A Small Place E-Book

Jamaica Kincaid

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

'If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see…' So begins Jamaica Kincaid's powerful portrait of the damaged paradise that was her childhood home. The island of Antigua is a magical place of breathtaking beauty – with cloudless skies, dazzling blue waters, and majestic sunsets. But it is also a place of dramatic contrasts. What one doesn't see when on holiday on this ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies is the sweeping corruption, the dilapidated schools and hospitals and homes, and the shameful legacy of its colonial past. In A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid candidly appraises where she grew up, and makes palpable the impact of European colonisation and tourism. The book is a missive to the traveller, whether American or European, who wants to escape the banality and corruption of some large place, Kincaid, eloquent and resolute, reminds us that the Antiguan people, formerly British subjects, are unable to escape the same drawbacks of their own tiny realm – that behind the benevolent Caribbean scenery are human lives, always complex and often fraught with injustice.

Leseprobe

Acclaim for A Small Place

‘A loving explanation … a small book full of big ideas.’ – New York Newsday

‘This is truth, beautifully and powerfully stated … In truly lyrical language that makes you read aloud, Kincaid takes you from the dizzying blue of the Caribbean to the sewage of hotels and clubs where black Antiguans are only allowed to work … Truth, wisdom, insight, outrage, and cutting wit.’ – Atlanta Journal-Constitution

‘Like “The Ancient Mariner” in Coleridge’s poem, Kincaid will not let you go until you’ve heard her tale.’ – Boston Herald

‘Kincaid continues to write with a unique, compelling voice that cannot be found anywhere else. Her small books are worth a pile of thicker – and hollower – ones.’ – San Francisco Chronicle

‘Intimate … emotional … beautifully written.’ – Virginian-Pilot

A SMALL PLACE

JAMAICA KINCAID

DAUNT BOOKS

For Brian and Veronica Dyde; for my brothers Joseph, Dalma, and Devon Drew with love; and for William Shawn (again) with gratitude and love

Contents

Title PageDedicationPreface1234About the AuthorAlso By Jamaica KincaidCopyright

Preface

WOULD I WRITE such a book as this today? A book with its sense of innocence and so therefore betrayal, a book that was not meant to be a book at all, meant to be a letter to my then editor, William Shawn. I wasn’t so young in years, I was thirty-nine and already the mother of one child, but I felt young in my life as a writer, for I was just beginning to understand the world into which I was born, a world that began on Friday, 3 August 1492.

I myself was born in 1949. I left Antigua after I turned sixteen, but I was not yet seventeen years of age. I left, but ‘left’ isn’t the proper word at all; I was sent away to the United States of America to be a servant, a caretaker of children whose parents were very prosperous, a nanny, an au pair, whatever it can be called then or now.

At the time I was sent away, I felt behind me was a hell that was always being presented as Paradise: each day the sun shone above me for twelve hours, each night a warm blanket-like blackness enveloped me and I went to sleep. But those nights were full of such terrors: the night soil men with their horse-drawn carts, coming to take away the tub full of human waste from our latrine; the presence of someone known to be long dead but who had not remained everlastingly so and was, from time to time, lurking under a tree or just lurking, waiting to do harm; or someone who was not yet dead, but waiting alive in an alley to make someone else exactly that – dead! I did not know how to manoeuvre my way through or out of this.

The world before me, the world I was sent into, New York, I knew through a few magazines and movies. I had no friends there, I had no family, I had no money. What I had was a huge cauldron of questions that I did not know the answers to, and I did not know that the questions themselves should not be asked. When the questions had an answer, my people, the Antiguan people, would say to me, ‘It’s true, but did you have to say it?’ They said it in creole English, or broken English, or bad English, and it was the nicest thing they said to my face. Behind my back they said things and did things that made me think that perhaps my life was in danger.

The book you are now reading was not meant to be a book at all. It was meant to explain to William Shawn, who was then editor of the New Yorker, who I was and where I came from. Mr Shawn loved his writers (and we were his), or should I say, he loved the world that they carried around in their heads, their hands, their feet, their entire being.