Meme Corner: I have to note that I was really taken with this book’s cover painting, The Charmer by Robert Hogfeldt. It’s a perfect visual introduction to Kincaid’s arguments, and it pairs well with her tone. Today’s first and second memes are straight from the bowels of Clubhouse, my new social media addiction. Clubhouse is a perfect auditory introduction to Black Twitter’s arguments, and it pairs well with bouts of doom scrolling.

My friend Ambar told me about this book a few weeks ago, when we were having a discussion about Black land loss in the U.S. South, and how this loss is heightened in areas with major tourism economies. After the Twitter and Clubhouse debates surrounding this weekend’s thread of controversy, it seemed like a perfect time to make good on my library hold. (For context in case you don’t want to read the article, the debate was essentially about the ethics of a Black queer woman selling an ebook with guidance on how people could “find paradise” by becoming “digital nomads” in Bali, as she and her girlfriend have been doing for several months.)

Now to the book: given the short length of this 81-page essay, I found myself paying more attention than usual to the various stylistic choices Jamaica Kincaid made. I am IN LOVE with her cadence, and how it’s supported by an indulgent use of commas. Her sentences are so smooth and well-paced, even when they’re long—they’re less “run on”, more like “please, go on.” As someone who supports the Oxford comma and all its friends, it was a huge fan of Kincaid’s refined approach (I typically wield commas in less graceful service of my own verbosity.) There are also many second-person sections in this essay, where the “you” is a nondescript white tourist from the imperial core. In A Small Place, this tourist receives the field guide of a lifetime on how (not) to visit the author’s home of Antigua.

Kincaid begins the narrative by guiding the tourist through the physical manifestations of the oppressive tourism economy they are supporting in their trip to her home country. These manifestations are hidden in plain sight by complicit Antiguan leaders, all so the tourists don’t have to “let that slightly funny feeling you have from time to time about exploitation, oppression, domination develop into full-fledged unease, discomfort; you could ruin your holiday.” This could not be more timely for 2021, when we are both suckers for escapism and guilt-ridden by Kincaid’s notion of the tourist as “an ugly human being.” I think the Bali example sparked so much debate because many people felt the e-book peddlers had a distinct right to their paradise fantasies, as they were escaping not just drudgery of a large place, but also their oppression in the U.S. as Black lesbians. Many Americans (primarily White and wealthy) have claimed they too have a “right to escape” the coronavirus by moving to less populated areas, many of which are domestic and international hotspots for tourism. A Small Place poses a universal question for people of any race who have the resources to become tourists: do we have the right to “escape” at the expense of contributing to other people’s oppression?

One challenging component of truly reckoning with this question is that of language: we are trying to discuss how Black Americans can contribute to “the horror of the deed” (neocolonialism and neoliberalism) while using the “language of the criminal.” It makes things clunky, like I saw people asking on Clubhouse—how can queer Black women be colonizers, when we’re fleeing American oppression? We are still developing language for how even while possessing the same identity in every place you go, your power can change given the societal contexts of a new place. However, as the “digital nomad” industrial complex continues to boom, I think it’s important for Black people with the power to participate in the tourism economies to question our Travel Noire fantasies.

More thoughts: there is so much FEELING here, my God. I love Miss Susan’s review about how Kincaid’s anger makes her argument all the more incisive—by refusing the illusion of objectivity, she is able to exemplify how the enduring violence of settler colonialism mutilates the individuals living under this system. This means she can travel much further than a critique that refused to discuss how each of us have been shaped by imperialism. In a passage so good I had to quote it in three separate sets of Goodreads updates, she unravels so much: 1) how Western notions of good governance, law and order, and objectivity are inventions of racial capitalism; 2) why there is no place in “the free market” for people who used to be ON the market; and 3) where the “we were kings” narrative falls flat for many Black people who have been irreparably disconnected from our ancestral cultures and ways of being through slavery.

A Small Place made me think of so many other topics: theft of heirs’ property land in the SC Low Country and SC/GA Sea Islands, Randi K. Gill-Sadler’s article Confronting Myths of Exceptional, Black Leisure Travel: Teaching June Jordan’s “Report from the Bahamas” in the Contemporary Classroom, a quote from Toni Morrison about how paradise does not exist on this earth without the oppression of some group. (This quote is something I was thinking a lot about in my review of Akwaeke Emezi’s [b:Pet|38612739|Pet|Akwaeke Emezi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1550603866l/38612739._SY75_.jpg|60224408].) Kincaid’s description of the settlers who took pleasure in “pointing out the gutter into which a self-governing—Black—Antigua had placed itself” is very similar to many people’s opinions of U.S. municipalities with majority Black populations and leadership. Once more, this “language of the criminal” renders oppression inconsequential, so that settler colonial states become the standard for proper governance, and chocolate cities become the predominant instances of corruption. You also can’t miss the many parallels to gentrification: when Kincaid describes the towering presence of the Barclays Bank in Antigua’s central business district, and how the original Barclays Brothers made their wealth through slave trading, it calls to mind the Barclays Stadium in Brooklyn, and its contribution to the gentrification of Black communities with roots in the Caribbean. This is a place I think I’ll continue to reflect upon: how does modern settler colonialism necessitate tourist economies, and how do tourist economies exacerbate gentrification in American cities? How do gentrifiers become resident-tourists, with the means to “escape” life in the suburbs while ignoring those who are displaced to create this “urban paradise”?

As many of y’all know, this last point is super relevant to my current field of work, urban and regional planning. As I continue to learn about racial capitalism in housing and the real estate state, I am questioning whether it’s even possible to substantively resist these market-driven systems while working as a planner. However, A Small Place indicates how my other professional interests (archival work) are by no means separated from the legacy of colonial violence: “You loved knowledge, and wherever you went you made sure to build a school, a library (yes, and in both of these places you distorted or erased my history and glorified your own.)” In short, working to resist the exploitation of oppressed people, false notions of objectivity, and revisionist histories will follow me in every occupation!

My unanswered questions: how does Kincaid’s “native or tourist” binary apply to Black people in the U.S., who have been theorized as a neoindigenous people? As an NC resident who is the descendant of enslaved North Carolinians, and whose family hopes to build a reunion center on the land our ancestors have stewarded and owned for decades, I need to find out more about agritourism, land sovereignty, and who exactly is Indigenous. This means I want to keep learning about the experiences and freedom struggles of Black Native people in my country, such as the Choctaw & Chickasaw Freedmen, whose ancestors were property of the Five Slaveholding Tribes, orthe Lumbee people here in the Carolinas (I’m hoping to get more acquainted with Melissa Maynor Lowery’s work this year.) Finally, I am curious about how Kincaid’s essay should motivate us to support “natives in the world [who] are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go.” In the case of Bali debacle, people have suggested supporting the the Free West Papua campaign, as the West Papuans are Indigenous people who are being brutalized by the Indonesian government.

TLDR: read this book!!! It’s short, and structured beautifully. Kincaid is righteously angry, and this full emotion enables her to depict how structural oppression and generational trauma impact each individual in a given society. A Small Place could help you break your reading slump, and it will certainly make you think about escapism in the time of COVID, tourism’s parallels to gentrification, and settler colonialism’s enduring impact on Indigenous communities.