A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the
author of Annie John
If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you
come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International
Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua.
You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister
would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a
hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you
have not yet seen . . .
So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have
not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies
where she grew up.
Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small
Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all
that it signifies.