You breathe deep. You see a beautiful boy skimming the water, godlike, on a Windsurfer. You see an incredibly unattractive, fat, pastrylike-fleshed woman enjoying a walk on the beautiful sand, with a man, an incredibly unattractive, fat, pastrylike- fleshed man; you see the pleasure they're taking in their surroundings. Still standing, looking out the window, you see yourself lying on the beach, enjoy- ing the amazing sun a sun so powerful and yet so beautiful, the way it is always overhead as if on permanent guard, ready to stamp out any cloud that dares to darken and so empty rain on you and ruin your holiday; a sun that is your personal friend.
You see yourself taking a walk on that beach, you see yourself meeting new people only they are new in a very limited way, for they are people just like you. You see yourself eating some delicious, locally grown food. You see yourself, you see yourself. You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it.
You must not wonder what happened when you brushed your teeth. Oh, it might all end up in the water you are thinking of taking a swim in; 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.
But the Caribbean Sea is very big and the Atlantic Ocean is even bigger; it would amaze even you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed up. When you sit down to eat your delicious meal, it's better that you don't know that most of what you are eating came off a plane from Miami. And before it got on a plane in Miami, who knows where it came from? A good guess is that it came from a place like Antigua first, where it was grown dirt-cheap, went to Miami, and came back.
There is a world of something in this, but I can't go into it right now. The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being.
You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. But one day, when you are sitting somewhere, alone in that crowd, and that awful feeling of displacedness comes over you, and really, as an ordinary person you are not well equipped to look too far inward and set yourself aright, because being ordinary is already so taxing, and being ordinary takes all you have out of you, and though the words "I must get away" do not actually pass across your lips, you make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it; to being a person lying on some faraway beach, your stilled body stinking and glistening in the sand, looking like something first forgotten, then remembered, then not important enough to go back for; to being a person marvelling at the harmony ordinarily, what you would say is the backwardness and the union these other people and they are other people have with nature.
An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness you do not look the way they look ; the physical sight of you does not please them; you have bad manners it is their custom to eat their food with their hands; you try eating their way, you look silly; you try eating the way you always eat, you look silly ; they do not like the way you speak you have an accent ; they col- lapse helpless from laughter, mimicking the way they imagine you must look as you carry out some everyday bodily function.
They do not like you. They do not like me! That thought never actually occurs to you. Still, you feel a little uneasy. Still, you feel a little foolish. But the banality of your own life is very real to you; it drove you to this extreme, spending your days and your nights in the company of people who despise you, people you do not like really, peo- ple you would not want to have as your actual neighbour.
And so you must devote yourself to puzzling out how much of what you are told is really, really true Is ground-up bottle glass in peanut sauce really a delicacy around here, or will it do just what you think ground-up bottle glass will do? Is this rare, multicoloured, snout-mouthed fish really an aphrodisiac, or will it cause you to fall asleep permanently? Oh, the hard work all of this is, and is it any wonder, then, that on your return home you feel the need of a long rest, so that you can recover from your life as a tourist?
That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world— cannot go anywhere.
They are too poor. They 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—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.
That Antigua no longer exists. That Antigua no longer exists partly for the usual reason, the passing of time, and partly because the bad- minded people who used to rule over it, the English, no longer do so. But the English have become such a pitiful lot these days, with hardly any idea what to do with themselves now that they no longer have one quarter of the earth's human population bow- ing and scraping before them.
Actual death might have been better. And so all this fuss over empire—what went wrong here, what went wrong there—always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong: they should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they loved so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget.
And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and every- body they met they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that. The English hate each other and they hate England, and the reason they are so miserable now is that they have no place else to go and nobody else to feel better than.
But let me show you the Antigua that I used to know. In the Antigua that I knew, we lived on a street named after an English maritime criminal, Horatio Nelson, and all the other streets around us were named after some other English maritime criminals. There were flamboyant trees and mahogany trees lining East Street.
Government House was surrounded by a high white wall—and to show how cowed we must have been, no one ever wrote bad things on it; it remained clean and white and high. I once stood in hot sun for hours so that I could see a putty-faced Prin- cess from England disappear behind these walls.
I was seven years old at the time, and I thought, She has a putty face. There was the library on lower High Street, above the Department of the Treasury, and it was in that part of High Street that all colonial government business took place. In that part of High Street, you could cash a cheque at the Treasury, read a book in the library, post a letter at the post office, appear before a magistrate in court. Since we were ruled by the English, we also had their laws.
There was a law against using abusive language. Can you imagine such a law among people for whom making a spectacle of yourself through speech is everything? When West Indians went to England, the police there had to get a glossary of bad West Indian words so they could understand whether they were hearing abusive language or not. It was in that same part of High Street that you could get a passport in another government office.
In the middle of High Street was the Barclays Bank. That is how they made their money. When the English outlawed the slave trade, the Barclay brothers went into banking. It made them even richer. It's possible that when they saw how rich banking made them, they gave themselves a good beating for opposing an end to slave trading for surely they would have opposed that , but then again, they may have been visionaries and agitated for an end to slavery, for look at how rich they became with their banks borrowing from through their savings the de- scendants of the slaves and then lending back to them.
But people just a little older than I am can recite the name of and the day the first black person was hired as a cashier at this very same Barclays Bank in Antigua. Do you ever wonder why some people blow things up? I can imagine that if my life had taken a certain turn, there would be the Barclays Bank, and there I would be, both of us in ashes.
Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget?
There is the Barclays Bank. The Barclay brothers are dead. The human beings they traded, the human beings who to them were only commodities, are dead.
People who think about these things believe that every had deed, even every bad thought, carries with it its own retribution. So do you see the queer thing about people like me? Sometimes we hold your retribution. And then there was another place, called the Mill Reef Club. It was built by some people from North America who wanted to live in Antigua and spend their holidays in Antigua but who seemed not to like Antiguans black people at all, for the Mill Reef Club declared itself completely private, and the only Antiguans black people allowed to go there were servants.
People can recite the name of the first Antiguan black person to eat a sand- wich at the clubhouse and the day on which it happened; people can recite the name of the first Antiguan black person to play golf on the golf course and the day on which the event took place. In those days, we Antiguans thought that the people at the Mill Reef Club had such bad manners, like pigs; they were behaving in a bad way, like pigs.
There they were, strangers in someone else's home, and then they refused to talk to their hosts or have anything human, anything intimate, to do with them. And what were these people from North America, these people from England, these people from Europe, with their bad behaviour, doing on this little island?
For they so enjoyed behaving badly, as if there was pleasure immeasurable to be had from not acting like a human being. Let me tell you about a man; trained as a dentist, he took it on himself to say he was a doctor, specialising in treating children's illnesses.
No one objected—cer- tainly not us. He came to Antigua as a refugee running away from Hitler from Czechoslovakia. This man hated us so much that he would send his wife to inspect us before we were admitted into his presence, and she would make sure that we didn't smell, that we didn't have dirt under our finger- nails, and that nothing else about us—apart from the colour of our skin—would offend the doctor.
I can remember once, when I had whooping cough and I took a turn for the worse, that my mother, before bundling me up and taking me off to see this man, examined me carefully to see that I had no bad smells or dirt in the crease of my neck, behind my ears, or anywhere else.
Then there was a headmistress of a girls' school, hired through the colonial office in England and sent to Antigua to run this school which only in my lifetime began to accept girls who were born outside a marriage; in Antigua it had never dawned on anyone that this was a way of keeping black children out of this school. This woman was twenty-six years old, not too long out of university, from Northern Ireland, and she told these girls over and over again to stop behaving as if they were monkeys just out of trees.
No one ever dreamed that the word for any of this was racism. We thought these people were so ill- mannered and we were so surprised by this, for they were far away from their home, and we be- lieved that the farther away you were from your home the better you should behave.
This is because if your bad behaviour gets you in trouble you have your family not too far off to help defend you. We thought they were un-Christian-like; we thought they were small-minded; we thought they were like animals, a bit below human standards as we under- stood those standards to be. We felt superior, for we were so much better behaved and we were full of grace, and these people were so badly behaved and they were so completely empty of grace. Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children.
We were taught the names of the Kings of England. In Antigua, the twenty-fourth of May was a holiday—Queen Victoria's official birthday. We didn't say to our- selves, Hasn't this extremely unappealing person been dead for years and years? Instead, we were glad for a holiday.
I was reciting my usual litany of things I hold against England and the English, and to round things off I said, "And do you know that we had to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday?
I said, "Well, apart from the fact that she belonged to you and so anything you did about her was proper, at least you knew she died. I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions.
All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no ex- cess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue.
For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal's deed. The language of the criminal can explain and ex- press the deed only from the criminal's point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation in- flicted on me.
When I say to the criminal, "This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong," or, "This deed is bad, and this other deed is bad, and this one is also very, very bad," the criminal understands the word "wrong" in this way: It is wrong when "he" doesn't get his fair share of profits from the crime just committed; he understands the word "bad" in this way: a fellow criminal betrayed a trust.
That must be why, when I say, "I am filled with rage," the criminal says, "But why? But nothing can erase my rage—not an apology, not a large sum of money, not the death of the criminal—for this wrong can never be made right, and only the impossible can make me still: can a way be found to make what happened not have happened? And so look at this prolonged visit to the bile duct that I am making, look at how bitter, how dyspeptic just to sit and think about these things makes me.
Years and years later, I read somewhere that this Princess made her tour of the West Indies which included Antigua, and on that tour she dedicated my school because she had fallen in love with a married man, and since she was not allowed to marry a divorced man she was sent to visit us to get over her affair with him.
How well I remember that all of Antigua turned out to see this Princess person, how every building that she would enter was repaired and painted so that it looked brand-new, how every beach she would sun herself on had to look as if no one had ever sunned there before I wonder now what they did about the poor sea? I mean, can a sea be made to look brand-new?
Have I given you the impression that the Antigua I grew up in revolved almost completely around England? Well, that was so. I met the world through England, and if the world wanted to meet me it would have to do so through England. The English were ill-mannered, not racists; the school head- mistress was especially ill-mannered, not a racist; the doctor was crazy—he didn't even speak English properly, and he came from a strangely named place, he also was not a racist; the people at the Mill Reef Club were puzzling why go and live in a place populated mostly by people you cannot stand , not racists.
Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all people like me seem to have learned from you is how to imprison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank ac- counts? Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? Let me just show you how you looked to us. You came.
You took things that were not yours, and you did not even, for appearances' sake, ask first. You could have said, "May I have this, please?
Believe me, it would have gone a long way. I would have had to admit that at least you were polite. You murdered people. You imprisoned people. You robbed people. You opened your own banks and you put our money in them. The accounts were in your name. The banks were in your name. There must have been some good people among you, but they stayed home.
And that is the point. That is why they are good. They stayed home. But still, when you think about it, you must be a little sad. And you might feel that there was more to you than that, you might feel that you had understood the mean- ing of the Age of Enlightenment though, as far as I can see, it had done you very little good ; 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.
But then again, perhaps as you observe the debacle in which I now exist, the utter ruin that I say is my life, perhaps you are remem- bering that you had always felt people like me cannot run things, people like me will never grasp the idea of Gross National Product, people like me will never be able to take command of the thing the most simpleminded among you can master, people like me will never understand the notion of rule by law, people like me cannot really think in abstractions, people like me cannot be objective, we make everything so personal.
You will forget your part in the whole setup, that bureaucracy is one of your inventions, that Gross National Product is one of your inventions, and all the laws that you know mysteriously favour you. Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists?
As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any com- fort to me.
Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you. For the answer on every Antiguan's lips to the ques- tion "What is going on here now? Them are thief, them are big thief. I was standing on Market Street in front of the library. The library! But why is the library on Market Street? I had asked myself. Or, why, years after The Earthquake damaged the old library building, has a new library not been built?
Why is the library above a dry- goods store in an old run-down cement-brick build- ing? Oh, you might be saying to yourself, Why is she so undone at what has become of the library, why does she think that is a good example of corrup- tion, of things gone bad? The place where the library is now, above the dry-goods store, in the old run-down concrete building, is too small to hold all the books from the old building, and so most of the books, instead of being on their nice shelves, resting comfortably, waiting to acquaint me with you in all your greatness, are in cardboard boxes in a room, gathering mildew, or dust, or ruin.
In this place, the young librarians cannot find the things they want, and I don't know whether it is because of the chaos of storing for a long period of time the contents of a public library in cardboard boxes, or because of the bad post-colonial education the young librarians have received. In Antigua to- day, most young people seem almost illiterate. On the airwaves, where they work as news personalities, they speak English as if it were their sixth language. Once, I attended an event at carnival time called a "Teenage Pageant.
What surprised me most about them was not how familiar they were with the rubbish of North America—compared to the young people of my generation, who were familiar with the rubbish of England—but, unlike my generation, how stupid they seemed, how unable they were to answer in a straightforward way, and in their native tongue of English, simple questions about themselves. In my generation, they would not have been allowed on the school stage, much less before an audience in a stadium.
The head librarian, the same one from colonial days, seemed to spend her time wondering if there was anybody with money or influence to help the library, apologising to people—Antiguans returning to Antigua after a long absence—who are shocked and offended by the sight of the library sitting on top of a dry-goods store, wondering if in the end the people at the Mill Reef Club will relent and contribute their money to the building of a new library, instead of holding to their repair-of-the-old-library-or-nothing position.
The people at the Mill Reef Club love the old Antigua. I love the old Antigua. Without question, we don't have the same old Antigua in mind. When I was growing up and was a member of the library, this woman was the head librarian. I didn't mean to steal the books, really; it's just that once I had read a book I couldn't bear to part with it , always sure that we meant to do some bad. She must have been very proud of her work then and her association with such an institution, for, to see her now, she looks the opposite of her old self.
I would go to that library every Saturday afternoon—the last stop on my Saturday-afternoon round of things to do I would save this for last, for it was the thing I liked to do best —and sit and look at books and think about the misery in being me I was a child and what is a child if not someone full of herself or himself , whom I loved, whom I did not love, whom I only just liked, and so on. I think that by around nine years of age I had read all the books in the children's section it was a very small collec- tion , and so I had to use my mother's library card to borrow books from the adult section.
It is this same librarian who now stands over the shame of what is now the library who used to watch me closely, trying to make sure that I didn't leave the library with more books than I was allowed, and leave with them in such a way that meant they would never be seen in any library but my own again. And so again, can you see why it is that the library might mean something to me, why it might make me feel sad to see it reduced to its present condition?
For at the moment that I was standing on Market Street and looking up at the thing called the library, the old building where the library used to be was occupied by, and served as headquarters for, a carnival troupe. The theme of this carnival troupe was "Angels from the Realm," and it seemed to me that there was some- thing in that, though not a deliberate something, just a something, like an "Angels from the Realm of Innocence" something.
And I supposed it made sense for something from the realm of culture to occupy a building that used to house something from the realm of education, for in Antigua, the Minister of Education is also the Minister of Cul- ture. Where the shelves of books used to be, where the wooden tables and chairs used to be, where the sound of quietness used to be, where the smell of the sea used to be, where everything used to be, was now occupied by costumes: costumes for angels from the realm.
And so what sort of place has Antigua become that the people from the Mill Reef Club are allowed a say in anything? That they are allowed to live there the way they continue to live there is bad enough. I then went to see a woman whose family had helped to establish the Mill Reef Club.
She had been mentioned to me as someone who was very active in getting the old library restored. I knew of this woman, for she is notorious for liking Antiguans only if they are servants. After I mentioned the library to her, the first thing she told me was that she always encouraged her girls and her girls' children to use the library, and by her girls she meant grownup Antiguan women not unlike me who work in her gift shop as seamstresses and sales- women. She said to me then what everybody in Antigua says sooner or later: The government is for sale; anybody from anywhere can come to Antigua and for a sum of money can get what he wants.
And I had to ask myself, What exactly should I feel toward the people who robbed me of the right to make a reply to this woman? For I could see the pleasure she took in pointing out to me the gutter into which a self-governing—black- Antigua had placed itself.
John's was going to be developed, turned into little shops—boutiques—so that when tourists turned up they could buy all those awful things that tourists always buy, all those awful things they then take home, put in their attics, and their children have to throw out when the tourists, finally, die. I had heard from many people that the person who wanted to develop that part of St.
John's was a foreigner, who was once wanted in the Far East for swindling a government out of oil profits, a man so notorious that he cannot travel with a pass- port from the country of which he is a citizen but travels on a diplomatic passport issued by the gov- ernment of Antigua.
I thought, then, that I should ask the Minister of Education about the library. In Antigua, cricket is sport and cricket is culture. But let me just tell you something about Ministers of Culture: in places where there is a Minister of Culture it means there is no culture. For have you ever heard of any culture springing up under the umbrella of a Minister of Culture? Countries with Ministers of Culture must be like countries with Liberty Weekend.
Do you remember Liberty Weekend? In the week before Liberty Weekend, the United States Supreme Court ruled that ordinary grown-up people could not do as they pleased behind the locked doors of their own bed- room. I would have thought, then, that the people whose idea it was to have the Liberty Weekend business would have been so ashamed at such a re- pudiation of liberty that they would have cancelled the whole thing. But not at all; and so in a country that had less liberty than it used to have, Liberty Weekend was celebrated.
In countries that have no culture or are afraid they may have no culture, there is a Minister of Culture. And what is culture, anyway? In some places, it's the way they play drums; in other places, it's the way you behave out in public; and in still other places, it's just the way a person cooks food. And so what is there to preserve about these things? Oh, I suppose that it was just as well that the Minister of Culture was not in Antigua then, for I did not know how this man would take to me or anything I might say.
It so happens that in Antigua my mother is fairly notorious for her political opinions. She is almost painfully frank, quite unable to keep any thoughts she has about anything—and she has many thoughts on almost everything—to herself.
My mother, at one time, was a supporter of the second successful political party Antigua has ever had. In the years that Antiguans have been electing governments, only once have they elected a political party other than the party now in power. In one election campaign, my mother was putting up her party's posters on a lamppost just outside the house of the Minister of Culture. When the minister, hearing a great hubbub my mother would only do this with a great hubbub came outside and saw that it was my mother, he said, perhaps to the air, "What is she doing here?
Not someone who steals stamps from Redonda. When Antiguans talk about "The Nation" and they say "The Nation" with- out irony , they are referring to the nine-by-twelve- mile-long, drought-ridden island of Antigua; they are referring to Barbuda, an island even smaller than Antigua Barbuda was settled originally by a family from England named Condrington; this family specialised in breeding special groups of black people, whom they then sold into slavery ; and they are referring to a barren little rock, where only booby birds live, Redonda.
Once there was a scandal about stamps issued for Redonda. A lot of money was made on these stamps, but no one seems to know who got the money or where the stamps actually ended up. Where do all these stamps, in all their colourfulness, where do they come from? I mean, whose idea is it? Antigua has no stamp designer on the government payroll; there is no building that houses the dyes and the paper on which the stamps are printed; there is no Department of Printing.
Who decides to celebrate Mickey Mouse's birthday? Who decides that stamps from this part of the world should be colourful and bright and not sedate and subdued, like, say, a stamp from Canada? I suppose that somewhere there is a stamp syndicate and that from time to time its people decide what would be best for the syndicate's financial interest, and they issue these stamps to these poor sap countries like Antigua.
In a small place, people cultivate small events. The small event is isolated, blown up, turned over and over, and then absorbed into the everyday, so that at any moment it can and will roll off the inhabitants of the small place's tongues. For the people in a small place, every event is a domestic event; the people in a small place cannot see them- selves in a larger picture, they cannot see that they might be part of a chain of something, anything. The people in a small place see the event in the distance heading directly towards them and they say, "I see the thing and it is heading towards me.
The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account, of themselves. The people in a small place cannot give an ex- act account, a complete account of events small though they may be. This cannot be held against them; an exact account, a complete account, of any- thing, anywhere, is not possible.
The hour in the day, the day of the year some ships set sail is a small, small detail in any picture, any story; but the picture itself, the story itself depend on things that can never, ever be pinned down.
The people in a small place can have no interest in the exact, or in completeness, for that would demand a careful weighing, careful consideration, careful judging, careful questioning. It would demand, the invention of a silence, inside of which these things could be done. To the people in a small place, the division of Time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not exist.
An event that occurred one hundred years ago might be as vivid to them as if it were happening at this very moment. And then, an event that is occurring at this very moment might pass before them with such dimness that it is as if it had happened one hundred years ago.
No action in the present is an action planned with a view of its effect on the future. When the future, bearing its own events, arrives, its ancestry is then traced in a trancelike retrospect, at the end of which, their mouths and eyes wide with their astonishment, the people in a small place reveal themselves to be like children being shown the secrets of a magic trick. Then they speak of emancipation itself as if it happened just the other day, not over one hundred and fifty years ago. The word "eman- cipation" is used so frequently, it is as if it, emanci- pation, were a contemporary occurrence, something everybody is familiar with.
And perhaps there is something in that, for an institution that is often celebrated in Antigua is the Hotel Training School, a school that teaches Antiguans how to be good servants, how to be a good nobody, which is what a servant is. In Antigua, people cannot see a relation- ship between their obsession with slavery and eman- cipation and their celebration of the Hotel Training School graduation ceremonies are broadcast on radio and television ; people cannot see a relation- ship between their obsession with slavery and emancipation and the fact that they are governed by corrupt men, or that these corrupt men have given their country away to corrupt foreigners.
The men who rule Antigua came to power in open, free elections. In accounts of the capture and enslave- ment of black people almost no slave ever mentions who captured and delivered him or her to the Euro- pean master. Antigua is a small place. Antigua is a very small place.
In Antigua, not only is the event turned into everyday but the everyday is turned into an event. Here is this: On a Saturday, at market, two people who, as far as they know, have never met before, collide by accident; this accidental collision leads to an enormous quarrel—a drama, really—in which the two people stand at opposite ends of a street and shout insults at each other at the top of their lungs.
This event soon becomes everyday, for every time these two people meet each other again, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design, the shouting and the insults begin. But event turned into everyday and everyday turned into event do not remain event and everyday, in a fixed state. They go back and forth, exchanging places, and their status from day to day depends on all sorts of internal shadings and internal colourings, and the forces that manipulate these internal shadings and internal colourings are kept deliberately mysterious and unknown.
And might not knowing why they are the way they are and why they do the things they do put in their proper place everyday and event, so that exceptional amounts of energy aren't expended on the trivial, while the substan- tial and the important are assembled artfully into a picture story "He did this and then he did that"?
I look at this place Antigua , I look at these people Antiguans , and I cannot tell whether I was brought up by, and so come from, children, eternal innocents, or artists who have not yet found eminence in a world too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own lunatic asylum, or an exquisite combination of all three.
For it is in a voice that suggests all three that they say: "That big new hotel is a haven for drug dealing. The hotel has its own port of entry, so boats bearing their drug cargo can come and go as they please.
The bay where the new hotel is situated used to have the best wilks in the world, but where did they all go? A Japanese- car dealership, one of the largest Japanese-car dealerships between the borders of Canada and South America, bears the name of a Syrian national, but some of the ministers in government own shares in it, and that is why all government vehicles are that particular brand of Japanese-made vehicle.
Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, writing lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download.
Great book, A Small Place pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid. At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid. Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid. Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick.
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