaid's essay anticipates some of it. Rather than
militate against students defensive responses, I put them in service of
a close and critical reading of the text. This can move students from a
reaction to A Small Place to an engagement with it. In the absence of
this movement, students can read the essay uncritically and, therefore,
overlook the author's critique of English colonialism,
Antigua's neo-colonial government, local peoples' equivocal
relationship to their past and present, and interrelationships among
these. (5) Such students also are not open to the complexities of
Kincaid's argument. When, for example, Kincaid makes explicit the
similarities between tourism and slavery, students focused on her
characterization of the tourist cannot see that, according to the
author, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Referencing
Antigua's inadequate sewage system (overwhelmed by the number of
tourists), Kincaid says, "the contents of your lavatory might ...
graze gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water."
She immediately continues, "the Caribbean Sea is very big and the
Atlantic Ocean is even bigger; it would amaze even you to know the
number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed up" (1988, 14).
Readers can see that there is a connection, but Kincaid does not map it
explicitly. We explore the possibilities of such a
connection--dehumanization of enslaved African peoples, emphasis on
tourists over Antigua's local residents--in class discussion.
A Small Place has moments where the idea of shared, complex
subjectivities can be seen. Kincaid claims that tourists and local
people share a desire to change their lives--even if only for four days
and three nights (1988, 1819). Yet this connection exists as an
introduction to a more pressing concern; a larger economic/social
context asserts itself here. Although similarities between
"tourist" and "native" exist, Kincaid notes a
central, and profound, inequality. "[Antiguans] envy [the
tourist's] ability to turn [Antiguans'] own banality and
boredom into a source of pleasure for [themselves]" (19), and yet
"some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They
are too poor ... and they are too poor to live properly in the place
where they live" (18-19). In noting this common desire to escape,
Kincaid simultaneously recognizes that power and privilege exist as
sources of their differences. I do not want students'
"momentary alliance" or "empathy" to replace a
recognition/examination of their privileged place of power (white-skin
privilege, class privilege, and "first world" privilege). I
want students to recognize the roots--and implications--of
Kincaid's critique, and of her legitimate anger--possibly against
them as individuals, but significantly against their unexamined role in
oppressive relationships. Accentuating students' defensiveness
and/or empathy maintains their central place within a nexus of
representations, namely a discourse of tourism that merely understands
the Caribbean as paradise and a discourse of colonialism that privileges
capital (what money can buy), service (slavery and the tourist
industry), and whiteness above all else. This type of interpretation
assigns to the background Kincaid and the views she seeks to represent.
After I solicit their "gut responses" to the text (a
solicitation that initiates the above-described interpretive process), I
ask them to consider the author's techniques and goals: why would
she employ such language?, what she could hope to achieve?, where does
she position herself in the problems she identifies? I continue by
asking them to look carefully at her word/phrase choices, encouraging
them to hone their skills at close textual analysis. At each stage,
students weigh their examined reactions to the text against those of
their classmates and against Kincaid's; they also measure their
close readings against their gut reactions as well as against the
writer's goals. Although I guide students through these steps, I
invite them to reach their own epiphanies about the text. Thus I assist
them in becoming active participants in their own learning.
Additionally, I believe that this process maintains A Small Place,
Kincaid, and the communities of which she is part at the heart of the
story; Kincaid-the-author is the agent to whom students/readers must
respond.
To get an idea of the issues at stake in A Small Place, and for
Kincaid, I ask students to consider the promotional blurbs in and on the
book's cover. I read her essay, among other things, as an
Antiguan-centered response to Western depictions of this island as a
tourist's "paradise." Yet the blurbs invoke the very
"paradise" that the author critiques. For example:
Kincaid's Antigua is a "damaged paradise,"
"[Kincaid's] language soars above her anger and her outrage,
exquisitely evoking the elegant rhythms of her tropical island
home," "[A Small Place] tells more about the Caribbean in 80
pages than all the guide books" (1988, back cover; my emphasis).
The first of this list still understands Kincaid's country as a
paradise, albeit a damaged one; the second blurb is explicit in its
invocation of the discourse of tourism. Finally, the last declaration
positions A Small Place as one among many Caribbean guide books. I draw
attention to these blurbs, essentially designed to sell the book to
potential readers, because many of them work against the text itself. I
ask students to think about the rhetorical impact of the blurbs
(potential tourists to Antigua might be misled by the cover and confused
by the author's Critique of neo-/colonialism) as well as
Kincaid's essay. This line of interpretation will emphasize
writers' choices and intent, whether they seek to elicit particular
responses or convey information.
I do not offer preliminary readings for A Small Place. By offering
students no preparation, I seek to maintain the writer/reader positions
that Kincaid's writing strategy creates. Her radical use of the
second person singular marks A Small Place as a text that speaks and
thinks from the margin, as opposed to one that speaks to the center from
the margin. To set up this interpretation, I ask students to attend to
Kincaid's discussion of white expatriates in the Antigua of her
childhood, which supports this contention. Because of their belief in
white civilization, Antiguans did not recognize racism in the behavior
of the Czechoslovakian dentist-cum-pediatrician who "would send his
wife to inspect us before we were admitted to his presence, and she
would make sure that we didn't smell, that we didn't have dirt
under our fingernails, and that nothing else about us--apart from the
colour of our skin--would offend the doctor" (1988, 28). Neither
would they perceive racism in the behavior of the Northern Irish
schoolteacher who "told these girls over and over again to stop
behaving as if they were monkeys just out of trees" (29). Instead,
Antiguans saw these people as "ill-mannered,"
"un-Christian-like," "small-minded," and "like
animals" (29). Kincaid states that her fellow Antiguans "felt
superior, for we were so much better behaved and we were full of grace,
and these people were so badly behaved and they were so completely empty
of grace. (Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper
posture of the weak, of children)" (30; my emphasis). The
"posture of the weak," imposed upon (to facilitate
subjugation) or learned by (to enable survival) formerly enslaved and
colonized Antiguans, was "normal" in the Antigua Kincaid
describes. However, in writing A Small Place, Kincaid chooses a
decidedly different tactic. She chooses to be "ill-mannered,"
enraged, and out-of-order because being mannerly, peaceful, and orderly
has been prescribed for, demanded and expected from people like her. Her
style, therefore, must necessarily tell a radically different story--and
tell it differently.
I hope students will appreciate their classmates'
interpretations of A Small Place, even if each is wholly different. I
hope that they acknowledge my informed reading of the text. I hope, too,
that angry and/or defensive students come to reconsider their positions.
But whether or not students realize any of my hopes, I concern myself
with directing them through a thorough use of the text in support of
their opinions. Teaching by example, I draw their attention to passages
that sustain my interpretations. This pedagogy demands that my analyses
be subject to the same textual rigor as those of students. An added
bonus is that this textually based analysis heads off complaints that I
impose my interpretations on the class, for I always point to A Small
Place for confirmation. Accordingly, students who challenge my
interpretations must do so by citing examples from the text.
Nevertheless, this textually based pedagogy sometimes fails. It is
difficult, for example, to convince some students that Kincaid is not
purely motivated by animosity toward white people. However, they have to
work very hard to maintain this opinion and, in doing so, they still
learn to use the text productively. Ultimately, even when I do not agree
with my students' interpretations of Kincaid's essay, I
respect and encourage their critical handling of it.
After devoting a significant amount of time to analyzing A Small
Place closely, I turned our attention to Jamaica Kincaid, specifically
where she places herself in her narrative. This investigation centers on
how such placement can influence our interpretation of her content.
(This line of questioning also helps them negotiate their own shifting
subject positions, from self-interested reader to informed witness.)
Throughout A Small Place, Kincaid shifts between insider (Antiguan) and
outsider (Antiguan American) positions while maintaining her place as
author. At times, it is hard to tell which subject position she
occupies. We can find Kincaid-the-Antiguan in unambiguous
representations of A Small Place and its people ("we Antiguans, for
I am one, have a great sense of things, and the more meaningful the
thing, the more meaningless we make it" [1988, 8]) and in the
author's reference to a white-only club ("we Antiguans thought
that the people at the Mill Reef Club had such bad manners, like
pigs" [27]). Readers can also witness the author positioned as an
Antiguan American in her harsh critique of tourism, the local
government, and the continued English presence in the country, for her
criticisms would have to take on a different caste if her survival
depended on tourism, the government, and the local English elites.
Some of my students argued that Kincaid's narrative fails, and
it does so because of her "privileged" subject position. They
noted how easy it was for the author to critique Antiguan tourism and
its neo-colonial government because she lives and works in the United
States. This is a valid criticism, to be sure; yet, I asked the students
to consider whether Kincaid's freedom to speak these truths (as she
sees them) undermines the veracity of these claims. Kincaid does take
full advantage of her subject positions, yet she leaves readers to
ponder, for example, whether Antigua's overwhelmed sanitation
system somehow becomes under-whelmed because her privileged position
allows her to discuss it. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize the
author's shifting place in the narrative she weaves. What better
way to show students that their own positions to the essay can similarly
shift?
Finally, I move from our consideration of the author's subject
position back to one of her narrative goals. A Small Place demonstrates
Kincaid's investment in tourisization, or the process through which
one becomes a tourist. She makes this interest plain when she declares,
"An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an
ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and
there to gaze at this and taste that" (1988, 17; my emphasis). With
eyes focused on paradise, Kincaid's tourists are blind to the
limits of this vision. For example, Kincaid continues: "it will
never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you
have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they
laugh at your strangeness" (17).
Introducing another of our required texts, Terry McMillan's
novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back, at this point both supports the
idea of tourisization and allows students to test Kincaid's
narrative strategy. (Bringing McMillan's text in here also gives
students an example of how to "use" Kincaid's essay; the
latter can provide a critical/interpretive frame through which Stella
can be read.) Kincaid specifically identifies her tourists as white, but
including Stella supports the notion of tourisization by tracing it in
other contexts (class, national identity).
McMillan's novel details an African American
protagonist's transition from a high-powered business executive to
a tourist. Stella shares many characteristics with Kincaid's
tourist, a fact that can be understood in terms of nationality as well
as class. Speaking generally about African American tourists in the
Caribbean, Ian Strachan argues that "although many of [them] are
often quite deliberate about giving their money to an independent black
nation with whom they share cultural and historical ties ... we should
not make the mistake of thinking that others of them do not come in
search of the same leisure, sun, gambling, and duty free liquor that
white ... tourists take advantage of" (1995, 10-11). Strachan adds
that:
In addition to the class privilege that radiates from the pages of
McMillan's novel--Stella stays at an expensive all-inclusive resort
in Negril, Jamaica. She consistently overtips "because [she
believes] in the power of tipping" (McMillan 1996, 105), and she is
liberal with her spending at home (254) and in Jamaica (216)--the novel
still acknowledges whiteness as a very real feature of Caribbean tourism
(Stella is one of only two African American guests at the resort). Yet
Strachan's point is well taken. In his/her desire for sun and fun,
"tourist" is largely defined by the ability to purchase both
things.
In addition to the class privilege that white and black tourists
can share, both sets of tourists are profoundly self interested. That
which motivates Stella's trip to Negril is her desire to get her
"groove" back. Since the novel features lengthy discussions of
Stella's sexual exploits, readers can equate her "groove"
with sexual satisfaction. McMillan's protagonist says that she is
"losing [her] morals down here on this island and yet [she is]
enjoying every single minute of it" (1996, 207). Importantly, while
readers witness Stella's moral "decline" in almost lurid
detail, we receive predictably familiar representations of Jamaica and
Jamaicans: hot and beautiful oceans and landscapes (57); attractive,
dark-skinned men with "white white teeth" (57) whose penises
are described as "fire hoses" (44) or "big flapping
dicks" (46). In its emphasis on sun, fun, and various forms of
"relaxation," How Stella Got Her Groove Back provides a
one-sided representation of the island. The flatness of McMillan's
characterization draws readers' attention to who and, more
importantly, what is central in the novel: Stella and her groove.
Perhaps unwittingly, McMillan recounts a moment when the
protagonist almost steps outside of the tourist persona. It occurs when
she (finally) travels beyond the grounds of the all-inclusive resort.
Exploring Negril's countryside on horseback with her guide,
General, Stella sees a "girl standing in her bra and panties inside
the living room of the house, ironing something. Our eyes meet and there
is something like disgust in hers for me. I sort of get it, but I go
ahead and sit on a handmade wooden bench and drink my Ting while the
General drinks two Red Stripe beers" (1996, 109). The speed with
which McMillan glosses over this encounter invokes Kincaid when the
latter states: "You see yourself taking a walk on that beach, you
see yourself meeting new people (only they are new in a very limited
way, for they are people just like you). You see yourself eating some
delicious, locally grown food. You see yourself, you see yourself
..." (1988, 13). It is not an accident that this passage ends as it
does; Kincaid could not be any more explicit. And on this point I anchor
my argument that "white people" and "tourists" may
be related, but not necessarily synonymous. The act of escaping their
unexamined lives in addition to a profound self-interest defines the
typical tourist. Both characterizations also make tourists blind to the
implications/impact of their vacations. Kincaid's A Small Place
focuses on the fact that tourism, as an industry, allows (encourages?)
tourists merely to "see" themselves.
Kincaid and McMillan both identify tourists' self-interest by
noting that they are not constitutionally unable to perceive complex
issues, nor are they unable to locate themselves within different
socio-political systems. The former claims that "the banality of
your own life is very real to you; it drove you to this extreme,
spending your days and your nights in the company of people who despise
you, people you do not like really, people you would not want to have as
your actual neighbour" (1988, 18). Kincaid raises issues of race
and class chauvinisms here as part of what makes the tourist's life
at home complicated; she also raises the idea of race/class privilege
that characterizes a tourist's experiences.
As we move toward the end of our time with Kincaid's A Small
Place, I expect students to appreciate the ways the author complicates
her discussions of tourism, class, slavery, and colonialism. After
working through the essay, students should also have the critical and
interpretive skills necessary to judge the effectiveness of the
author's narrative approaches as well as the text's content.
When, for example, Kincaid describes tourists as "incredibly
unattractive, fat, pastrylike-fleshed [men and women]," she might
be speaking from personal prejudice. However, I ask students to consider
the face of tourism pre-1988 (when A Small Place was published), the
impact of the industry on Antigua and on Antiguan people, and the
similarities between modern tourism and slavery. Add to these Terry
McMillan's rendition of Stella-as-tourist and students are left
with an unflattering representation of tourists, those who are oblivious
to, but nonetheless imbedded in, very complicated circumstances.
Students might consider Kincaid's rhetorical techniques
particularly ineffective, but this position would have to derive from
something more complex than reactive anger or defensiveness. In other
words, their interpretations of A Small Place have to derive from
"a variety of critical languages" (McLaren 1992, 17).
As McMillan's Stella quickly moves from "sort of"
getting why the Jamaican woman looks at her with disgust to enjoying her
Ting (1992, 109), Kincaid's "you" is equally disinclined
to examine his/her discomfort. Yet where McMillan provides a character
on which readers can heap criticisms, Kincaid offers "you."
Embracing all readers within her "you" construct, the author
animates thought processes and behaviors that have been normalized.
Removing the mediating character, Kincaid makes it difficult and, I
would argue, unproductive for readers to shift responsibility. Thus
Kincaid raises consciousness about thoughtless (unthinking) behavior and
about the connections between individual experience and social,
economic, and political issues. Readers of A Small Place cannot merely
"go on vacation" without acknowledging the contexts in which
they circulate.
Moving away from the above-mentioned features of A Small Place, we
turn our attention to paradoxical moments in the text. I ask, for
example, that they consider what the author means when she reflects on
her use of "the language of the criminal" to critique
"the criminal's deed" (1988, 31-32). This request is not
as simple as it appears, for at another point in the essay, Kincaid
remarks that because "abusive language" was illegal in
England, police had to use a dictionary of West Indian English to
determine whether (and when) these immigrants' language was abusive
(25). This anecdote reveals a complication of which the author does not
appear aware: "the criminal's language" and West Indian
English are not the same. I also contend that the author's language
differs from them both, particularly as A Small Place successfully
employs it to delineate the criminal's crime. Language, then,
evolves and can "speak" from various positions, about various
concerns. This is but one example of the kinds of critiques that can
result from different approaches to this text.
I agree with Professor Aegerter that being subjected to
students' resistance, as well as their preconceptions, can be
tiresome. The teaching method in "A Pedagogy of Postcolonial
Literature" is considerably less stressful for the teacher, but I
see it as an attempt at using "the master's tools to dismantle
the master's house." I am not naive enough to think that my
way of teaching will be successful every time, but I do believe that it
adds to diversity in a useful way, one that A Small Place makes clear. I
hope attention to varied ways of knowing will lead to productive
teaching methods and, possibly, productive "politics of daily
living" (McLaren 1992, 15).
I want all students to be uncomfortable when reading A Small Place.
Yet I want them to move from their discomfort to a textually supportable
critique of the essay. If I am successful, students will become
proficient at close textual analysis, and also be primed to engage texts
that explicitly map the contours of imperialism, colonization, slavery,
oppression, and white supremacy. I hope they can learn to move through
this process without becoming bogged down by their own reactive
responses; in fact, I expect that students will come to recognize that
their anxieties drive Kincaid's rhetorical strategy. I, too,
believe that the method with which I teach Kincaid's essay can be
used creatively with other texts, for it engages Lorde and
McLaren's desire for "forms of critical practice that can
interrogate, destabilize, and disorganize dominant strategies of power
and power/knowledge relations and that in doing so teachers may envisage
a means of enlisting pedagogy in the construction of a radical and
plural democracy" (McLaren 1992, 8). Such a strategy can shift
focus from students' familiar ways of knowing to less familiar
and--it is important to emphasize this--equally valid ones. I believe
such a strategy is possible if one uses ideological views that are
central to postcolonial/multicultural literatures to shape--rather than
expand on--the classroom environment.
Notes
(1) I would be disingenuous if I did not mention that a few
students read through their discomfort and recognized Kincaid's
style as a strategy designed to inform and affect readers. While this
essay is primarily concerned with students who were not able to do this,
I want to take a moment to discuss the former group. These students
tried to make sense of their initial discomfort with the text by
interpreting it through the course's themes and readings. I valued
their efforts because (as discussed below) I hope to guide students
through the process of critical reading.
(2) Although in another context, Jamaica Kincaid comes to the same
conclusion: "for isn't it odd that the only language I have in
which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who
committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of
the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal's deed.
The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from
the criminal's point of view" (1988, 31-32).
(3) My students have said that Kincaid is "way too
angry," that her anger "turned them off" or otherwise
prevented them from accepting "her message." They sometimes
absented themselves from her critique ("she's not talking to
me, I'm not that kind of tourist"), or they were overwhelmed
by it ("what can we do?"). Interestingly, many of these
students re-read A Small Place looking for solutions to the problems
Kincaid identifies (she offers few), as if her style would be more
palatable if she told readers what to do.
(4) Aegerter acknowledges this notion of destabilization:
"defamiliarization is an effective tool in helping students to
question previously held assumptions" (1997, 143). However, she
then states that the price of this kind of reorientation is her own
mental well being. I do agree that it can be frustrating to have to face
students' anger and defensiveness semester after semester. Yet
preliminary reading assignments, not to mention Aegerter's
characterization of texts like Kincaid's as "antagonistic,
accusatory, and oppositional to [students]," imply that
Kincaid's take on the world and her anger are excessive, vaguely
unjustified, and simply intended to attack readers. Professor
Aegerter's pre-reading assignments and description of post-colonial
ideologies also do not recognize Kincaid's skill as a writer.
Finally, I believe that Professor Aegerter's teaching method
maintains mainstream students--rather than Kincaid and peoples
victimized by oppression--as central to the issues in texts like A Small
Place.
(5) In their focus on self--their anger, their
defensiveness--students often overlook Jamaica Kincaid's critique
of Antiguans, a critique that takes up over half of the text. No
Antiguan escapes the author's critical eye, from corrupt government
officials to local people who fail to acknowledge links between tourism
and slavery, signified by their celebration of the Hotel Training School
where Antiguans learn to be "good servants" (1988, 50).
Works Cited
Aegerter, Linsday Pentolf. 1997. "A Pedagogy of Postcolonial
Literature." College Literature 24 2 (June): 142-51.
Chowdhury, Kanishka. 1992-3. "Teaching the Postcolonial Text:
Strategies and Interventions." College Literature (Double Issue)
19.3/20.1 (October/February): 191-94.
Cliff, Michelle. 1988a. "A Journey Into Speech." In The
Graywolf Annual Five: Multicultural Literacy, ed. R. Simonson and S.
Walker. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press.
--. 1988b. "If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This
in Fire." In The Graywolf Annual Five: Multicultural Literacy, ed.
R. Simonson and S. Walker. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press.
Kincaid, Jamaica. 1988. A Small Place. New York: Plume Books.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. "The Master's Tools will Never
Dismantle the Master's House." In Sister Outsider: Essays and
Speeches by Audre Lorde. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.
McLaren, Peter L. 1992-93. "Critical Literacy and Postcolonial
Praxis: A Freirian Perspective." College Literature 19.3/20.1
(October/February): 7-27.
McMillan, Terry. 1996. How Stella Got Her Groove Back. New York:
Signet.
Mohan, Rajeswari. 1992-93. "Dodging the Crossfire: Questions
for Postcolonial Pedagogy." College Literature 19.3/20.1
(October/February): 28-44.
Ojaide, Tanure. 1992-93. "Teaching Wole Soyinka's
'Death and the King's Horseman' to American College
Students." College Literature 19.3/20.1 (October/ February):
210-13.
Richardson, Bonham C. 1992. The Caribbean in the Wider World,
1492-1992: A Regional Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strachan, Ian Gregory. 1995. Paradise and Plantation: The Economy
of Caribbean Discourse. Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.
Rhonda D, Frederick teaches Caribbean and African American
literature at Boston College. She is presently working on a manuscript
that examines historical and imaginative narratives of Panama Canal
migrants and migration.
women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap
of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our
needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the
oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it
is the task of women of Color to educate white women--in the face of
tremendous resistance as to our existence, our differences, our
relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of
energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.
(Lorde 1984, 113; my emphasis)
They do not like me! That thought never actually occurs to you.
Still, you feel a little uneasy. Still you feel a little foolish.
Still, you feel a little out of place. But the banality of your own
life is very real to you; it drove you to this extreme, spending
your days and your nights in the company of people who despise you,
people you do not like really.... (Kincaid 1988, 17-18)
one day, when you are sitting somewhere, alone in that crowd, and
that awful feeling of displacedness comes over you ... you make a
leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your
amniotic sac ... to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin
and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it.
(Kincaid 1988, 16)
ordinarily, you are a nice person, an attractive person, a person
capable of drawing to yourself the affection of other people (people
just like you), a person at home in your own skin ... at home on
your street, your church, in community activities, your job, at home
with your family, your relatives, your friends--you are a whole
person. (Kincaid 1988, 15-16)
in their quest to get away from it all for a week in the winter,
white Americans want no experiences with black hostility, which they
feel they already know from their own country. So groups of tourists
can be typically loud and offensive while expecting deferential
servility from their "hosts." Caribbean governments, with an eye on
tourist profits, reinforce these expectations. It is perhaps
needless to point out that this economically-imposed servility is
galling in the light of the obvious (at least to Caribbean peoples)
inequities mirrored in the juxtaposition of luxurious tourist hotels
that are the domain of white tourists and wooden shacks occupied by
local peoples. (Richardson 1992, 127)
black tourists are often very aware of their status as Americans and
as a result view the rest of the world as backward.... Industrial
scale tourism has simply done its demographic homework and begun
targeting a new constituency, one which usually wants the same
vacation packages as white consumers.... Class operates here above
racial difference. (Strachan 1995, 11; my emphasis)