Comments-A Small Place
Below is a readers guide and review to "A Small Place." What did you think about the book?
posted by book1 at 5:23 PM
Friday, June 02, 2006
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My comments regarding A Small Place are twofold: one is about KIncaid personally and the pain she still suffers, and the other is about looking at her situation from a historical perspective.
Re Kincaid: KIncaid's pain and rage are certainly real and palpable but I have a great deal of trouble feeling any empathy for her. This may sound harsh and terribly "Western," or Imperialist, or White, but here's the way I see it.
Whether Kincaid is in voluntary or forced exile from Antigua is almost irrelevant to the life she lives. After Kincaid began writing in America, her work was noticed by someone at the prestigious New Yorker magazine where she landed a plum job. She met Allen Shawn there, the son of William Shawn - the magazine's founder and owner -- and his brother Wallace Shawn, the incredible actor, writer, and translator (this years production of the Threepenny Opera). She married Allen who's now on staff as a music professor at Bennington and it is there that she lives comfortably and writes about her rage. Forgive me if I don't bleed for her.
Personally, I think she gets a great deal of psychological satisfaction from hanging onto this rage, and it fuels her writing. Without it, she probably has nothing to say. It reminds of Athol Fugard's most recent play -- post Apartheid -- that flopped in America, primarily because now that his bogeyman was dead, he no longer had a target, and his writing lacked the crackling heat that it used to have. If Kincaid releases her bogeyman, what has she got to say?
Her writing also made me think of Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory in which this Mexican American spoke of his alienation from his culture and his parents. He lamented that he no longer felt he had anything in common with them, no longer felt like a Mexican, but also didn't feel like an American. To flesh this picture out, Rodriguez, whose mother brought him here to assure that he could have a better life and education, went on to get a Ph. D., study at Cambridge, and became a college professor.
My hard-nosed words to both is: get over it. This is the immigrant experience, always has been, always will be. It was the same for my family who came from Russia but fortunately, they were people who found the new culture exciting -- an adventure. And these people were, quite literally, forced to leave their homes. Pogroms were deadly you know.
Historical perspective: Invade and conquer has been the way of the world since recorded history and surely before. Kincaid's island oppressors were themselves victimized by foreign invasion and colonization: the Romans invaded Britain in 43 CE; the Saxons (Germans) in 450; the Vikings (Scandinavia) in 793; the Normans (French) in 1066; the Tudors (Scots) in 1485.
Each time, the indigenous population integrated the new culture into their own to create a new and different one -- different here does NOT mean worse or bad, only different.
The only thing that is unforgivable about anything she experienced, or that the British experienced when they were invaded, is enslavement. The rest is the way of the world.
This blog has gotten very long so I'll end with two things I'd like to talk about further: the effect of slavery on today's African-American culture, and being "forced" to write in English. I have many thoughts on those subjects but that's for live discussion or new blogs.
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