The Ugliness of Tourism
For Kincaid, tourists are morally ugly, though in her description of
fat, “pastrylike-fleshed” people on the beach, she shows that physical
ugliness is part of tourism as well. The moral ugliness of tourism is
inherent in the way tourists make use of other, usually much poorer, people
for their pleasure. Kincaid is not referring to direct exploitation of
others (though she does mention one government minister who runs a brothel);
rather, she refers to a more spiritual form of exploitation. According to
Kincaid, a tourist travels to escape the boredom of ordinary life—they want
to see new things and people in a lovely setting. Kincaid points out that
the loveliness of the places that tend to attract tourists is often a source
of difficulty for those who live there. For example, the sunny, clear sky of
Antigua, which indicates a lack of rainfall, makes fresh water a scarce and
precious commodity. For tourists, however, the beauty is all that
matters—the drought is someone else’s problem.
Others’ problems can even add to the attraction of a place for
tourists. Kincaid notes that tourists tend to romanticize poverty. The
locals’ humble homes and clothing seem picturesque, and even open latrines
can seem pleasingly “close to nature,” unlike the modern plumbing at home.
Kincaid believes that this attitude is the essence of tourism. The lives of
others, no matter how poor and sad, are part of the scenery tourists have
come to enjoy, a perspective that negatively affects both tourists and
locals. The exotic and often absurd misunderstanding that tourists have of a
strange culture ultimately prevents them from really knowing the place they
have come to see.
Admiration vs. Resentment of the Colonizer
Kincaid observes the quality of education on Antigua, as well as the
minds of its inhabitants, and remains deeply ambivalent about both. She
herself is the product of a colonial education, and she believes that
Antiguan young people today are not as well-educated as they were in her
day. Kincaid was raised on the classics of English literature, and she
thinks today’s young Antiguans are poorly spoken, ignorant, and devoted to
American pop culture. However, one of the things Kincaid despises most about
the old Antigua was its cultural subservience to England. If young Antiguans
today are obsessed with American trash, in the old days they were obsessed
with British trash. One of the insidious effects of Antiguans being schooled
in the British system is that all of their models of excellence in
literature and history are British. In other words, Antiguans have been
taught to admire the very people who once enslaved them. Kincaid is
horrified by the genuine excitement the Antiguans have regarding royal
visits to the island: the living embodiment of British imperialism is
joyously greeted by the former victims of that imperialism.
Antiguans’ minds have been shaped from the bottom up by the experience
of being enslaved and, later, colonized. This intimate shaping determines
the contours of daily life and even private thoughts. For example, the young
Kincaid’s greatest pleasure is in reading, but everything she reads is
tainted by bitterness, since she is learning the dominant culture from the
position of a dominated people. English is her first language, and Kincaid
complains that even her critique of colonialism must be expressed in the
words she learned from the colonialists themselves. Kincaid doesn’t feel at
home in either world. She will never be truly English because of race and
history, yet her intimacy with English culture expands her horizons far
beyond the small boundaries of Antigua. Thanks to slavery and to being ruled
from afar for so long, the Antiguans have become accustomed to being passive
objects of history, rather than active makers of it. The experiences of the
colonized are therefore always secondary in some sense; it is the people
from the “large places” who determine events, control history, and even
control language.
The Prevalence of Corruption
For Kincaid, corruption is related to colonization in that it is a
continuation of the oppression of colonialism—except that corruption turns
the once-colonized people against themselves. Kincaid insists that
corruption pervades every aspect of public life in Antigua, that everyone
knows about it, and that no one seems to know what to do about it.
Government ministers run brothels, steal public funds, and broker shady
deals, but there is a conspicuous lack of outrage on the part of the public.
Kincaid attributes this lack of anger to the Antiguans’ general passivity,
but she also sees their attitude as a logical reaction to the “lessons” of
Antiguan history. The British claimed to be bringing civilization to the
colonized territories while actually exploiting them and taking from them as
much as they could. Naturally, when the Antiguans themselves came to power,
they followed the example they had been given: under the motto “A People to
Mold, A Nation to Build,” their ministers claim to be working for the
greater good while lining their own pockets.
