#6 A Small Place - Personal Reaction on Ch. 1 & 2

Before starting to read the book I chose to look for some background information about the author, Jamaica Kincaid. From the many interesting accomplishments she’s made throughout her life, the most memorable and most related to the book is the fact that even though she was born in Antigua, she decided to change her name from Elaine Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid, partly so that the people of Antigua wouldn't know she was writing. I find this interesting given the fact that on the first two chapters of a “A Small Place”, Kincaid speaks so cynically about Antigua, and explains everything with detail, even though she now lives and teaches in Vermont, USA.

The perspective Kincaid writes about in the book, related to the ideas you get when you visit a place that you’ve never before seen, are true at least for me. When we arrive to any place in the world that we paid some of our hard earned money and we see that the place is worse than where you live, we tend to start pointing out the things that are wrong or out of place and we don’t look at the “why” and “how” that got to be how it is. An example of this is seen when Kincaid talks about how you, a tourist, react to the fact that the driver that will take you from the airport to the hotel you chose, has a better car than the one you have back at home, just by being a taxi driver. She also says that what you don’t ask yourself is that if besides the nice car, does the driver have a nice house to go after his shift, or does he, as it happens to be, goes to a house that is far beneath the status of the car. This example can also go the other way around in which we go, for example, to Orlando and we see all these sophisticated highways and improvements and we tend to ask ourselves, how it would be like if we had that back in Puerto Rico, or we say how good is this compared to the rubbish we have in the island. This reaction may be related to the identity each and everyone has, since we are comparing the identity of the country we are visiting and comparing it to our own identity from whichever country we consider ourselves to be.

Below is the link from where I found the interesting facts about Kincaid's life! Enjoy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/kincaid_life.shtml