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Written by Reading Recluse on 2025-01-09 at 11:18

📗 "A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid

Here, some oven mitts. You'll need them because this book is scalding hot.

I love this long essay about the effects of colonialism on Antigua, about the divide between western countries and the way they use the global south for both resources and entertainment, and about the inequality that comes with tourism. Kincaid really does not hold back.

I've been reading and thinking a lot in the last few years about why my life is the way it is, here in Europe. About being lower class, yet still having libraries I can use. About being disabled and discriminated against, but being able to use certain healthcare. About never travelling and struggling with classism, but still having clean water and a roof over my head for now. I'm not able to word it eloquently, but there's a difference between comparing myself to my surroundings ("I'm not that well off") and looking at myself compared to the rest of the world ("I have a great standard of living because all of our forefathers robbed other continents and still our governments and businesses are exploiting the rest of the world"). Because I indirectly profit from years of conquering and war, and although I have limited means to fight the status quo, I want to learn all about it and see in what ways one can at the very least opt out wherever possible. Maybe it's a naive thought, but I'm not sure where else to start.

The author directs her anger more towards the US/EU middle class who plays obnoxious tourist everywhere, but also doesn't stop to critique on how places like hers have changed through exploitation and will never be able to go back to how they were before. And they'll never develop into what they could've been either. It's sad to see that with such clarity. The ripple effects are everlasting and sadly often internalized as well.

A Small Place is almost 40 years old. I can only imagine what a more updated version would look like, now that there is more mass tourism, but also more anti-tourism movements. And now that so many countries are dealing with more natural disasters because of climate change... which in the west is mostly approached as 'a disaster for tourism' without much care for local inhabitants. Things haven't gotten much better, have they?

I'm sure I'll pick up more titles from Jamaica Kincaid soon, both fiction and non-fiction. She writes so well.

[#]AmReading #NonFiction #essays #memoir

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