A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Holding Retribution

African slavery has produced an inestimable amount of suffering in the world, not only in the past but also as a legacy which just keeps on giving. It continues to humiliate long after it has ceased to incarcerate. Often in the most subtle, and therefore profound, ways, slavery continues to repress and to kill.

Jamaica Kincaid’s bio-rant is a catalogue of the residue of slavery in Antiqua - and in the Caribbean and the Americas more generally. What remains from the formal ownership of people by other people is a commercial dominance symbolised most forcefully by tourism. The tourist is the modern liberal, middle-class slave-owner. “A tourist is an ugly human being.” The tourist is hated by the people he exploits just as the slave-owner was hated by the same people.

Like his predecessors, the modern owner lives elsewhere - in Europe and North America- and has his gang-bosses ensure the work gets done. The minor organisational innovation is that the bosses are now black rather than white and are called politicians. But the slaves are still tied to the place, unable to move; and they’re still the servants, and field-hands in their own country. Or rather in the country to which they were transported:

“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 excess 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?)”

But there is an oddity here. Kincaid hints at it when she says, “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.” The island of Antigua is a very religious place. Its density of Moravian, Baptist, Independent Evangelical, Pentecostal, Adventist, Christadelphian, Methodist, and Anglican churches is remarkable. Christianity dominates the culture of the island.

And yet Christianity is also the clearest remaining component of the colonial past. Christianity justified the very slavery that caused the African presence on the island. Missionaries were just another fact of the colonial regime. Indeed the colonists were ‘badly behaved’ but was that because or despite their religious sentiments? And is the interpretation given to Christianity by the Antiguans, and other colonised people, superior or simply more naive than that of their former masters? Is this Christianity an example of Nietzsche’s slave-mentality, a way to exercise dominance without undue (and inefficient) violence?

Christianity, as a remnant of salve-owning colonialism, has an interesting political effect. It is often, as in Antigua, shared by an entire population. Its claim for the existence of ‘another world’ is interpreted by the elite as a justification to exploit this one. And, simultaneously, it is interpreted by the exploited as a reason for hope. Christianity thus forms an ideal basis for a culture of continuing slavery. Perhaps Nietzsche wasn’t overstating his case.

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