Text: "A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid
This essay excerpt works to broaden the reader's perspective by comparing the experience of Antigua's tourists to the experience of the natives. Kincaid doesn't mind painting an ugly picture of tourists (who could of course be you or me, but at any rate are certainly European or American). She captures the escapist expectations of an island holiday, only to inform us that the natives "cannot go anywhere . . . are too poor to go anywhere . . . [are unable] to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure (264).
It's all about challenging perception: tourists come for the promise of sunny, dry days, for example, while natives suffer the realities of drought. Kincaid often introduces a loaded image or fact with, "You may say" or "You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder" or "You must not wonder," a writing strategy that suggests what you should say or should wonder when you come to the island. If you are thinking and observing, she suggests, you will wonder certain things. For example, "You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it" followed a few sentences later by "the contents of your lavatory might, just might, graze gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water, for you see, in Antigua, there is no proper sewage-disposal system" (262).
Prompt: What do you have inside information about? I've heard horror stories about hotel sheets not being changed/washed for weeks, food dropped on the floor in restaurants served to the customer anyway, and the tip of a finger being found in a package of ground beef. Is there something you want your audience to seriously rethink? Something about which we "must not wonder?"
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