Kincaid’s Carnival
Performance, Identity, and the Reader
in A Small Place
Shannon Marie Hubbard
Stanford University, B.A.H. 2015
English Literature and Philosophy
Senior Honors Thesis
Stanford University Department of English
Submitted May 15, 2015
Advisor
Saikat Majumdar
Second Reader
Paula Moya
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Majumdar, for introducing me to Postcolonialism and
expanding my horizons in English Literature. Professor Majumdar encouraged me to pursue
honors, believed in my abilities and trusted my ideas, and for that I am very grateful.
I would also like to thank Professor Moya, who has supported me throughout my English
studies and who first suggested I look up an author named Jamaica Kincaid.
I cannot express enough gratitude to my graduate mentor, Vanessa Seals, who supported me,
encouraged me, and showed me the next step whenever I was sure I stood at the edge of a cliff.
Everyone in my family has played a role in helping me reach this point, from the brother who has
given me books for every holiday since I can remember, to the brother who teases me for my
books then proclaims my academic accomplishments from the rooftops. My parents, too,
have both been indispensible throughout my college career. But I would most like to thank
my mom, Shirley Mancini, who couldn’t be prouder, for always letting me know that.
2 Table of Contents
Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 4
A Mirror for the Reader ............................................................................................................ 6
Theoretical Frameworks ........................................................................................................... 9
Chapter 1: The English Identity Performance ............................................................... 12
Part I: West and Antiguan Identities from the English Perspective ....................................... 12
Part II: The Antiguan Perspective and How Anger Silences It .............................................. 19
Chapter 2: Kincaid’s Identity Performance .................................................................... 27
Part I: Usurping the Space and Medium of Indoctrination ....................................................28
Part II: Crowning the Antiguans, Uncrowning the Westerner ...............................................36
Part III: Re-Scripting the Westerner’s Identity .......................................................................42
Chapter 3: The Reader’s Identity Performance ............................................................. 49
Part I: How the Reader Enters the Narrative .........................................................................50
Part II: How Identity Performance Creates Real Change ......................................................54
Closing the Carnival ....................................................................................................... 66
4 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL Introduction
We need to read texts that engage with the complex moral and ethical situations we often feel
overwhelmed by, ones that open up aspects of human and natural life in the world that we
could not possibly understand or perceive without guidance or, at least, wise company. We
need to read works that draw out our surprise, call up our admiration, devastate our current
assumptions, and call us to a wider experience than we currently have. We need to read
works that are bigger than ourselves.
— Daniel Coleman (38)
Literary critics discussing Jamaica Kincaid have paid relatively little attention to her longform essay, published as a book in 1988, A Small Place. The literature on Kincaid largely
focuses on her novels, especially The Autobiography of My Mother and Annie John.i In A Small
Place, Kincaid makes her viewpoint on colonialism the explicit focus, and perhaps this
overtness, combined with the fact that A Small Place is not a novel but a work of creative
nonfiction, deters critics from treating this text as a literary artifact and encourages them instead
to read it as a kind of manifesto against colonialism.ii Though in some ways valuable, this
interpretation is inadequate. I argue that this approach ignores the literary value of this text,
focusing too much on its anti-colonial message at the expense of its method for communicating.
Reading A Small Place, I was struck by Kincaid’s assertion that she cannot communicate
her criticism of English-speaking Westerners in words. Kincaid claims that the English language
inherently carries the English perspective. Any attempt to make this language carry a contrary
perspective, therefore, will necessarily fail. The language itself corrupts the message and distorts
the way its Western audience perceives it. But of course, Kincaid is from the British Caribbean,
specifically the island of Antigua, where nearly everyone is either a descendant of slaves* or
English colonists.iii Antiguans have no other language than English, no other culture than that
*
Kincaid refers to Antiguans of African descent as ‘natives’ or simply ‘Antiguans,’ and I follow suit.
HUBBARD | 5 given to them by their colonizers. Kincaid articulates this problem nearly halfway through A
Small Place, in the following passage (the ‘crime’ she refers to is colonialism):
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? And what can that really mean? For the language of the
criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can
explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view. … That must be why,
when I say, ‘I am filled with rage,’ the criminal says, ‘But why?’ And when I blow things up
and make life generally unlivable for the criminal (is not my life unlivable, too?) the criminal is
shocked, surprised. (A Small Place*, 31-2)
This is a surprising problem: Kincaid asserts that she cannot mount a critique of the West
in English, but this is precisely what she is attempting to do in A Small Place. She intends to
expose and decry colonial and neocolonial abuses of power through this text—criticisms aimed
directly at Westerners—and her intended audience is white people from North America and/or
Europe. This is explicit in the text.† It is also clear from the fact that this text was originally
intended to be published as an essay in The New Yorker, the magazine for which Kincaid was a
regular contributor.iv The primary audience for this magazine is middle to upper class, Englishspeaking, white Americans. v So, Kincaid is attempting to do the impossible: condemn the
criminal using his own language. She must find a way to imbue her words with the meaning that
their Englishness denies them.
So why do critics read this work as a manifesto? A manifesto, in its attempt to explicitly
declare the author’s beliefs and intent, must necessarily assume words are unambiguous vehicles
for transmitting meaning. Kincaid makes it clear that words cannot be her primary mode of
communicating with readers. Kincaid’s understanding of language mirrors that of other
postcolonial writers, including Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Chinua Achebe. Ngũgĩ believes that
English can never carry African meaning and argues for a return to indigenous languages,vi but
*
Henceforth abbreviated in citations to “ASP”
Kincaid writes, “Since you are a tourist, a North American or European—to be frank, white…” (ASP, 4). When I
refer to Kincaid’s reader or her narratee throughout this paper, I mean her intended audience, so this is the race and
nationality to which I refer.
†
6 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL Kincaid does not have this option. Achebe believes that English can be transformed to carry the
weight of the colonial experience.vii How might Kincaid be transforming language?
With these thoughts in mind after my first engagement with A Small Place, I returned to the
text. Normally a reader expects a text to communicate through the sheer power of language, but,
because I approached the text knowing that its language is a barrier rather than bridge between
the author and reader, I recognized the text communicating by another means. Kincaid’s words
come to life as not just a narrative, but a performance. I argue that Kincaid fashions her text into
a performance space, populated by the narrator and second-person narratee as the performers.
The reader understands Kincaid’s anti-colonial message not directly through her words, but
through the experience that those words create for him.* Kincaid scripts her reader into a role as
her narratee, and brings him into a performance intentionally designed to reveal her meaning.
Kincaid, as the narrator, and the reader, as narratee, jointly enact a carnivalesque parody of the
power dynamic between the West and Antigua.
A Mirror for the Reader
The most remarkable formal feature of A Small Place is its use of second-person address.
The text opens with a direct reference to ‘you’—the implied recipient of Kincaid’s words, whom
I call her narratee—as he steps off a plane to begin a tourist trip in Antigua. The text is dialogic,
structured around the interaction between Kincaid’s narrative persona and this narratee.viii To
participate in the text, the real reader must step into this role and adopt this persona; the reader
must bring the narratee to life, or else the text has no structure. Without the reader’s
participation, the narrator would speak into dead air and Kincaid’s meaning would be lost.
*
Kincaid codes her narratee as male. Because the ‘you’ figure refers to both a fictional character and an implied
reader, I refer to the reader as a male throughout this paper. However, this is only an incidental trait of the narratee,
which is to say not foundational to his identity like his race and nationality are, so only the narratee must necessarily
be male, and the reader can in fact be female. For more on this, see endnote ‘iii’ in the section for chapter two.
HUBBARD | 7 The narratee’s role is central to the communication of meaning in A Small Place, because
what Kincaid wants to communicate simply is this narratee’s identity. Many postcolonial writers
are concerned with constructing their own identity (as an individual, culture, or nation) in the
wake of independence.ix These authors want to define an identity that is independent from their
colonial oppressor’s. In A Small Place, this is not Kincaid’s primary focus. Her message seems
to be, ‘I know who I am, but you should see yourself.’ It is not the Antiguan who more
desperately needs to redefine his identity in a postcolonial world, but the Westerner. Kincaid
suggests that the Westerner has not lost the sense of superiority he cultivated during the imperial
age, and for the world to move forward from the oppressive sociopolitical structures established
through colonialism, the Westerner needs to alter this self-serving image of himself, which has
long justified the West’s dominance over colonized societies.
To this end, A Small Place acts as a mirror for the reader. The oppressor projects an image
of himself into the world—in the case of English imperialism, it was an image of beauty,
enlightenment, and benevolent power—and in this text Kincaid turns that image back on him,
filtering it through the perspective of the oppressed group. Kincaid’s narrator embodies the
Antiguan perspective to show the oppressor his image as the oppressed see it. She does, then,
construct and assert an identity for herself, but it is primarily deployed as a foil to her narratee’s
identity. Her side is necessary to give structure to the narratee’s side—to tell the ‘you’ who he is
and what he has done to the Antiguans. Just as Kincaid is the real Antiguan behind the persona,
or mask, of the narrator (she is the ‘I’), the reader is the real Westerner who wears the mask of
the narratee, who recognizes himself in the ‘you.’
These personas are performative, encompassing costumes and scripts for identities of
Kincaid’s design. The reader, upon opening the book, steps into a role and performs an identity
8 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL that is at times very like his own, and at times very alien and challenging. Kincaid, for her part,
embodied a narrative persona to write the text, and this persona exists perpetually inside the
book, waiting for a partner to give life to the persona to whom she speaks. The Westerner could
easily dismiss a simple assertion of how oppressive he is, but Kincaid asks him not to listen, but
to perform. So long as the Westerner engages with the text, he must embody the persona of the
narratee. This performance makes the reader not merely recognize but embody the identity the
Antiguans have attributed to him. This brings that perspective to life for the reader and makes it
much more difficult to dismiss the Antiguans’ claims offhand. The only way to silence them is to
close the book.
It is because A Small Place asks its readers to engage with a new identity, and through this
identity to experience the perspective of the Antiguans, that I say this text is bigger than any
individual reader, and much bigger than Kincaid herself. I began this paper with a passage from
Daniel Coleman. This is from a book in which he asserts the power that the act of reading has to
connect us with people and worlds outside of ourselves. I believe that Kincaid’s text exemplifies
how the reading experience calls us to this communion with the Other. A Small Place is not so
small at all, but contains a whole universe of experience that engages readers in the difficult
process of identity construction and in the subversion of complex sociopolitical structures.
Kincaid, through her narrative voice, is our guide through this world. Like Coleman so aptly
says, this book has the potential to “devastate our current assumptions,” and if this process is to
have constructive as well as destructive potential, we must trust this guidance. We must approach
Kincaid’s work with a posture of openness and the expectation to be moved, and let go of the
posture of defensiveness that so often silences messages seeking to alter our worldview.
HUBBARD | 9 Theoretical Frameworks
There are two primary theories that I use to inform my interpretation of A Small Place as a
space of performance: the carnivalesque and identity performance theory. To understand how
performance is capable of exposing social injustices and even uprooting them, I analyze A Small
Place through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. I use the term ‘carnival’
to refer to a performance that exposes and mocks unequal social structures, and not in the
broader sense of organized social festivities. x The carnival appropriates and transforms
traditional values and official power structures through performative inversion; the oppressed
don the masks of their oppressors, performing their societal role and appropriating their
authority. Those masks are extreme and grotesque; they exist by virtue of simplifying real power
structures into a simple dichotomy of oppressed and oppressor, because this simple dynamic can
be cleanly inverted. In the carnival, the oppressed become the oppressors. The carnival reveals
hidden power structures by representing them in stark black-and-white contrast and, by taking
reality to the extreme and inverting it, shows the dominant group the grotesque version of
themselves. This is precisely the kind of polarized, performative environment we see in A Small
Place. By interpreting the text through this lens, we can understand that Kincaid creates a space
of performance, and she defines the roles by inverting traditional structures of authority.
But does the carnival work? My argument is not that Kincaid exposes power structures and
inverts them for a brief performance, lasting only as long as it takes to read the book; I argue that
Kincaid’s use of performance has the potential to unsettle her reader’s real-life identity and
thereby create the means to unsettle power structures in the real, non-carnival, world. Other
scholars share my concern with results. One claims that literary texts of course do subvert
societal norms, but the real questions to ask about literature are “how these transgressions
10 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL function and whether they matter in the real sense of contributing to genuine social change”
(Booker, 5). These are the guiding questions of my analysis of A Small Place. I analyze how the
carnival performance functions in the text to invert and subvert established social hierarchies,
and I ask whether this performance has the potential to create real social change.
Butler’s performance theory gives us a way of understanding how an identity can be
imposed and how it can change. In A Small Place, the reader performs a new identity. Simply by
embodying the identity Kincaid creates for him, even in a relatively unthreatening literary space,
the reader brings that identity into existence and sets it at odds with his usual identity. The reader
performs an identity that is quite close to his usual one, but it exposes implicit assumptions of
superiority and oppressive tendencies that the average Westerner would not readily admit to. I
have said that A Small Place holds up a mirror to its readers. When the reader looks in the
mirror, the image is deformed and grotesque, but distinctly recognizable. He sees the worst
version of himself, and this destroys his previous sense of self. He is made to renew himself with
a new identity. Kincaid puts him in this position so that he can recognize that identity is simply a
performance; it is a human construction that can be altered. By engaging with A Small Place the
reader practices the difficult tasks of identity deconstruction and reconstruction, so that when
Kincaid closes her book by asking him to create a new identity—one neither exalted nor
debased—and perform this after leaving her carnival, he has a sense of what he needs to do.
So here, then, is my argument in whole: I argue that we should understand A Small Place as
a carnivalesque performance enacted by the narrator and narratee, and that performing the
identity of the narratee has the potential to unsettle and even alter the real reader’s identity as a
privileged Westerner. In the first chapter, I discuss how English imperialism constructed
Antiguan society around a narrative of English superiority and Antiguan inferiority, and by
HUBBARD | 11 which means the English enforced this worldview. In the second chapter, I explain that Kincaid
recognizes this narrative of power and identities as a constructed performance, and I argue that
Kincaid offers carnivalesque parody as a means by which Antiguans can regain agency—by
usurping the tools of English oppression—and can rewrite the script of the West/Native
performance. In my third chapter, I argue that Kincaid makes these subversive moves to place
the Western reader in the position of ‘oppressed’ under the authority of the Antiguan perspective,
thereby altering the reader’s relation to hierarchical structures. I argue that this gives readers the
opportunity to recognize identity as a performative construction and to practice altering their
identity. This text promotes social change by showing the reader a grotesque version of himself,
challenging him to construct a new identity, and modeling for him the tools of identity
construction. I conclude by illustrating how, at the end of her text, Kincaid dismantles her parody
of power structures, and, putting agency back in the reader’s hands, challenges him to help create
a new performance in the world: one without power hierarchies.
This argument presents a new way of reading A Small Place. I offer my ideas to illustrate
how we can gain new insights into Kincaid’s text by reading it through the lens of the
carnivalesque. It is my hope that my findings here will encourage other scholars to approach this
text in a similar manner, using an aesthetic reading to understand how the text functions. While
valuable insights have been gained by reading this text primarily as a manifesto against tourism,
I believe more attention should be paid to its literary merits. By modeling a way of reading this
work, I also hope my ideas will encourage readers to approach A Small Place with a willingness
to embody the challenging identity of the narratee without becoming defensive, and by so doing
receive a deeper understanding of Kincaid’s arguments against colonialism.
12 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL Chapter 1
The English Identity Performance
How the English Constructed a Dichotomy of Power and Identity Between the West and Antigua
In this chapter I explain why we should understand education and anger as tools of
Western oppression. Together these tools silence the Antiguan perspective and force Antiguans
to perform a vision of reality scripted by and designed to favor the English. I begin by describing
the power dichotomy between the West and Antigua as it was set up through colonialism, then I
explain why this power dichotomy led to a dichotomy of identities, between the ‘noble savior’
and the ‘barbarians’ they saved. The English legitimated this worldview through literature and
disseminated it through the educational system. The Antiguans, as the subjugated group, were
forced to perform these scripts of their identity, despite the fact that they had an inverted
understanding of identity—such that they were morally superior and the English were
oppressive, not saviors. This repression of their perspective bred resentment, so anger is central
to the Antiguans’ perspective. I explain that this anger could be used to dismantle oppressive
social structures, so the dominant group therefore suppresses the anger of the oppressed through
what I call an ‘anger monopoly.’ From this discussion, I intend to make it clear that the imperial
English scripted reality for the Antiguans using the tools of anger and education. This will
suggest that these tools of oppression could be usurped and identities could be re-scripted.
Part I: West and Antiguan Identities from the English Perspective
Power and identity dichotomies between the English and Antiguans
There is a fundamental power dichotomy underlying Antiguan society. On one level, it is
between the oppressed and the oppressor, but these are only empty roles—scripts that must be
performed by a living body to have meaning. Kincaid asserts that the most fundamental
HUBBARD | 13 dichotomy, which precedes and in fact established this dynamic of oppression, is between
Westerners and natives, or the West and Antigua. The West has power over Antigua and uses its
authority to establish another dichotomy—not of power, but of identity. The West, beginning
with imperial England, defines the identities of Antiguans and Westerners by taking them to
extremes and ascribing absolute value judgments to them. During imperialism, the English saw
themselves as saviors—good, enlightened, doing the work of God. For this identity to make
sense, the natives they colonized and exploited must be characterized as the opposite of this
identity. Therefore, the English saw the natives as bad, brutish, barbaric, and in dire need of
saving. By defining identities in this way, the English could justify their inhumane treatment of
natives and their right to dominate these foreign lands.
English writers of the imperial period described again and again the cultureless, subhuman
‘savages’ who populated foreign lands. Notable examples include the monstrous Caliban in
Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the cannibal natives in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Canonized
texts like these contributed to the English perception of natives as savages and, by putting it in
writing, lent legitimacy and a sense of objectivity to English biases. These biases pervaded
everyday life, as Kincaid illustrates in A Small Place using anecdotes from her colonial
childhood. For example, she remembers the white headmistress of a girls’ school, who constantly
scolded black children to “stop behaving as if they were monkeys just out of trees” (ASP, 29).
The English, as the dominant group, assigned to colonized peoples identities that dehumanized
them and subordinated them to the English.
Kincaid further illustrates this English perception of Antiguan natives by describing, from
the Western perspective, the sight the English see when they look back and shake their heads at
how poorly their former colonies are running themselves:
14 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Perhaps you are remembering 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. (ASP, 36)
Kincaid uses rhetorical devices here to underscore that the English perception is fundamentally
based on an absolutist dichotomy. Her insistent use of the opposing terms “you” (meaning the
Westerner) and “people like me” (meaning Antiguans), underscores the dichotomy between the
West and the Natives. This complements and adds power to Kincaid’s description of these
dichotomized identities. From the Western perspective, the English are intelligent and capable:
they understand how to run a government and are quite skilled in all the areas that such
governance requires. The Antiguans, on the other hand, are incapable of meeting requirements of
governance. They cannot even think properly, because they cannot understand their situation
‘objectively.’ At the end of the above passage, Kincaid points out the ignorance that Westerners
demonstrate by this worldview:
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. (ASP, 36)
The English assume that, unlike the Antiguans, they can think objectively. This is because,
being the dominant group, they have been privileged to treat their worldview without question,
so they interpret it and disseminate it as the correct understanding of the world. They believe that
their ideas are objectively true, when in fact the English have just created a system that validates
their own bias. They assume that their ideas of governance are the only correct way to govern,
and through colonialism they force that idea onto foreign societies, overriding all alternative
worldviews. Then, when those societies govern themselves after achieving independence, the
English system is all they know. But it does not work for them; it was designed to inherently
HUBBARD | 15 work against them. And the Western world, still privileging its own perspective, misinterprets
the problems with self-rule as further evidence that the natives indeed never were fit to rule.
The English imperialists’ understanding of their identity in relation to that of Antiguans is a
constructed performance. The English turned reality into a performance space and they designed
two roles: one for themselves and one for the Antiguans. They cast themselves in the role of the
‘superior,’ and defined their identity as ‘intelligent,’ ‘capable,’ ‘benevolent,’ and so on down a
litany of positive attributes. In contrast, they cast Antiguans and other natives in the role of the
‘inferior,’ and ascribed to them a host of attributes ranging from unflattering to heinous. The
English did not just happen into a reality that privileged them at the expense of others; they
assumed control over reality and bent it to their own designs. In this way, we can understand the
English construction of dichotomies—dichotomies of identity and dichotomies of power that
attach to those identities—as an intentionally crafted performance.
Education as the site of script-writing
You loved knowledge, and wherever you went you made sure to build a school, a library (yes,
and in both these places you distorted or erased my history and glorified your own).
— Kincaid (36)
Education was a primary means by which the English constructed this reality and
disseminated their perspective to the groups under their control. Using literature and the school
curriculum, the English published ‘scripts’ of identity and behavior that the Antiguans would
have to follow. A brief introduction to the history of education in the British Caribbean will
illustrate this point.
In the British Caribbean, education was used as a tool to ensure the subordination of former
slaves after emancipation. During slavery, black Antiguans received no formal education. But
they did receive an ‘education’ in a negative sense; rather than learning what to be, they learned
what not to be. Rather than teaching slaves culture and language, the English systematically
16 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
erased the slaves’ African heritage and beat their ancestral languages out of them. As
emancipation became inevitable, this negative education was feared to have created a problem.
There was a large population of Blacks on the islands who did not have any cultural ties at all,
much less ties to the English culture. Caribbean whites thus feared that emancipation would
dismantle not only their economy (by eliminating the primary source of labor), but also their
society, by filling the islands with free Blacks who had nothing but contempt for the English.i At
this point, educating the black population in the Caribbean became a priority. A system of
elementary education was established for the explicit purpose of socializing former slaves. The
Emancipation Act of 1833 makes this clear through its provision of funds for the “religious and
moral education of the Negro population.”ii This education would turn Blacks into Englishmen,
as far as that could be accomplished. It would give them a cultural affiliation, and would teach
them ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ according to the English understanding. It would teach Blacks their
place, which is right under the English thumb.
This education, or rather mis-education, was intended to perpetuate the power division
between the English (that is, Whites) and Blacks, but instead of using whips as in the time of
slavery, the Blacks would be forced into submission using the chalkboard. Kincaid writes of the
British colonizers, “everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody 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” (ASP, 24). The English colonists wanted the Blacks to be exactly like them,
but they could not see—did not want to see—these people as anything but inferior. So the black
Antiguans could never really be English; instead, they would be turned into thoughtless
mouthpieces for the glorification of England. By teaching them to glorify England, the English
HUBBARD | 17 would train the black Antiguans to appreciate their subordination to the English. Through
persistent mis-education, the English made Antiguans believe that they deserved to be controlled,
because it was lucky that their masters would deign to share their culture, and they (being
savages, monkeys right out of trees) were improved by their subjugation.
Teaching the former slaves according to the traditional English curriculum, including
subjects like history, literature, and language, was a primary means of legitimating British
dominance in Caribbean colonies. The curriculum from English schools was largely transplanted
into the colonies,iii and this allowed these schools to purport to enlighten pupils by sharing the
fruits of culture while indoctrinating them into the English worldview. In such a different
context—because the pupils were black instead of white, living in the Caribbean instead of
England, and ruled by a group that did not at all reflect their own identities and experiences—the
curriculum accomplished a very different purpose in Antigua than it did in England.
To illustrate how the same curriculum was treated differently in different contexts, Kincaid
describes a subtle but meaningful distinction between how a queen was celebrated in English and
Antiguan schools. She writes, “In Antigua, the twenty-fourth of May was a holiday—Queen
Victoria’s official birthday. … Once, at dinner (this happened in my present life), I was sitting
across from an Englishman … he said that every year, at the school he attended in England, they
marked the day she died” (30-1). The schools both celebrated England’s history, but they framed
the representation of England differently. Kincaid says to her English acquaintance, “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” (31).
This case of Queen Victoria exemplifies how the English purposefully crafted education to
disseminate and perpetuate a performance that privileges the English. There was an objective
18 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
historical fact: the life of Queen Victoria. She was a queen, she was born, and she died. In
England, the English framed this as a lesson in history, but in Antigua, this was warped into a
fantasy. By celebrating the birth of Queen Victoria and never mentioning her death, the message
in Antiguan schools was an English fantasy of exaltation and immortality. Note Kincaid’s
characterization of how Queen Victoria’s day was treated. In England, they simply “marked the
day,” but in Antigua, it was turned into a “holiday,” a holy day that celebrates the birth of this
long-dead queen as if she were a religious symbol or a central tenant of Antiguan culture.
Kincaid writes, “So that was England to us—Queen Victoria and the glorious day of her coming
into the world, a beautiful place, a blessed place, a living and blessed thing” (31). In Antigua, the
same curricular material was warped to indoctrinate students into a fantastical worldview that
saw England, ‘objectively,’ as a beautiful, infallible place.
This image of England, by glorifying the colonizers, marginalized and belittled the
colonized group. This worldview excluded Antiguans, for it encompassed only what rightly
‘belonged’ to the English and transmitted these ideas in such a way that they seemed like
objective reality. Kincaid writes that the pervasive message about England, as it was represented
to the Antiguans, was that this fantasy-land was an “England we could never be from, [an]
England that was so far away, [an] England that not even a boat could take us to, [an] England
that, no matter what we did, we could never be of” (30). This education silenced the perspective
of black Antiguans by indoctrinating them into a worldview inherently biased against them. The
Antiguans were taught scripts for their behavior and subordinated to the English. However,
despite this mis-education, Antiguans were not oblivious. They did develop a different
perspective from that of the English. They were simply barred from expressing it.
HUBBARD | 19 Part II: The Antiguan Perspective and How Anger Silences It
How the Antiguans saw the identities of ‘Westerner’ and ‘Antiguan’
Persistent mis-education can silence any opposing perspectives and even take steps to
prevent a dissenting opinion from forming, but a victim of oppression will naturally still develop
an opposing perspective on the world. In a binary system of oppressed and oppressor, there are
necessarily two different viewpoints on the same situation, and they are diametrically opposed to
one another. The English were so busy looking down on the image of the Antiguan that they had
themselves created, they did not notice the Antiguans looking down on the image of the English
that the Antiguans had created. Just as the English are capable of warping reality to suit their
interests, so are the people they oppress. It does not suit the Antiguans’ interests to see
themselves as barbaric or savage, so they create a new identity for themselves and cast
themselves into the role of victim, and perceive the English as their evil oppressors. Whereas the
English saw themselves as saviors and the natives as needing to be saved, the Antiguans saw
them as oppressors and themselves as the victims of oppression. Likewise, whereas the English
saw themselves as virtuous and cultured, the natives saw them as ill-mannered and barbaric, and
themselves as virtuous. In a dichotomized vision of power and identity, the perspective of either
group is the inverse of the other.
Black Antiguans developed an opposing perspective on the English despite their
indoctrination into British culture. If anything, indoctrination even backfired, because the
English living in the colony did not meet the standards of polity and humanity that they expected
of the natives. They were offensive, unkind, exclusionary, greedy, and impolite. Kincaid
remembers her fellow natives’ reaction to English colonists:
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 understood those standards to be. (ASP,
29)
20 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
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 completely empty of grace. (30)
The English established ‘objective’ standards of behavior—moral behavior, Christian behavior
(both Western ideals)—then failed to meet them. Because of this, it was inevitable that the
natives would develop a perspective on the identities of the English that conflicted with the
identity which the English attributed to themselves.
Kincaid illustrates how the Antiguans’ perspective must necessarily oppose that of the
English through the example of capitalism. Following the earlier passage, in which the Western
perspective spoke on Antiguans’ incompetency in governance, Kincaid shows the West why its
worldview is biased. She explains why the Antiguans can never master English ideals, why they
never should master them. She asks the Westerner, “Do you know why people like me are shy
about being capitalists?”
Well it’s because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and
sacks of sugar, and you were the commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this is so
strong, the experience so recent, that we can’t quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that
you think so much of. (36-7)
Part of the English system of dichotomized identities included the idea of slavery, that Blacks
were property. The English were the property-owners, and therefore were entitled to treat the
Blacks however they saw fit, in whatever way would bring them the most profit. In the modern
era, 150 years after emancipation and after the death of the English empire, the West wants to
forget this part. Westerners want to forget that they established a system that works in their own
favor at the expense of other human beings. But this system of oppression was never dismantled,
and the Antiguans continue to suffer, so they can never forget it. Kincaid illustrates the contrast
between the Western and Antiguan perspective beautifully: We were capital, and you were the
commanding, cruel capitalists.
HUBBARD | 21 The colonizer thinks very highly of capitalism, because it was invented to favor him and it
has always done its job. But the colonized are on the opposite side of this transaction and
understand capitalism as their personal exploitation, so they have (to say the least) a very
negative view of capitalism. This inverted perspective on an economic concept applies to
identities as well. What the English understand as their virtue—their shrewd knowledge of the
economy and their ability to manipulate a government—the Antiguans view as English vices. To
the Antiguans, this behavior is “commanding” and “cruel.” Just as ‘capitalism’ is a celebrated
concept in one population and a dirty word in the other, ‘capitalist’ is a term of praise for the
English and a term of derision for the Antiguans.
Despite this inverted perspective on the English identity, English education did succeed in
warping natives’ perspective of England. Kincaid deftly captures how these conflicting
worldviews co-existed in the minds of the colonized Antiguans: “We felt superior to all those
people; we thought that perhaps the English among them who behaved this way weren’t English
at all, for the English were supposed to be civilised, and this behaviour was so much like that of
an animal, the thing we were before the English rescued us” (29-30). The Antiguans felt superior
the English, and in this way they inverted the identity dichotomy between Westerners and
Natives. Although Antiguans absorbed the message that they were inferior and indebted to the
English (“an animal, the thing we were before the English rescued us”), at the same time they
inverted the identity dichotomy by viewing themselves as superior to the English.
The centrality of anger in the Antiguans’ perspective
Victims of oppression, such as the Antiguans, develop a perspective that conflicts with that
of their oppressors, and they come to resent being forced to embody an identity with which they
do not identify. For this reason among others, anger is a fundamental part of the perspective of
the oppressed. Feminist and race theorist Audre Lorde claims that anger is necessarily
22 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
concomitant to the experience of oppression when she says, “Women responding to racism
means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial
distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation”
(Lorde, 124). This is to say that any attempt to consider the perspective of the victim of racism
(or any form of oppression) necessitates engaging with that victim’s anger. This anger exists
because anger is, as Lorde says, “an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the
actions arising from those attitudes do not change” (129). The imperial English certainly
exemplify these anger-inciting traits of oppression. They assumed unquestioned privilege,
excluded the natives, and distorted their identities. And moreover, between the imperial age and
today, Kincaid argues, those attitudes have not changed.
The power of anger to dismantle oppressive social structures
Anger is the natural response to oppression, and anger is also potentially the tool for
dismantling systems of oppression. Lorde argues that anger is a creative, energizing force. It is
the spark that ignites the blaze of change. Taking women as an example of an oppressed group,
she says, “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those
oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with
precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change” (Lorde, 127).
The simmering anger that oppression creates is also the explosive force that allows the oppressed
group to fight for justice. The dichotomy between ‘oppressed and oppressor’ implied another
dichotomy, between the ‘powerless and powerful,’ but this anger could prove that this latter
dichotomy is utterly mistaken; the oppressed group is not powerless at all, but has an arsenal
ready to combat their oppression. That is, if it could only be used. Oppressed individuals do not
lack power, but do often lack a means of directing and using their dormant internal power against
their oppressors, because their expression is stifled.
HUBBARD | 23 The oppressor’s anger monopoly
The dominant group does not want to face that threat of directed anger, so it establishes a
monopoly on anger expression, legitimizing its own anger while delegitimizing and silencing the
anger of the oppressed. Feminist thinker Jane Marcus characterizes anger as a tool of patriarchs,
but we can expand this to include oppressors of all forms, including colonizers. She explains
how this anger monopoly can look:
Anger and righteous indignation are the emotions of patriarchs in the state and in the family.
These emotions are justified as imitations of Jehovah, god of retribution and justice. Hell is the
source of woman’s wrath, we are told; the anger of the victim comes from the devil while the
fury of a general or prime minister is heroic and godlike. (Marcus, 70)
This excerpt illustrates one major way that a dominant group prevents anger expression that
would threaten its systems of control: by denouncing the anger of the subordinate group. The
anger of the dominant group is legitimate; its members are in charge, so they have the power to
say when someone is acting inappropriately and retaliate for that behavior with righteous anger.
When the subordinate group speaks out or riots against its oppression, the dominant group
becomes angry. And this anger is inherently justified, while the anger that led to the revolt is
unjustified, regardless of the actual content of the arguments on either side. Anger is used, in this
case, to drown out the content of the arguments. The ‘legitimate’ indignation of the oppressors
can mask their selfish reasons for maintaining the status quo; the ‘illegitimate’ anger of the
oppressed can be used against them as evidence of their mob mentality and their failure to think
reasonably about the situation. It can be used as evidence of their depravity.
Oppressors use their anger to preserve the existing power differentials. ‘Righteous’
indignation, with its assumption that the subject has been wronged by the other party’s
inappropriate behavior, and ‘righteous’ anger, with its claim to moral superiority, are inherently
ascriptions of the dominant group. The dominant group decides what is right and wrong, so its
24 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
members alone are able to claim that they have been unduly injured. Because they belong
exclusively to the dominant group, these are the two emotions “that provoke the most hostility
from the powerful when expressed by the powerless … The scold’s chair, bridle, and gag remind
us of our ancestors’ remedies for outspoken women” (Marcus, 69). The oppressor vehemently
punishes the subordinate’s expression because their anger—especially when it takes on the added
force of righteous fury and lashes out not in undirected bursts of hostility but in focused attacks
on the oppressor—usurps a primary tool of oppression and poses a serious threat to the stability
of the oppressive system, because of anger’s power to cause change.
Their subordinate position and their treatment at the hands of the master ensure the buildup
of an arsenal of anger within the subordinate group, but clearly its expression, if given any at all,
cannot be direct. Marcus writes, “Whining and nagging, those peculiar forms of protest which
we are taught to associate with the powerless—women, slaves, children, and servants—are
testimony to the anger of the powerless and its survival in the form of indirect discourse” (6870). The anger monopoly does not only use condemnation and retaliatory violence to silence the
oppressed group, but creates a culture that forces them to use indirect speech to mask their anger
and belittle their claims. If the oppressor is not an angry god exacting justice, he is a patriarch
scolding his petulant children. By retreating into indirect forms of expression, the oppressed
group undermines themselves by failing to harness the power of their anger, as Lorde says. This
is how the anger monopoly works: it either condemns or belittles the expression of the
subordinated group. In all cases it silences their perspective.
So, we see now the dynamic between the West and Antigua. Westerners, the powerful
oppressor, define the identities of both themselves and the natives they oppress. They construct
these identities as polarized opposites: extreme expressions of virtue and savagery. They impose
HUBBARD | 25 this worldview on their victims through cultural indoctrination. But the natives still develop an
opposing worldview, and this perspective encompasses anger. This anger could be used to spark
revolt against the systems of oppression, so the oppressors enforce their worldview by
establishing an anger monopoly to silence the perspective of the oppressed. They delegitimize
the anger of the oppressed group by either writing it off as the impotent whining of a child, or by
condemning it as something like a demonic possession—a purely destructive and evil force. This
is the Antiguan perspective: anger and their own superiority. These are the tools by which the
West suppresses that perspective: education and anger.
The Persistence of the West/Antigua Power Dichotomy
Kincaid argues that this is the fundamental dichotomy that must be broken before change
can take place in sociopolitical relations between the West and Antigua. English imperialism
created a stark power binary. Slavery made this power binary evident, but as black Antiguans
became freed, were allowed education, were awarded scholarships to English universities, and
were eventually allowed a say in their government, the power binary because harder to see. But
this does not mean that the power binary dissolved. On the contrary, these subtleties of social
participation masked the power imbalance and made it more nefarious than ever.
It is clear from reading A Small Place that Kincaid understands this power binary, as well
as the dichotomy of identities that goes along with it, as being continually re-enacted by a variety
of figures throughout history. Slaveholders first adopted the scripts of oppression by silencing
the perspective of those they oppressed and convincing themselves that this power binary was
the correct way of doing things. They adopted the worldview that glorified their identity and
dehumanized those they oppressed. Then, colonists adopted these scripts by purposefully
indoctrinating Antiguans into their worldview through education and disseminating the idea that
the English had the right to do the things they did and deserved to be in control of the natives
26 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
(and the natives, for their part, deserved to be controlled). Finally, in the modern era, these
scripts have been re-enacted through tourism. Still today, Westerners dehumanize the Antiguans
and exploit them for their own profit, and they justify their behavior with the belief that they
have the right to act this way, because they are innately superior and they are in fact helping the
natives. First slaveholders, then colonists, then tourists have all enacted these scripts of
oppression by continuing the dichotomy of identities that underlies the dichotomy of power. The
West perceives itself as superior, and as long as this is true the fundamental power dichotomy
can never be dismantled.
If education and anger are tools of oppression, then anyone can simply pick them up and
wield them, and thereby become an oppressor. ‘The oppressor’ is a role, and instruction and
anger are part of the script one must adopt to bring this role to life. This suggests a possible
solution to the Antiguans’ problem with the West. The West, all throughout history, has been in
charge of designing the performance, that is, the relationship between themselves and the
Antiguans. The West has been writing the scripts that privilege themselves and dehumanize the
Antiguans, and the West has been disseminating these scripts and holding the Antiguans to the
continued performance of these scripts of deferential behavior. If the Antiguans could only take
over the performance and replace it with one of their own creation, the power structure between
the West and Antigua could be flipped and Antigua could force the West to accept their
worldview and embody their conception of identity. It would be through this usurpation of the
performance, this taking back of agency and turning the tables on Western oppression, that the
fundamental power dichotomy could be shaken and ultimately dismantled.
HUBBARD | 27 Chapter 2
Kincaid’s Identity Performance
How Kincaid Uses the English Tools of Oppression to Invert the West/Antigua Power Dynamic
In this chapter I explain how Kincaid makes A Small Place into a carnivalesque
performance space and re-enacts the historical relationship between the West and Antigua. As
the narrator, Kincaid represents the Antiguan perspective, and her narratee represents the
Western one. Using these personas, Kincaid inverts the power dichotomy and parodies Western
oppression. I argue first in this chapter that Kincaid usurps the space and medium of English
indoctrination to legitimize and disseminate the Antiguan worldview. I then argue that Kincaid
directs righteous anger against the Westerner, thereby usurping the anger monopoly to privilege
the Antiguan perspective. Using these tools, Kincaid enacts a parody of Western oppression.
Kincaid crowns herself ‘carnival king’ and uncrowns the Westerner by redefining his identity,
just as the English defined the identity of the Antiguans. Kincaid makes the Westerner embody a
grotesque reimagining of his identity. In this way, the Westerner performatively embodies the
role of an oppressed individual, and therefore feels (to a certain degree) the same resentment that
the Antiguans felt at their oppression and the same rejection of hierarchical structures. This
performance repudiates the Westerner’s claim to superiority and thereby his rationalization for
dominance. This degradation and the act of uncrowning forces a renewal, so that the Westerner
is forced to imagine a new identity for himself—one that accounts for his role in historical
oppression and resists both his own sense of superiority and the Antiguans’ sense of his
barbarity.
28 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Part I: Usurping the Space and Medium of Indoctrination
The library: Replacing reality with performance
For Kincaid, Antigua’s library was the centerpiece of England’s domination over the
Antiguans. The library played a key role in their indoctrination of Antiguans into the English
worldview by giving the natives culture—a culture that glorified the English and dehumanized
the natives. This colonial library was very influential on Kincaid as a child. She remembers, “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)” (ASP, 45). The
library represented for Kincaid a better life. She writes, “[I would] sit and look at the 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)” (45). In 1974, this library was damaged in an earthquake and was never
fixed. Now, in self-ruled Antigua, the books are housed in a room “above a dry-goods store in an
old run-down cement-brick building” (42). Kincaid points to this current state of the library as “a
good example of corruption, of things gone bad” (42). It is interesting that Kincaid sees the
dilapidation of the library as a bad thing, because the fantasy it offered her as a child, however
comforting, was an English fantasy. Kincaid remembers herself and her fellow Antiguans…
… sitting there like communicants at an altar, taking in, again and again, the fairy tale of how
we met you [the English], your right to do the things you did, how beautiful you were, are, and
always will be; if you could see all of that in just one glimpse, you would see why my heart
would break at the dung heap that now passes for a library in Antigua. (42-3)
This is precisely the kind of indoctrination I describe in the previous chapter. So if the
library was a symbol of Western oppression, then why is its destruction bad? Because: to reclaim
the library would have meant reclaiming Antiguans’ power. But instead, Antiguans abandoned
the library and allowed the old building to stand in shambles—a relic of England’s past glory
HUBBARD | 29 rather than a symbol of Antigua’s current strength. In A Small Place, Kincaid models this
usurpation of the library by inverting it through the carnival.
[T]he 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 something in that, though not a deliberate something, just a
something, like an ‘Angels from the Realm of Innocence’ something. (46)
In this passage, Kincaid literally replaces the colonial library with the trappings of a
carnival and muses on its theme. We can understand her interpretation of this theme, “Angels
from the Realm of Innocence,” as a connection between this carnival and colonialism. Elsewhere
in the text, Kincaid describes Antiguans as children in their posture of submission to English
domination: she describes the Antiguans as better behaved than the English, then adds, “Of
course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children” (30).
Children, according to Kincaid, are “eternal innocents,” and the Antiguans are like them when
they are under colonial rule (37). So “Realm of Innocence” is best interpreted to mean ‘era of
colonialism,’ and its “Angels” are best interpreted as the Antiguans. The library, then, is a
symbol of colonialism, and the carnival comments on the identity of the Antiguans under
colonialism (i.e. well-behaved angels, according to the interests of the English, or weak children,
according to the interests of the Antiguans). The passage continues:
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. (46)
In true carnival form, Kincaid replaces the serenity of the colonial library with a kind of
chaos. The beauty of the library is distorted, as are the people who populated it during
colonialism. Kincaid transforms the reality of the colonial library into a carnivalesque
performance space, and she transforms the people into performers. This move latches onto the
performative nature of the historical dichotomy between the West and Antigua and amplifies it
30 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
into a surreal re-imagining. Kincaid turns the historically-imagined identities of Westerners and
Antiguans into costumes and uses this carnivalesque representation to rewrite those identities
from the Antiguan perspective.
Some of the costumes were for angels before the Fall, some of the costumes were for angels
after the Fall; the ones representing After the Fall were the best. (46-7)
Here, we learn the scene that the carnival performs: the Fall from Heaven, in which Lucifer
leads a group of angels in a revolt against God.i As a result of this revolt, God casts these angels
out of heaven and exiles them to Hell, where they are henceforth known as demons. Now we also
see what the costumes represent: angels and demons. That is, the same group, as angels before
they are cast out of Heaven, and as demons after their exile. The costumes represent the
Antiguans’ roles during colonialism, when they are obedient angels, and then after colonialism,
after they have fought for and won independence, and the English wash their hands of them,
condemning them as ungrateful, vicious, demons.* If the Antiguans are the angels before and
after the Fall, we must understand the English as performing the role of God. They are a
Christian God, “a British God,” as Kincaid calls Him (9). This is a God that was imposed on the
Antiguans through colonialism as part of their indoctrination into ‘proper’ English morality—the
morality that kept them in the posture of children in the realm of ignorant innocence. This is the
site of Kincaid’s inversion. It is short, subtle, and powerful.
Inversion: Privileging the Antiguan perspective in the library
The library carnival re-imagines a scene with its historical roots in the English perspective.
The performance is based on a passage from the Bible, which is a symbol of Western theology.
From its very foundation, then, the performance has been scripted by the West. The Antiguans,
the angels, carry the identities that the English attribute to them. A Western audience is likely to
*
Cf. The passage in A Small Place, pages 35-36: “After the mutilated bodies of you, your wife, and your children
were found … you say to me, ‘Well, I wash my hands of all of you, I am leaving now,’ … and from afar you watch
as we do to ourselves the very things you used to do to us.”
HUBBARD | 31 understand the angels in this way. From the English perspective, they are angels when they are
obedient and demons when they rebel. So too with colonialism from the imperial English
perspective: the Antiguans were innocents while obedient and evil upon rebelling. This reflects
the library as the site of English oppression. It was in the library that the Antiguans received an
education in the English worldview; it was there where they became acquainted with literature,
including the Bible, that was used to exalt the English and justify oppression. Now, that setting is
turned against the English; Kincaid takes the library, takes its morality and its biased worldview,
and inverts it to reflect the Antiguan perspective.
It is significant to recognize that Kincaid never says ‘demons’ or ‘devil.’ Understanding the
biblical context illuminates these terms in the subtext, but Kincaid only describes the costumes in
positive terms, as simply “angels.” Their virtue does not change, only their temporality and
context: first they are angels before the Fall, then angels after the Fall. Insisting on this positive
description emphasizes that the Antiguans do not change who they are by rebelling against their
oppressor. Lucifer, this suggests, does not suddenly become evil because he throws off the
chains of his slavery to God. No, Lucifer and the Antiguans are victims of oppression, and their
revolts are the natural products of the anger that oppression built up inside of them. Their revolts
are not evil. They are expressions of their ability to harness their arsenal of anger and launch it in
a direct attack against their oppression—and win.
Remember the power of anger from the previous chapter. The oppressor maintains a
monopoly on anger in order to suppress this expression—precisely because anger is a powerful
tool against oppression. He maintains his monopoly by characterizing anger in one of two ways:
either as ‘whiny,’ as the benign and impotent expression of children, or as ‘destructive,’ as a
vicious impulse toward evil. Remember Marcus’s observation that, in the hands of the oppressor,
32 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
anger is “justified as imitations of Jehovah, god of retribution and justice,” while “the anger of
the victim comes from the devil” (Marcus, 70). The English are entitled to anger, because they
are the ultimate source of moral judgment; they are God. The Antiguans are at first impotent
children, but when they express their anger it is condemned as springing from depths of evil. In
this passage, this English perspective on Antiguans’ anger is represented by an angry God
casting Lucifer out of Heaven as retribution for his rebellion. God sees Lucifer’s anger as
destructive and wrong, but Lucifer understands himself as a victim of oppression, so from his
perspective, he was righting a wrong through his revolt. So too with the Antiguans. Although the
oppressor condemns them, their identities have not changed but have in fact been given powerful
expression, and they are just as much angels as they ever were.
Now to consider that final line: “The ones representing After the Fall were the best.” Here,
Kincaid inverts the perspective on this scene by praising the costumes for the characters whom
the oppressor casts as evil. In Western theology and morality, good is portrayed as victorious
over evil. Good is more beautiful than evil, it is more desirable, it is stronger and overall better.
After all, God’s army is victorious over Lucifer’s, and this is a testament to his righteousness and
glory. This is how the English see themselves, as Kincaid makes clear with lines like “how
beautiful you were, are, and always will be” (42). Here, Kincaid’s interpretation of the costumes
flips that idea. From her perspective, the ‘evil’ characters in this performance are more beautiful
than the ‘good’ characters; their costumes are “better.”
By praising the embodiment of all evil in Western thought—the devil himself—Kincaid
makes a bold and relatively unusual move, but it resembles the move some postcolonial literary
scholars make when interpreting Caliban from The Tempest. These scholars see Caliban as a
native who has been systematically denied his own identity because he is viewed only from the
HUBBARD | 33 biased and warped perspective of his oppressor, Prospero.ii That biased perspective has often
been taken as objective reality in interpretations of The Tempest, just as, in historical fact, the
biased perspective of the English has been allowed to define the identities of their colonized
subjects. These scholars recast Caliban as a victim of oppression by viewing him from a new
perspective. Looking from Kincaid’s perspective in this passage, the characters coded as ‘evil’ in
traditional Western theology are recast to be better than those coded as ‘good.’ The hierarchy of
identities is thus inverted. Evil becomes Good, Oppressed becomes Powerful, and the Antiguan
perspective is given privilege over the English.
The logic of inversion in the carnival
Kincaid uses the carnival in the library to parody and invert the Western perspective on
reality. We can see this scene relating to Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival in a few ways. One is
through the act of ‘profanation,’ or degrading sacred symbols. The carnival, at its core, wants to
do away with hierarchies; this includes hierarchies between the sacred and the profane. Sue Vice
explains, “Carnival profanation consists of ‘a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and
bringings down to earth,’ to the level of the body, particularly in the case of parodies of sacred
texts” (Vice, 152). In this scene, Kincaid violates the sanctity of figures in Western theology. By
joining God with the English oppressors and the angels with the Antiguans, Kincaid brings these
lofty figures down to a ‘profane,’ corporeal level. Linking these identities also represents the
unusual pairings of the carnival. Carnival mésalliances, as they are called, “allow for unusual
combinations: ‘the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the
insignificant, the wise with the stupid’” (Vice, 152). Kincaid degrades religious symbols and
mythos and raises up bodily figures and historical relationships through these pairings. This
captures the anti-hierarchical ethos of the carnival.
34 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Dismantling value-hierarchies in this way is part of the carnival’s logic of inversion, or “the
logic of the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom” (Vice, 154). Carnival logic
holds that a continual inversion and re-inversion of established social order unsettles that order
and creates the potential to do away with it (and all hierarchies) entirely. This logic, Vice says,
“leads naturally to parody, as the [historical European] carnivalesque was a parody of official
life” (Vice, 154). In the carnivalesque sense, parody means degrading what is ‘sacred’ and
exalting what is ‘base.’ Whereas parody as we usually understand it inverts expectations simply
for comedic effect, in the carnival relations between groups are inverted to expose and
undermine sociopolitical hierarchies. The people who are usually seen as ‘good’ or ‘virtuous,’
then—in this case the Westerners—become degraded. The people who are usually seen as
‘barbaric’ or ‘plebian’ (in Bakhtinian terms), take their place and become exalted. Kincaid thus
exalts the Antiguans, attributing to them the same virtue and power that the imperial English
scripted into their own role in the historical performance of dichotomies.
Although the carnival is primarily symbolic, as Kincaid’s library scene demonstrates, it has
pragmatic aims. One of those is to assert the authority of the oppressed community to “set its
own standards of behavior and social discipline” and to enforce these standards (Bristol, 52).
Ultimately, what Kincaid accomplishes in this passage is communicating this message to the
Western reader: Your perceptions of us are wrong. We are good, and now, after our Fall from
your grace, we are stronger. We have our own perspective, and now we can force it on you. This
encapsulates the Antiguan perspective on what constitutes ‘right and wrong’ behavior. By
choosing the library as the location from which to announce this perspective, Kincaid asserts the
authority of the Antiguans to impose this perspective on English. She symbolically usurps the
location where the English disseminated and imposed their perspective on the colonized
HUBBARD | 35 Antiguans. The epicenter of the English fantasy of superiority was the library, so Kincaid
chooses this as the location to install a carnival and illustrate the Antiguan idea of which group is
superior. In this way, Kincaid usurps the space of English oppression to initiate a carnivalesque
parody of that oppression.
Mechanisms of the carnival are not confined to the library—Kincaid enacts this parody of
oppression throughout A Small Place. The whole book is a re-imagining of the historical
dichotomy between Western and Native identities and an inversion of their power roles. In this
way, Kincaid also usurps the medium of English oppression. The English legitimized their
perspective through the literature they stocked in the library and in schools; with A Small Place,
Kincaid writes and publishes a work of literature to disseminate the Antiguan perspective to the
West. Kincaid suggests that this usurpation of English tools of domination is necessary when she
writes, “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” (ASP, 33).
Kincaid emphasizes the inversion of hierarchies throughout her text, making explicit the
redefinition of identities that she illustrates in the library scene. In ‘normal,’ non-carnival reality,
masters are superior to slaves, just as God is superior to Satan, and all oppressors are superior to
those they oppress. But Kincaid inverts this, saying, “all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and
all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this” (80).
Although this line comes at the end of the text, this theme of inverted dichotomies runs
throughout the narrative. In her carnival, Kincaid designs and asserts an inverted hierarchy
between oppressed and oppressor, and she imposes this recasting of historical identities onto the
West through her usurpation of literature and the library. Using the space and medium of English
36 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
oppression, Kincaid ‘educates’ the West to legitimize the Antiguan worldview. Kincaid educates
the Westerner about who he is, and though this identity is only through the eyes of the
Antiguans, Kincaid presents it as if it were objective fact—“there can be no question about this.”
In short, Kincaid parodies the role of the oppressor by usurping his tools and strategies for
oppression. Among those tools for imposing identity is, as we have seen, anger.
Part II: Crowning the Antiguans, Uncrowning the Westerner
Using anger to privilege the Antiguan perspective
Kincaid usurps the anger monopoly to enforce the privilege of the Antiguan perspective
and silence the Western perspective. I have already argued that anger is an inherent part of the
perspective of an oppressed group. So it is only right that Kincaid, having created a space where
the Antiguan perspective is privileged over the Western one, expresses that anger. As we have
already seen, Kincaid asserts that the English language prevents the Westerner from
understanding the Antiguan perspective, and writes, “That must be why, when I say, ‘I am filled
with rage,’ the criminal says, ‘But why?’” (ASP, 32). In her text, Kincaid endeavors to make the
Westerner recognize this anger. She writes, “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”
(32). Kincaid brings her anger to the foreground to legitimize the anger inherent in the Antiguan
perspective, and thereby privilege that perspective.
Besides being part of the oppressed group’s perspective, it is also a feature of anger that it
can be used as a tool of oppression, when directed against an opposing group. So Kincaid
focuses Antiguan anger directly on those who have oppressed them: i.e. the Westerner,
represented in A Small Place by the narratee. In this way Kincaid uses anger in the way that
Lorde says it can be used to combat oppression, using her arsenal of anger against her
HUBBARD | 37 oppression. This process of directing anger against the oppressor inherently involves a reversal
of roles, because for the oppressed group to legitimize their anger, they must silence the anger of
the oppressed (since the oppressor uses his anger to delegitimize that of the oppressed). In
silencing the anger of the other group and legitimizing their own, the oppressed group performs
the scripts of oppression, and thus becomes the oppressor. In A Small Place, Kincaid uses her
anger to silence the perspective of the Westerner and invert the roles of the historical power
dichotomy; she becomes the oppressor, and the Western narratee becomes the oppressed.
This privileging of the Antiguan perspective at the expense of the Western perspective
enacts the carnivalesque ritual of crowning and uncrowning. In the carnival, a king is crowned
who is symbolically in control of the performance. “Death and renewal are central to the
carnival,” Vice writes, “represented most often by the carnival act of ‘the mock crowning and
subsequent decrowning of the carnival king’” (Vice, 152). These two acts are inseparable. To
dismantle hierarchies, the carnival parodies them. To parody a hierarchy, someone new must be
in charge, and this crowning of a carnival king necessarily entails the uncrowning of the ‘normal’
king, to complete the role inversion. “He who is crowned is the antipode of a real king, [such as]
a slave or a jester” (Storey, 252). Kincaid, as the narrator in A Small Place, represents the
Antiguans, so she represents the identity of the slave. By privileging the Antiguan perspective,
she crowns the slave and exalts him. This comes at the expense of the Westerner, who is the
‘normal’ king, or master; he controls non-carnival reality and his perspective is normally
privileged at the expense of the Antiguans’. Kincaid uncrowns the Westerner through her anger,
degrading the identity of the narratee and delegitimizing his perspective.
The Westerner as king
Kincaid begins her text by ‘crowning’ the Westerner—she describes her narratee’s selfdefined identity as based on the assumption of his superiority; he is egoistic and self-serving.
38 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Sending him on a tourist trip, Kincaid exposes the superiority that the Westerner feels in relation
to the natives by emphasizing how thoroughly he dismisses their troubles to enjoy himself.
Kincaid describes the narratee’s thoughts on Antigua’s arid climate: “[The other islands you
visited] were much too green, much too lush with vegetation, which indicated to you, the tourist,
that they got quite a bit of rainfall, and rain is the very thing that you, just now, do not want …
since you are a tourist, the thought of what it might be like to live day in, day out in a place that
suffers constantly from drought … must never cross your mind” (ASP, 4). The narratee admires
the blazing sun—“a sun,” Kincaid writes, “that is your personal friend” (13)—although it is
devastating for Antigua’s natives. The narratee sees Antigua as something meant for his own
pleasure, and ignores the existence of the natives. To the narratee, they are just another charming
part of the scenery.
Kincaid’s narratee is self-congratulatory and self-justifying. When he sees Antiguan natives
using holes in the ground as a toilet, he thinks proudly to himself: “Their ancestors were not
clever in the way yours were, for then would it not be you who would be in harmony with nature
and backwards in that charming way?” (17). This thought brings the narratee joy because it lets
him think positively of himself and his ancestors. It allows him to distance himself from the
natives in the same way the English imperialists distanced their self-defined identities from the
identities they attributed to natives. The tourist, like the imperialists, is clever (not exploitative),
while the natives are backward. This position of superiority allows the narratee to condescend to
the natives, thinking of their innate inferiority as ‘charming.’ It also allows him to maintain
distance between himself and the natives and justify his preference for people of his own ‘status.’
Kincaid describes the narratee’s reverie of holiday bliss, “You see yourself meeting new people
(only they are new in a very limited way, for they are people just like you)” (13). The narratee
HUBBARD | 39 contrasts himself with the natives to foster his ignorance, justify his use of the natives as props
for his own holiday enjoyment, and discount their humanity.
Kincaid’s narratee is not ignorant by chance, but actively maintains his ignorance. He even
has scholars to support his beliefs. Kincaid writes, “You have brought your own books with you,
and among them is one of those new books about economic history,” and this book explains that
the West got rich not from slavery, but from the invention of the wristwatch (9-10). This book on
economics—written for Westerners by a Westerner—informs the narratee that his ancestors
earned their success through their own ingenuity. Ironically adopting the perspective of the
Westerner, Kincaid assures him further: “They [the Antiguan natives, descendants of slaves] are
not responsible for what you have; you owe them nothing; in fact, you did them a big favour, and
you can provide one hundred examples” (10). Kincaid’s narratee justifies the actions of his
ancestors and celebrates his own character.
Kincaid’s narratee sees himself as ‘king.’ That is, he sees himself as superior to nonWesterners, and considers Antigua’s natives not as autonomous humans with feelings and needs;
he sees them as existing only in relation to the Westerner himself, as servants of his personal
pleasure. When the thought crosses his mind that the natives might be suffering or have suffered,
perhaps at the hands of people like him, he dismisses the idea and assures himself with the
thought that he and his ancestors are in fact benefactors to the poor natives. They are not tyrants,
but benign kings, ruling by birthright. As the tourist, he is contributing to Antigua’s economy,
and as the government who industrialized Antigua, his ancestors shared the fruits of their
ingenuity with the natives and built them a country from the ground up. Kincaid’s Westerner is
king in his own mind, and he deserves this title and uses it well.
40 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Uncrowning the Westerner through derision and degradation
After introducing her narratee through his perception of himself on his tourist trip, Kincaid
goes about tearing off his crown by showing her narratee the Antiguans’ perception of him.
Kincaid’s narrator ridicules and condemns the narratee, revealing to him a grotesque image of
his identity. Kincaid tells the narratee, “Let me just show you how you looked to us” (ASP, 35).
To force the Westerner to embody a radically new identity, Kincaid reframes the narratee’s
actions and character from the perspective of the historically oppressed group. Bringing the
Antiguans’ resentment and anger to the foreground, Kincaid debases the narratee’s identity and
privileges the Antiguan perspective over the Western one.
Kincaid’s narratee, in the eyes of the natives, is utterly repulsive. She tells her narratee,
“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” (17). Since the
narratee could see only how pleasant everything around him is—the sun, the beach, the food, the
customs, the handmade trinkets for sale—Kincaid turns his gaze around and makes him see
himself through a native’s eyes. What he sees is ugliness and mindless consumption. She
emphasizes this with a powerful image, describing her reader as “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” (16). These venomous
descriptions shatter the narratee’s sense of himself as a lovely, intelligent, and important person.
His lofty perception of himself is weighted down by his hideousness.
Kincaid’s narratee is despised and mocked. Kincaid describes how the natives react to
him: “Behind closed doors they laugh at your strangeness … the physical sight of you does not
please them; you have bad manners … they do not like the way you speak (you have an accent);
they collapse from laughter, mimicking the way they imagine you must look as you carry out
HUBBARD | 41 some everyday bodily function” (17). The narratee had previously only looked outward and
judged the ‘backward’ ways of the natives. “They do not like me! That thought never actually
occurs to you,” Kincaid writes. (17). So she places this thought at the center of her narratee’s
consciousness. She makes him the object of entertainment and condescension, and the Westerner
is forced to assimilate the hatred and derision of others (and those he considers below himself, no
less) to his perception of himself. This ridicule, founded in anger and resentment, is an important
part of the carnival. The contempt of the native is hidden, day-to-day. This contempt must be
clandestine because the native (on a tourism-dependent island) relies on the good will of the
West. The condescension and contempt on the part of the Westerner, on the other hand, can be
forthright. Public humiliation of the dominant group is a primary tool of degradation and
uncrowning in the carnival, because it parodies (and therefore exposes and condemns) the
humiliating abuses of power enacted by the oppressor.
Laughter is a means of uncrowning the Westerner because laughter, when directed at
someone else, is a form of derision. Michael Bristol characterizes laughter as “a pleasurable
response to the inferiority or degradation of another,” in other words, the act of enjoying
someone else’s inferiority and ridiculing them for it (Bristol, 128). Hobbes writes that laughter is
the response to someone’s “apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison
whereof they [the person who laughs] suddenly applaud themselves” (qtd. in Bristol, 128). In
this sense, someone laughs when he sees something repulsive in someone else, feels that he does
not share that unfortunate quality, and is amused by the misfortunate of that other person.
Laughter is a means by which someone both debases the object of his laughter and raises himself
up through his own contrast to it. Laughter is therefore an effective tool for maintaining the
dichotomy of identities between dominant and subordinate groups, and has been historically
42 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
deployed as a tool of oppression. It is therefore a key site of parody in the carnival.* The
Antiguans’ laughing at the tourist flips the usual identity dichotomy between these groups. The
tourist usually condescends to the natives and amuses himself at their ‘charming backwardness,’
but the natives believe themselves to be superior, and they turn this condescension around on the
Westerner. Through the carnival, Kincaid legitimizes the natives’ laughter and condescension
and uses it to parody the Westerner’s sense of superiority and degrade his self-perceived identity.
It is by reversing the roles of oppression in this way that Kincaid makes the Westerner
understand the Antiguan perspective—the perspective carrying the anti-colonial, antihierarchical message that Kincaid intends to communicate. Language cannot explain it, but
experiencing (by experiencing the degraded sense of identity and the humiliation central to the
experience of oppression) makes the perspective of the oppressed group real for the Westerner.
By directing Antiguan anger and resentment against the narratee, Kincaid uncrowns the
Westerner, dismantling his identity with each insult. She also crowns the Antiguan, and gives her
narrator the privileges of the oppressor. This allows her, having dismantled the Westerner’s usual
sense of self, to impose on him a new identity, just as the English imperialists did to the natives.
Part III: Re-Scripting the Westerner’s Identity
Altering the identity of the narratee
As the narratee progresses through the book, his identity begins to morph, and he takes on
the persona of his ancestors. He is no longer just the tourist, but also the colonist and the
slaveholder. Kincaid hoists these identities onto the narratee so that he will recognize himself not
*
In Medieval Europe’s peasant class, laughter was a means by which the dominant group maintained its sense of
superiority and debased the identity of the subordinated group. The subordinated group was barred from returning
this derision, and even had to make gestures of humility through self-debasement and laughing at themselves
(Bristol, 126). On the day of Carnival, however, social divisions like this were broken down and “free and familiar
contact between people” became allowed (Vice, 152). Servants, then, no longer needed to hide their thoughts and
feelings behind closed doors, but could air them freely and laugh at their masters.
HUBBARD | 43 just as a repulsive human being, but as a criminal and a perpetrator of despicable, evil deeds. The
narratee is (originally coded as) a modern, white Westerner, but Kincaid loads him up with
identities that are increasingly alien and repugnant to him. Kincaid’s narratee is not only guilty of
the crimes of his ancestors; he is his ancestors. Kincaid fuses the identity of a nineteenth century
Englishman with the narratee’s modern tourist identity. Through this narrative progression,
Kincaid connects the exploitation of modern tourism with that of colonialism and slavery and
forces the narratee to see himself as deeply implicated in an ongoing history of oppression.
Kincaid’s narratee, comfortable roaming Antigua as a tourist, believing he is helping the
natives by contributing to their tourist industry, does not see himself as a criminal. He is dimly
aware of colonialism, but he justifies it to himself, and he does not align himself with any
misdeeds that may have taken place.* Kincaid forces him to embody the identity of the colonial
criminal. Indeed, he embodies the identity of imperial England itself: “You loved knowledge, and
wherever you went you made sure to build a school, a library” (ASP, 36, my emphasis). She
accuses him, “You took things that were not yours … you murdered people. You imprisoned
people. You robbed people. You opened your own banks and you put our money in them” (35).
In the eyes of Antiguans, slavery and colonialism never really ended, and neocolonialism is now
thriving through the tourist industry and global government corruption. The narratee, for whom
colonialism is usually so far removed as to be irrelevant, is made to see himself as deeply
implicated in colonial atrocities. He is guilty, he is a criminal, and Kincaid forces him to embody
that identity, showcasing her righteous anger through the sheer volume of the attacks she makes
on the narratee’s identity and his despicable actions.
*
Kincaid makes it clear that her narratee knows about colonialism but ignores it, saying ironically, “You needn’t let
that slightly funny feeling you have from time about exploitation, oppression, domination develop into full-fledged
unease, discomfort; you could ruin your holiday” (ASP, 10).
44 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Further altering the narratee’s identity, Kincaid aligns his identity with that of the
slaveholder: “After the mutilated bodies of you, your wife, and your children were found in your
beautiful and spacious bungalow at the edge of your rubber plantation—found by one of your
many house servants (none of it was ever yours; it was never, ever yours)—you say to me, ‘Well,
I wash my hands of all of you, I am leaving now’” (35-6). Here, Kincaid re-emphasizes the
narratee’s sense of detachment from colonial horrors. He is deeply implicated in them—he is
murdered because of his involvement with them—but he still stands up, brushes himself off, and
says that he is done with all of those ungrateful natives and is no longer responsible for what
happens to them. But of course, he is still responsible. He still perpetuates a global power
dichotomy that favors him and exploits the natives. By accusing her narratee of historical wrongs
and using her righteous anger to subordinate the narratee to her authority, Kincaid forces the
narratee to embody an identity that makes his involvement in this harmful hierarchy explicit.
How this privileges the Antiguan worldview
This morphing identity, which collapses time and historical personas, is alien to the
Westerner’s understanding of his identity. It reflects the Antiguans’ understanding of identity. By
casting the narratee into this identity, Kincaid privileges the Antiguan worldview. Kincaid’s
Antiguans embody an atemporal, three-layered identity. Kincaid writes, “To the people in a
small place [i.e. Antigua], the division of Time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not
exist” (ASP, 54). They do not distinguish between temporal eras and individual identities
because nuance plays no role in their lives: “The people in a small place can have no interest in
the exact, or in completeness” (53). Living in this dichotomized—carnivalesque, even—reality,
Kincaid’s Antiguans are at once citizens of a sovereign island nation, colonized natives, and
slaves. Each of these figures exists only in opposition to another: the Westerner. In the case of
slavery, there is the slaveholder. In colonialism, there is the colonizer. And in tourism, there is
HUBBARD | 45 the tourist. It is through the combination of these three identities that Kincaid’s Antiguans
understand the Westerner. So when Kincaid defines the identity of her narratee, she collapses
temporal distinctions and makes the narratee embody all of these identities. The narratee is
simultaneously the consumptive tourist, the paternalistic colonist, and the brutal slaveholder.
To Kincaid’s Antiguans, slavery and emancipation seem immediately present; “They speak
of emancipation itself as if it happened just the other day, not over one hundred and fifty years
ago” (55). Kincaid says Antiguans have “an appropriate obsession with slavery,” appropriate
because the effects of slavery are still deeply relevant in contemporary Antiguan life (43).
Slavery may have been abolished, and Antigua’s slaves may have been freed in a certain sense,
but the spectre of slavery has never ceased to influence Antigua. The extreme power dichotomy
that slavery established has never been dismantled and still persists. It was renewed through the
relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and again in the relationship between
tourist and native. Kincaid explains that this power dynamic is still present in the prominence of
Antigua’s Hotel Training School, which is “a school that teaches Antiguans how to be a good
nobody, which is what a servant is” (55). This school is a primary means of self-advancement in
Antigua because the island’s economy is largely dependent on tourism. At this school, Antiguans
learn to be deferential and serve the interests of the Western tourists.
It is because tourism is only a new face of an old power dichotomy that Antiguans bear so
much anger and resentment toward the modern Westerner. In hoisting historical identities onto
the narratee, Kincaid exposes the deep-rooted anger that Antiguans feel toward not any
individual Westerner, but the West as a whole and all the myriad ways it has oppressed and
dehumanized Natives. Kincaid uses the carnival to collapse all past and present incarnations of
oppression into one polarized dichotomy. The Tourist/native, Colonizer/colonized, and
46 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Master/slave dichotomies are fused into the West/Antiguan dichotomy of power and identity that
underlies all of these individual representations. I consider this atemporal, multi-faceted identity
a representation of the ‘prototypical Oppressor’ and the ‘prototypical Oppressed.’iii Kincaid uses
these extreme identities to create a performative, carnivalesque re-enactment of history. This
performance reaches its apex in the library scene, where the prototypical Oppressor is
symbolically, satirically raised to the level of the Christian God and the identity of the
prototypical Oppressed fuses with the figure of Lucifer. In Kincaid’s carnival, colonial
oppression is portrayed as an ancient ritual that cycles through new incarnations without ever
changing its fundamental structure. Kincaid uses the carnival to expose this foundation and force
Westerners to recognize the roles they have played, by embodying this new identity of the
prototypical Oppressor.
By taking agency over this performance on behalf of the Antiguans, Kincaid recasts the
Westerner in the role of the subhuman identity—he, as the prototypical master, is ‘a piece of
rubbish.’ She likewise recasts the Antiguan in the role of righteous, glorious being—she as the
prototypical slave, is ‘noble and exalted.’ This inversion of identities also inverts the power roles
and gives the Antiguan identity authority over the Western one. The Antiguan identity becomes
the oppressor and gets to redefine the identity of the Westerner. This inversion uncrowns the
Westerner, dismantles his sense of superiority, and forces him to alter his sense of self.
How Kincaid’s anger parodies English misrule
It is quite intentional that Kincaid makes the Western narratee embody an identity that
reflects the Antiguan worldview but is alien to his own. This is exactly what the English did to
the Antiguans and others they colonized. As we saw in the first chapter of this paper, the English
imposed a harmful identity onto the Antiguans, labeling them savages, and this identity reflected
a worldview that supported English interests at the expense of the Antiguans. Having crowned
HUBBARD | 47 herself carnival king—the parody of the Western oppressor—Kincaid is able to invert this
dynamic and write an identity for the Westerner that belittles him and silences his worldview. In
parodying English oppression, Kincaid intentionally enacts ‘misrule,’ or abuse of power. A
function of the carnival is “to criticize the public and political, as well as the private, misrule of
established authority” (Bristol, 52). Through her parody, Kincaid seeks to expose the West’s
abuses of their dominant position. The English misruled when they attributed a harmful and
belittling identity to the Antiguans, and when they cast them into the powerless side of an
extreme power dichotomy. Kincaid does the same things to her narratee in A Small Place,
thereby enacting misrule. But carnival misrule “is overt and deliberate,” because “by accurately
mimicking the pretensions of ruling families, the covert and possible willful misrule of
constituted authority is exposed” (Bristol, 52). By crowning herself carnival king and usurping
tools of oppression for a carnivalesque parody, Kincaid exposes and, through her parody
condemns, the oppressive misrule of the West.
This places the narratee in the position of the oppressed, under the intentional misrule of
Kincaid’s narrative persona. In this way, the Westerner, represented by the narratee, understands
Kincaid’s anti-hierarchical message by experiencing within himself the anger and resentment of
the oppressed group. The Westerner does not identify with the identity that he is forced to bear,
so he resents his ‘oppressor’ for misrepresenting him. He does not like the image of himself as it
appears through the eyes of the Antiguans, because it is a grotesque caricature of ugliness and
evil. But he is forced to embody that debasing identity throughout A Small Place.
Carnival renewal through degradation
All forms of debasement in the carnival, including laughter, insults, and Kincaid’s
particular techniques of progressively debasing and criminalizing the narratee’s identity, are not
only destructive but also constructive. They create the potential for change. Vice writes,
48 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
“Carnival laughter is directed at exalted objects, and forces them to renew themselves; thus its
debasing results in new life” (Vice, 152). Kincaid subjects the narratee to degradation not just to
debase him, but to force him to renew his identity. He can no longer comfortably exist in his
state of blissful ignorance, because he has been forced to recognize and directly experience the
hatred and derision of those to whom he condescends. His usual, self-defined identity has been
debased and destroyed. He cannot go back to the way things were. He can no longer see himself
as superior, so he must create a new identity for himself to grapple with and work through the
perspective that others have of him.
Forcing the Westerner into this new identity places him at a crossroads. On one hand, the
Westerner has a sense of self that exalts him, and on the other hand, he recognizes this vision of
himself that places him at a subhuman status. He cannot return to the first, and he cannot accept
the second. The Westerner, beyond the realm of the carnival, cannot embody the identity that
Antiguans attribute to him because it denies his own understanding of reality and removes his
agency in constructing his own identity. In the carnival, the Westerner has no say over his
identity because it is written by Kincaid’s narrator. But his old identity was destroyed through
degradation in the carnival; the Westerner saw a grotesque image of himself in the mirror, and he
cannot reconcile this with the beautiful image he saw previously. This is the destructive
mechanism of the carnival. But after the carnival, the Westerner will again have agency, so he
will be able to shed the identity the Antiguans gave him and perform one of his own
construction, a new one. In this way, carnival degradation is also constructive, because it forces
the narratee to renew himself.
HUBBARD | 49 Chapter 3
The Reader’s Identity Performance
How the Text Creates the Potential for Real Change
So Kincaid’s carnivalesque degradation forces the narratee into a position where the only
way forward is to construct a new identity for himself. But it is not especially meaningful if
Kincaid’s narratee renews himself. The narratee, after all, is only a literary construct, a narrative
device. It does not help the cause of ending neocolonialism and changing real Westerners’
perception of their identities if only the narratee is impacted by the carnival performance. So
why is Kincaid debasing her narratee’s identity in this way? What real effects can this have?
In this chapter, I explain how the reader comes to embody the role of the narratee and
experience the narratee’s degradation and oppression. I argue that the reader identifies with the
‘you’ figure and uses this as a vehicle to enter the story-world. Once there, he performs the script
of identity that Kincaid forces on her narratee and experiences the role of an oppressed
individual. I acknowledge that the reader can end his ‘oppression’ by closing the book, but argue
that Kincaid’s literary carnival encourages the reader to see his engagement as a performance,
and therefore not as an existential threat. I go on to argue that this performance is not actually
unreal in the sense that it has no bearing on reality, because all identity is performative. I argue
that Kincaid emphasizes this throughout her text and encourages her reader to recognize the
performativity of identity because she wants to show the reader that identity and the
sociopolitical relations that go along with it are constructed performances over which people—
individuals and societies—have ultimate control. Kincaid uses A Small Place to introduce the
reader to identity construction and performance, model how we can change the performance, and
finally ask the reader to continue this project beyond the carnival.
50 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Part I: How the Reader Enters the Narrative
Becoming the narratee
Kincaid’s second-person narrative structure enables the reader to actively participate in the
text. The narratee is a device that draws the reader into the narrative and encourages him to feel
himself experiencing the same movements and undergoing the same abuses as the narratee. As
the book progresses and the narratee’s identity changes, the reader feels himself as the object of
the narrator’s accusations and degradation. This mechanism is especially aligned with the
philosophy of the carnival. In the carnival, “there is no such thing as a spectator or audience
member,” because everyone in society, who would be a spectator, is implicated in the
performance (Booker, 4). Everyone is an actor who participates in the non-carnival performance,
so everyone is integral to bringing the carnival parody to life. The reader cannot be a passive
recipient of Kincaid’s message, or a bystander to her carnival; his participation is necessary to
create the text’s meaning. Kincaid’s message about the Westerner’s identity is developed
through the interaction between the reader’s narrative persona and the narrator, but genuine
social change is made possible by the real reader’s engagement with this alternative identity.
Narratologist Monika Fludernik theorizes the method by which the reader comes to
associate himself with the narratee in a second-person text. She explains that the pronoun you
“ambivalently hovers between reference to the narratee/reader and the second-person
protagonist” (Fludernik, 50). The reader of a second-person narrative like A Small Place is
simultaneously himself and a fictional character in the story-world.* Through this hovering,
Fludernik continues, “the effect of internal focalization is enhanced and takes on an almost
*
Here, Fludernik associates the terms ‘narratee’ and ‘reader’ and contrasts them with the ‘protagonist.’ I have been
aligning Kincaid’s narratee more closely with the figure of her own narrative construction. This is because Kincaid
has no particular protagonist, but rather speaks most directly to the abstract, imagined figure of ‘The Westerner.’
For this reason we can best think of this figure as the ‘protagonist’ and best describe it as Kincaid’s narratee.
HUBBARD | 51 hypnotic quality” (50). Because the narratee acts as an ambiguous reference point, the reader
imagines himself as the literal narratee and experiences the protagonist’s focalization—his
thoughts and actions—as his own. This ‘hypnosis’ causes the reader to enter the role of the
narratee and to assume the identity of the fictional protagonist.
The opening of A Small Place exemplifies how the reader is ‘hypnotized’ into associating
himself with the narratee. The text opens hypothetically, which keeps the role of the narratee
open: “If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see” (ASP, 3). Any real reader
could feel himself (or herself) being spoken to directly by this opening. We can contrast this with
what might happen if the text opened instead with something like, “As your plane touches down
in Antigua, marking the beginning of your holiday, this is what you see.” In this imagined
example, right away the ‘you’ figure is engaged in a fictional activity with which the reader
cannot identify. Instead, Kincaid brings the reader in slowly, asking him to imagine himself
doing something. This hypothetical disposes him to identify with the narratee, even as the
narratee’s identity becomes increasingly alien to his own. Following this first line, however, the
tourist scene does increasingly distance the narratee from the reader. The narratee’s identity
becomes more fleshed out, and increasingly precludes reference to the real reader: “You
disembark from your plane … You are feeling wonderful, so you say, ‘Oh, what a marvelous
change these bad roads are from the splendid highways I am used to in North America” (4-5).
The narratee is given certain thoughts and put into certain situations that are purely fictional.
Because the reader feels Kincaid’s narrator speaking to him from the beginning, he continues to
feel her speaking to him as she describes the narratee’s fictional actions and even accuses him of
monstrous deeds.
52 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Being unable to ‘talk back’ to Kincaid
It is not assuming too much to say that the reader does not want to embody the identity of
the narratee. A typical Westerner would likely respond either defensively or with hostility to
Kincaid’s accusations that he is identical with a slaveholder, and that he is a criminal, and that he
is human rubbish. The reader will want to dismiss, reject, or silence Kincaid’s claims, but he can
do nothing to her because she does not allow him to express his perspective. The fact that this is
a book and not an in-time interaction between writer and reader makes this insight obvious:
Kincaid is not really there to hear the reader’s complaints. But more than this, the book is
structured as if it is dialogic. Kincaid does not only express her side, but also pretends to express
the perspective of the reader. This seems in line with traditional systems of oppression. We have
already seen how the dominant group misrepresents complaints as being childlike and whiny,
and lacking content deserving of real consideration.* In this way, the oppressor does not only
silence the oppressed by silencing her speech, but adds insult to injury by misrepresenting and
belittling her experience. This is what leads to the buildup of such anger for the victim of
oppression. She is wronged, and she cannot tell the oppressor why or how. The oppressor will
not listen, because he assumes he knows and he assumes it is an invalid complaint.
To create the appearance of a dialogic interaction, Kincaid speaks to her narratee and puts
words in his mouth so that he can speak back. In giving him words, she pretends to represent the
Westerner’s thoughts, but the reader would still want to distance himself from these thoughts
because they validate Kincaid’s representation of him as selfish and willfully ignorant, and as a
colonial criminal. For example, Kincaid’s Westerner says, “Can’t she [the narrator] get beyond
all that, everything happened so long ago, and how does she know that if things had been the
other way around her ancestors wouldn’t have behaved just as badly, because, after all, doesn’t
*
See page 24 in this paper
HUBBARD | 53 everybody behave badly given the opportunity?” (ASP, 34). These thoughts make excuses for
the Westerner’s criminal behavior and justify Kincaid’s assertion that the Westerner has an
inflated opinion of himself, which he maintains by discounting the experiences of the Antiguans.
Kincaid follows this passage by associating the idea of “behaving badly” with simply being
rude. She writes, “Our perception of this Antigua—the perception we had of this place ruled by
these bad-minded people—was not a political perception. The English were ill-mannered, not
racists” (34). She does not explain this point; she simply shuts the conversation down and moves
onto the next idea. Perhaps we should take this as her saying, ‘We, too, naively thought that the
colonists were just behaving badly, but it was so much worse. We were wrong to think that, and
so are you.’ This ignores the deeper claim at stake in the narratee’s presumed complaint. Kincaid
does not consider that perhaps the Westerner is right to distinguish between himself and his
ancestors, nor does she consider the veracity of the claim that everyone behaves badly. She
assumes his complaints about her representation of him are simply cowardly retreats into
temporal nuances, and she dismisses them as invalid.* No, she will not listen, and you will
simply have to accept her worldview.
Again, I do not believe it is going too far to say that the reader does not want to accept
Kincaid’s misrepresentations and does not want to have his perspective mischaracterized and
dismissed. By embodying the narratee and being subjected to these misrepresentations and
experiencing the same degradation that the narratee experiences, the reader performatively
experiences the dynamic of oppression from the role of the oppressed. He resents these
misrepresentations and gets angry at Kincaid for accusing him so unfairly. In response to the
narrator’s dominance, the reader is disposed to develop the same anti-hierarchical sentiments that
*
Kincaid makes it clear that in a highly dichotomized reality, like that of Antigua and A Small Place, temporality
and nuance mean nothing. See the quotes on page 44 of this paper. It is contrary to this worldview to appeal to
distinctions like Kincaid’s narratee does here, so Kincaid, privileging her worldview, dismisses his claim outright.
54 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
characterize the Antiguans’ perspective and that make up the ethos of the carnival. He opposes
the hierarchy Kincaid has established, and he feels the same destructive/constructive drive to
dismantle it that Kincaid exhibits toward the Western hierarchy.
Part II: How Identity Performance Creates Real Change
How the literary carnival encourages reader participation
Unlike a real victim of oppression, the reader is able to end his oppression and silence the
misrepresentation of his identity, simply by closing the book. This ends the performance and
silences Kincaid’s message. So, why would he engage? Although the reader does not want to
embody the identity of the narratee, the performativity of his engagement in A Small Place
encourages the reader to participate in the text. This is crucial since in order to create meaning
out of the text, the reader must be willing to bring the role of the narratee to life. The ‘hypnosis’
effect encourages reader participation, and this encouragement is amplified by the fictionality of
the narratee’s identity. Although the reader feels the ‘you’ referring to himself, he also
recognizes its “ambivalent hovering” (as Fludernik describes it) between himself and a fictional
protagonist. Because of this fictionality, the reader is able to recognize that there is some level of
performativity in his engagement with the text; he is on some level aware that this is a
performance, and that makes it less threatening for him to embody an unfamiliar and unsettling
identity. This awareness is encouraged by devices like the gradually increasing fictionality of the
tourist persona in the beginning of A Small Place, as well as the atemporality of the narratee’s
identity and his shift from the tourist to the colonist to the slaveholder. This fictionality is part of
the performative nature of Kincaid’s book, and a crucial element in communicating her message.
The fact that A Small Place contains elements of performance, and, I argue, is in fact structured
HUBBARD | 55 like a carnival, heavily contributes to the reader being more willing to engage with the disruptive
energies of Kincaid’s text.
Transgressing norms is significantly more difficult in ‘real life’ than in a theatrical
performance. A subordinated group rising up against a dominant group and asserting themselves
as the new oppressor is more likely to result in a violent clash than an altered perspective for the
dominant group. The dominant group is likely to feel threatened and become defensive and
hostile, shutting down communication. This is why it is important that Kincaid is using a literary
carnival to degrade the Western identity. It is less dangerous for Kincaid to rebel against
oppression through a work of literature than in what we tend to think of as ‘real-life’ actions,
such as leading a protest, and it is less threatening for the dominant group to allow her to speak.
But this does not make Kincaid’s rebellion less effective. After all, reading a text is an action that
exists in the context of someone’s ‘real life.’ I argue that Kincaid’s subversive intentions have
more effective potential in A Small Place than they would if her text were less performative, or if
she had chosen a medium other than a work of art, because these choices encourage the reader to
let down his defenses and participate in the text.
Keith Booker worries that literature may have limited potential to create real, sustained
change, but suggests that it is also possible that literature, precisely because it is removed from
the real world, may actually be the ideal medium for change:
It is true that literary transgression is far easier than “real-world” transgression, and this
difference should not be taken lightly. At the same time, the increased ease with which
authoritarian ideals and received opinions can be challenged in literature suggests that the
literary genre might serve as a sort of kindling to ignite genuine social and political change.
(Booker, 247)
It could be problematic that a literary transgression of social norms, such as the carnivalesque
inversion of those norms that Kincaid enacts in A Small Place, is easier to enact than a ‘real-life’
transgression, because it is easier only due to the fact that the dominant group does not believe it
56 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
has effective potential. If the transgression is only imaginary—like if an adopted identity is only
theatrical—then it may have limited ability to create real change in the world. However, Booker
says—and I agree—that this increased ease may enable meaningful social change that would
otherwise be barred from happening due to its difficulty.
Booker is thinking here of the author’s facility in transgressing norms, but I argue that it is
not only the author who can challenge and subvert social norms through literature; the reader
can, too. In a text like A Small Place, in which the reader is asked to actively participate in
bringing the subversive message of the book to life, the reader is challenging Western norms of
identity and sociopolitical power. Just as this act of subversion is easier for the author, it is also
easier for the reader to engage with subversive ideas through literature than it would be in real
life. When the reader is resistant to acknowledge his identity from the perspective of those who
see him as an oppressor, it is easier for him to perform the scripts of a new identity when he sees
it as a performance. Literature offers just that kind of fictional engagement that creates a buffer
zone between the identity that the reader performs in the text and the one he performs in real life.
The carnival itself also creates a buffer zone that protects the reader’s ego while drawing
him into a performance with the potential to unsettle his identity. The carnival is in fact a
sanctioned activity. Some literary scholars even worry that the carnival is incapable of causing
social change because it is sanctioned. The performers are perfectly willing to engage, these
critics suggest, but only because they know that it will have no real effect. This idea has merit:
the historical European carnival was meant to allow the lower-class to ‘let off steam’ and prevent
revolution, which of course prevents the creation of real social change. Booker warns, “Despite
the significance of the carnival as an arena for the staging of subversive energies, one must not
forget that the carnival itself is in fact a sanctioned form of ‘subversion’ whose very purpose is to
HUBBARD | 57 sublimate and defuse the social tensions that might lead to genuine subversion—a sort of opiate
of the masses” (Booker, 5-6). Terry Eagleton goes so far as to claim that the literary carnival is
“relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art” (qtd. in Booker, 6).
I argue, in contrast, that the carnival creates a space that encourages the dominant group to
let their guard down precisely because they recognize it as a space of performance and do not
believe that their performance of a contrary identity will have any real subversive effects. Even if
a reader is unfamiliar with the idea of the carnivalesque and does not recognize that specific kind
of organized performance and parody while reading A Small Place, the surrealism inherent in the
carnival—its polarization of reality, its heightening and emphasis of dichotomies—is likely to
make a typical reader feel like he has stepped outside of ‘normal’ reality and entered a
performative space. As I have already said, recognizing his engagement with subversive energies
as performance encourages the reader to drop his defenses and participate in the text.
Performing the role of the oppressed and recognizing the performance
While I believe that the literary carnival encourages the reader to engage with subversive
energies because his ego is somewhat protected, I do not want to make too much of this sense of
performative detachment. First of all, as a reader progresses through the text, it is not guaranteed
that he will recognize a distance between himself and the persona he performs. Indeed, many
Western readers have felt personally attacked by the anger which Kincaid directs against her
narratee (the editor of The New Yorker even refused to publish it because of this anger; one can
imagine he believed it would be threatening and alienating to readers).i Secondly, it may suggest,
if the reader feels detached from his identity performance while reading A Small Place, that this
performance will not have any lasting effects on him. Both of these characterizations of ‘the
buffer zone’ between readers and the identity that they perform in the text are not quite right.
58 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
I believe that the reader is supposed to acutely feel the ‘hovering’ between himself and a
fictional persona that Fludernik attributes to the narrative device, ‘you.’ That is to say, the reader
is supposed to feel a sense of unease because he feels himself being personally attacked while at
the same time recognizing that Kincaid cannot, in all literal truth, be directly accusing him. He is
not identical with a colonist, and he is not stepping off a plane in Antigua and reading biased
books on economics. Moreover, Kincaid is not, really, oppressing the reader and forcing him to
enact an identity in the same way English colonists did, because the reader can always close the
book. The reader has ultimate control over what happens to him, and both he and Kincaid know
this. But it is crucial that the reader feel, on some level, the sense of stolen agency that breeds
resentment and anti-hierarchical sentiments in the real victim of oppression.
I have said this several times now, so why exactly is it so important that the reader feel the
experience of the oppressed? I have already said that this experience disposes the reader to
develop anti-hierarchical sentiments; in short, the reader wants to overthrow Kincaid’s hierarchy.
So why does this matter? To explain this, we must understand that the carnival encourages a
cyclical pattern of reality. The carnival celebrates a world in flux, unbound by rigid norms. The
carnival inverts hierarchies to unsettle them, to allow a society to collectively envision a different
version of reality, a new global dynamic that can be reached if we simply change the way we act.
For the oppressed group, this new world is a welcome change, allowing them to see themselves
as powerful and regain the agency that they lack in everyday life. For the oppressors, this new
world can be threatening, and they welcome the end of the carnival so they can regain their
agency and reinstate the normal hierarchies that privilege them. This is a cyclical structure. The
oppressed group feels resentment, so they performatively rebel and create a new hierarchy that
privileges them at the expense of the usual dominant group. The dominant group feels uneasy,
HUBBARD | 59 knowing that this is ‘merely’ a performance but at the same time seeing the potential for this
performance to become reality. If they become too unsure of the performative nature of the
carnival—if they start to think that maybe this parody is too real—they develop resentment
toward their new oppressors, and anxiously move to reinstate their dominance.
This is what I argue happens to the reader in A Small Place. The reader develops that
anxiety because he feels how terrible it would be to really be in the position of the oppressed. He
develops the anti-hierarchical sentiments that characterize the oppressed, because he wants to
overthrow the carnival king who aims to destroy life as he knows it. Developing this resentment
toward oppression is the first step of the cycle; the next is to overthrow the current norms, then
establish an inverted hierarchy. The reader’s next step is to close the book and return to his
comfortable position of ignorant dominance. It is at this point that Kincaid halts the carnival.
Toward the end of A Small Place, Kincaid makes it clear that the reader has been engaged
in a performance. She associates the physical space of Antigua with a stage, and uses extreme
polarizations and surreal descriptions to emphasize it as a carnivalesque, performative space. She
describes day and night in Antigua as two sides of an extreme dichotomy:
There is no dawn in Antigua: one minute, you are in the complete darkness of night; the next
minute, the sun is overhead and it stays there until it sets with an explosion of reds on the
horizon, and then the darkness of night comes again, and it is as if the open lid of a box you are
inside suddenly snaps into place. (ASP, 77-8)
This is an intentional move. Where else does one see a dichotomy as stark as an Antiguan day
and night? The power and identity relations between the West and Antiguans, as Kincaid
represents them. Throughout A Small Place Kincaid has emphasized and simplified the dynamic
between the West and Antiguans into a single dichotomy: masters and slaves. This is necessary
in the carnival, because it is only by simplifying and polarizing sociopolitical dynamics that one
exposes the fundamental inequality on which they are founded. Here, Kincaid explicitly says that
60 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
extreme polarization is outside of reality. She writes, “No real day and no real night could be
that evenly divided—twelve hours of one and twelve hours of the other; no real day would begin
that dramatically or end that dramatically” (77-8, my emphasis). In this same area of the book,
Kincaid represents Antigua in a tableau, making it seem static, like a backdrop on a stage.
Indeed, she says explicitly, “Antigua is beautiful. Antigua is too beautiful. Sometimes the beauty
of it seems unreal. Sometimes the beauty of it seems as if it were stage sets for a play” (77).
We should understand Kincaid’s description of Antigua as a parallel to the space she has
created in A Small Place. Indeed, the book is named for Kincaid’s characterization of this island;
it is a small place. The island is a stage on which the English constructed a performance of
extreme power and identity dichotomies (although the natural complexities of reality, following
emancipation, obscured these fundamental dichotomies). Kincaid’s text is a stage on which
Kincaid exposes these power roles, symbolically dismantles the hierarchy which the English
attached to those identities (especially the moral hierarchy of good versus evil, as we saw in the
library scene), and implements a new hierarchy. Because of this parallel, by emphasizing the
performativity of Antigua, Kincaid emphasizes the performative nature of her text. Yes, there is
a fundamental power dichotomy with great significance, just as there is a fundamental dichotomy
between day and night. But Kincaid suggests here that she has exaggerated this dichotomy by
removing all nuance—she removes dusk and dawn, and she has removed all the complexities of
reality. By emphasizing that this kind of polarization is performative, or ‘unreal,’ Kincaid
encourages readers to understand their engagement with the text as an exercise in performance.
Kincaid halts the carnival and reveals the stage because she wants the reader to realize that
what he understands as ‘reality’ is nothing more than performance. Although here she
emphasizes the performativity by calling the scene ‘unreal,’ it is more accurately described as
HUBBARD | 61 surreal, as she suggests afterward, calling Antigua “heightened, intense surroundings” (79). This
is an extreme and simplified representation of reality, but that does not mean reality itself is not
performative. Indeed, it is, but Kincaid simplifies its performative nature to illuminate it.
Throughout the text endeavors to show that the roles of oppressor and oppressed are just that—
roles, which can be performed by anyone. She presents English colonialism as getting its power
through its explicit attempts to construct a narrative in the colonies that glorified the colonizers.
The English imagined a narrative and disseminated it through literature and education,
legitimizing it to the point that it no longer seemed like a construction, but simply natural fact.
Understanding these identities as performative roles makes it easier to realize that tourism is
actually a new incarnation of the same power structure of slavery. Because although they may
not be identical as the carnival makes them out to be, the tourist is enacting the same scripts of
behavior that legitimate oppression through the oppressor’s sense of superiority. Understanding
identity as performative, based on scripts, also makes it clear that it can be changed.
Introducing the reader to identity performance
Judith Butler, a leading theorist on identity, understands identity in normal, non-carnival
life in the same way I suggest Kincaid understands English dominance: as a performance, which
means it is constructed by people and can be changed by people. Butler argues that identity (in
her work, gender identity) is actively constructed and constantly in flux, rather than inherent and
fixed. Butler sees identity as a role that an individual continuously performs. These repeated
performances both solidify and destabilize identities, because although one practices her identity
with each performance, the performance undergoes small variations each time, in the same way
an actor better memorizes her lines with each recitation but also changes a gesture or tone. Think
of identity as a script. Oppressed groups, like colonized peoples and women, are given a script
by their oppressors and held to its repeated performance. If they are told they are innately
62 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
savages and have been given the gift of culture by their colonizers, this is the script they perform.
This is not to say that being told one is a savage makes her act like a savage, but it can, after
many repetitions, cause her to accept it as part of her identity and believe that her oppressor has
in fact saved her from herself. The way to change one’s identity is to take back agency and
rewrite the script. The way to change one’s identity is by performing a new one.
However, identity is generally imposed, constructed, and performed unconsciously, so this
complicates one’s ability to rewrite the script. Although Butler’s ideas are quite prominent in
scholarship, the average person does not typically think of identity as something either imposed
on him or which he creates. The typical Westerner—Kincaid’s intended reader—is likely to
think of his everyday identity as inherent and fixed. He is unlikely to think of his identity as a
scripted performance, designed by his ancestors to privilege themselves at the expense of those
they subjugated. Kincaid counters this attitude by making her text a space for the reader to
actively engage with identity construction. A Small Place blurs the line between ‘real’ and
‘theatrical,’ setting up all forms of identity throughout the history of interactions between the
West and Antigua (e.g. colonists, tourists, slaves) as scripts in a constructed performance, and
asking the reader to see his own identity as encompassing the fundamental component of these
scripts: the assumption of Western superiority. This has the potential to change the way readers
understand their identities. Kincaid encourages them to see their everyday identity as a
constructed script, one with significant ramifications in the overall performance of sociopolitical
relations between the West and Antigua.
Identity performances are a powerful tool for changing social structures. By challenging
readers’ identities, A Small Place destabilizes the potentially harmful identities readers perform,
generally quite thoughtlessly, on a day-to-day basis. An engaged reader will come away with an
HUBBARD | 63 improved understanding of who he is. Although during the reading performance Kincaid takes
away the reader’s agency by degrading his usual identity and forcing him to embody a new, quite
upsetting one, the reader ultimately gains a new level of agency by having engaged with A Small
Place. Now that the reader is conscious of the identity he attributes to himself and the identity
others ascribe to him, he is able to make a conscious choice about the identity to perform in his
life from now on. Nobody wants to be a vapid, ugly, cruel, and destructive creature. When
someone reads A Small Place, he looks into this extreme, grotesque mirror that Kincaid has
designed, and he is able to see which parts really do reflect an objective reality and which might
be understandable from someone else’s perspective. He is able to see which parts of himself he
needs to change to align the way he perceives himself with the way a historically oppressed
person perceives him. A Small Place encourages the complacently oppressive Westerner to
engage in self-exploration and think of the identity he truly wants to communicate to the world.
If Kincaid did not force his identity to the forefront of his consciousness, the unwitting oppressor
would remain willfully ignorant of his position of power and his culpability in a tragic history.
The modern Westerner is trapped in his role of oppressor as long as there is no
communication between himself and those he oppresses. Kincaid claims that being a master is
not a privilege, but a burden, referring to the oppressor’s role as bearing the “master’s yoke”
(81). The Westerner feels stuck in his usual identity, though it makes him uneasy, so he justifies
his actions with false narratives about ‘doing colonized people a favor,’ and he supports his own
interests by actively ignoring those of the marginalized group. A Small Place, by inverting the
power dynamic, legitimates the Antiguan perspective and disallows the reader to simply silence
it. After performing the identity that Antiguans attribute to him, and after experiencing the
humiliation and resentment of the oppressed group, the reader is better able to understand the
64 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
experiences and needs of the oppressed group. He is able to see the problems with his usual
actions and identity, and he is able to take thoughtful control over them in the future.
Identity construction in real life, however, is more difficult than identity construction in the
theater. One is usually unaware of the identity she performs, and even if she realizes that her
identity is nothing more than a performance, actually rewriting it is a whole new difficulty. But A
Small Place does not only change its readers by altering their perception of themselves, although
that is an important way that it creates real change. Reading this text actually allows a reader to
practice identity construction and to see a model of how one can alter the scripts of identity to
change an interpersonal dynamic. Kincaid exposes the performative nature of reality and models
how one can take up certain tools and use them to belittle and oppress another group. She asks
her reader to step away from his normal understanding of reality, and coaxes him into a new
identity through the increasing surrealism of the persona of her narratee. By the end of the book,
the reader has performed a new identity, and, if he looks, he can see how Kincaid constructed it.
To engage with this book, I argue, is to perform a political action. Even if the reader does
not go on to boycott travel agencies and lobby his government to change their relationships with
former colonies, he has practiced enacting a personal change and he has been challenged to use
this practice to truly alter the way he understands himself in relation to those he normally sees as
‘Other,’ as inferior, as ‘backwards in that charming way.’ He has expanded the horizon of his
experience. He has crossed a border between himself and the Other. This is no small feat. Merely
recognizing the performativity of identity is a big step in the right direction. This is, therefore,
the heart of Kincaid’s message. She wants her readers to realize that identity can be rewritten,
and that sociopolitical relations can be reconstructed. In the library scene she models for the
Antiguans how to take back their agency, and throughout the book she engages her Western
HUBBARD | 65 reader in identity performance then reveals the stage to ask him to see and understand what he
has been doing. As long as everyone believes identity is fixed, and no one recognizes that they
have agency in this constructed performance of ‘reality,’ then their identities will be static
because no one will be able to successfully unsettle them. No one will rewrite the scripts and
alter the performance. Kincaid models this, then she asks her readers to follow her lead.
66 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Closing the Carnival
How Kincaid returns agency to the reader and envisions a world of dismantled hierarchies
We have finished our descent into Kincaid’s carnivalesque world. There is nothing left to
do now, for us in this paper nor Kincaid in her book, besides return to everyday reality.
Remember that the carnival is a cycle: destruction entails renewal, crowning entails uncrowning
which entails crowning again, and when one hierarchy is established another waits to replace it.
Kincaid halts her carnival because she wants to end this cycle. She wants to harness the antihierarchical energies that she has created in her reader to direct his future identity construction.
Kincaid has exposed and parodied an old reality to pave way for a new one. She has degraded
the Westerner’s sense of self so that he could be empowered to rebuild a better identity—one
that rejects hierarchies and sees sociopolitical dynamics as constructions over which we have
control. Having seen the mess identity and power dichotomies have made, having recognized
their role in constructing and perpetuating those dichotomies, and having performatively
experienced the oppression and the resentment on the other side, the West is hopefully ready to
join Kincaid and other victims of oppression, including other postcolonial thinkers, in defining
new identities going forward in the postcolonial world.
Kincaid invites her readers to join her on this path. The following lines begin the last
paragraph of A Small Place:
Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It
was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human
rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human being from Africa (all
masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there
can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power … (ASP, 80)
These lines stand out because they have a very different narrative style from most of the
book. The first few are distinctly staccato, punctuating unusually objective facts with a quiet
HUBBARD | 67 intensity. The last line is interesting, because it associates what would be considered a subjective
claim with the basic facts of Antigua’s nature and history, and Kincaid prolongs the clause just to
emphasize the suggested impartiality of this claim about masters and slaves. This structure
makes this extreme power differential and the moral inversion that Kincaid has attached to it a
simple, objective fact of Antigua’s history. This passage tells us, ‘This is what happened. It’s as
simple as that.’ It quietly begs the question, ‘So where do we go from here?’
I read this passage like a subdued survey of a beach after a hurricane has finally lifted.
Kincaid is looking at all the destruction and explaining in the detached tone of Fate herself how
this came to pass. There was a small island, and this neutral plot of land became the stage on
which a history of cruelty and destruction took place. The curtains opened with Columbus’s
arrival, and the stage soon became populated with characters who mocked the neutrality of a
small, static island with the extreme dichotomies that they established. These lines suggest to me
that Kincaid is looking back on everything that has happened in Antigua’s history—from what it
naturally is, what it was before any sociopolitical dichotomies became attached to it, to the
moment its modern history of chaos began, through the age of imperialism—and she is simply
summarizing the facts of this historical drama to her audience.
This passage, this detached recounting of a history (especially considering its placement in
the text), makes me think of a closing speech from a play’s narrator. The narrative voice removes
itself from the story to speak from outside the story-world, looking down on the diorama that has
been constructed throughout the narrative. Indeed, Kincaid is speaking about her narrative from
outside it. Her text is this history of Antigua. Kincaid creates a retelling of Antigua’s history in A
Small Place, exposing its dichotomies to invert them and to show us that they are not fixed. We,
fallible people that we are, built them, and we can also dismantle them. Setting aside the irony of
68 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
returning to the English canon to enlighten our understanding of these lines, let’s compare these
few lines with Puck’s speech at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is a famous
instance of reaching out to the audience to pull a narrative out of the chaos into which it has
descended, and I believe Kincaid is doing something similar at the end of her carnival.
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
(Shakespeare, V, i)
In his speech, Puck is acknowledging the chaos he has created in the story-world of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he is trying to make amends, but, significantly, without
apologizing for what has been done. Kincaid, by amplifying historical tension, emphasizing
extreme dichotomies, and pulling her reader into her carnivalesque representation of history, has
also created chaos in her story-world. But this chaos was necessary, because it reflected and
retold the chaos that has reigned in Antigua ever since Columbus first weighed anchor on its
shores. In the first lines of her final paragraph, Kincaid steps back from this chaos, just as Puck
does, and she returns to the basic history that makes up the skeleton of the carnivalesque world
she has created in her story. She underscores the basic power dichotomy that formed the basis for
all future polarities in Antigua—master and slave—and underscores the reversal she made of this
HUBBARD | 69 power structure in A Small Place: rubbish and exalted. She does not apologize for her retelling.
She does not apologize for the chaotic world she has portrayed.
But, to communicate her anti-colonial and anti-hierarchical message, Kincaid had to
uncrown the reader and degrade his identity. She had to reduce him to rubbish so he could renew
himself. So, like Puck, Kincaid seeks to make amends with her reader. Here are her last lines:
Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master’s
yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds
up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no
longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings. (ASP, 81)
In these final lines Kincaid breaks down the dichotomies that history set up and which she has
fleshed out, amplified, and inverted through her retelling of that history. Like Puck, Kincaid
extends her hand to her audience, asking them to reach back. The reader can reach back; like
Puck and his audience, narrator and audience in A Small Place can be friends. In A Small Place,
this requires the reader to do what Kincaid has just modeled. He must take off the mask Kincaid
has constructed for him—the mask of ‘The Oppressor,’ the embodiment of all personas on the
Western side of the great historical dichotomy. He must, too (and this is the harder part), remove
with this carnival mask the mask he wears every day. Some parts of his normal mask, his
habitual identity, will stick to the extreme mask Kincaid has made him wear. Some parts of the
grotesque mask were not so unreal, but all too real, and are part of the reason colonial
dichotomies persist today. The reader must remove all traces of the mask of the ‘master,’ just as
in this closing passage Kincaid removes her mask of the ‘exalted slave.’ Narrator and reader
must meet beyond the carnival performance of the text to become human beings. By taking
responsibility for what has happened, assuming agency in constructing the future, and joining
hands in solidarity in the middle of the power dichotomy instead of standing at its poles, master
and slave, colonizer and colonized, tourist and native, can finally begin to make amends.
70 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
Works Cited
Booker, Keith M. Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Transgression, Abjection, and the
Carnivalesque. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991. Print.
Bristol, Michael D. Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance
England. New York: Methuen, 1985. Print.
Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory." Theatre journal (1988).
Coleman, Daniel. In Bed With the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural Politics. Edmonton: University
of Alberta Press, 2009. Print.
Fludernik, Monika. An Introduction to Narratology. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Print.
Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and
Speeches. The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984: 124-133. Print.
Marcus, Jane. "Art and Anger." Feminist Studies (1978): 69-98. Print.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Collins Edition, 1998. Project Gutenberg, 2003.
E-book. <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1514/1514-h/1514-h.htm> (acc. 11 May 2015).
Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. University of Georgia Press, 2006. Print.
Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester University Press, 1997. Print.
Notes
Introduction
Literary criticism on Jamaica Kincaid largely focuses on readings of femininity and domesticity in these more
popular novels. For example, Louise Bernard’s essay approaching Autobiography of My Mother from a feminist
lens is, in that sense at least, typical: “Countermemory and Return: Reclamation of the (Postmodern) Self in
Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother and My Brother” (2002). Likewise, Maria Karafilis’s
essay “Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the ‘Bildungsroman’ in Sandra Cisneros's The House on
Mango Street and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John” (1998) is representative of readings of Annie John. Annie John
is especially prominent in literature on Kincaid and is frequently read in schools.
i
HUBBARD | 71 For examples of essays that take a message away from A Small Place like one might a manifesto, see the essay
by Liz Young: "An Angry Voice From Paradise: Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place as a Teaching Resource."
Also an essay that makes some points very similar to mine, but which approaches the text from a very
different perspective by Iyunolu Osagie and Christine N. Buzinde: "Culture And Postcolonial Resistance:
Antigua in Kincaid’s A Small Place."
ii
According to the 2011 census report on Antigua and Barbuda, Black and Caucasian are the largest ethnic
groups on these islands, followed by East Indian. African descendants make up 87% of the total population
and Caucasians make up 1.6% (Source: Antigua and Barbuda 2011 Population and Housing Census. Book of
Statistical Tables I. Page 64. Accessed Online, 12 May 2015,
<http://ab.gov.ag/pdf/2011_population_and_housing_census.pdf>).
iii
That A Small Place was intended to be published in The New Yorker is documented in a variety of places. It
was reportedly rejected by then-editor Robert Gottlieb for being “too angry.” For more information see
Emmanuel Sampath Nelson’s biographical information on Kincaid in his book, Contemporary African Novelists:
A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, on page 260.
iv
There is no official data on ethnic demographics in readership, either for The New Yorker or similar
magazines. However, it is clear that the readership is predominantly affluent or at least of a privileged
background. The average household income of TNY readers is $112,394, 62% of readers have at least a
bachelor’s degree, and 41% hold professional/managerial positions. Knowing that wealthier races in America
tend to be White and Asian and having a familiarity with the tone and style of The New Yorker allows us to
extrapolate that the magazine assumes a predominantly white audience. Source for demographic data:
<http://www.condenast.com/brands/new-yorker/media-kit/print>. Updated March 2015. Acc. 12 May 15.
v
Ngugi writes, “African literature can only be written in African languages” Source: Ngugi wa Thiong'o,
“The Language of African Literature.” (Personal PDF, P.450).
vi
Achebe writes, “I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience.
But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new
African surroundings.” Source: Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language.” From:
Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day. Anchor Press/Doubleday: New York, 1975, p. 91-103. P.103.
vii
“The term ‘narratee,’ coined by Prince (1971) … designates the addressee of the narrator, the fictive entity
to which the narrator directs his narration.” This is how I will use this term throughout this paper. The
concept of the narratee is in fact divided into to distinct entities: the addressee and the recipient. “The addressee
is the narrator’s image of the one to whom the message is sent; the recipient is the factual receiver.” (Source:
“The Living Handbook of Narratology,” University of Hamburg, <http://wikis.sub.unihamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Narratee> Acc. 12 May 2015). This is complicated in Kincaid’s work, because it
is likely that the narrator’s image of the one to whom she speaks is any Westerner, and this can align with the
real reader, while also contrast with the real reader if the reader is not, in fact, a white Westerner. I use the
most literal interpretation possible for the term ‘narratee’ for simplicity’s sake, using it to refer to the actual
figure of the ‘you.’ I assume for this purpose that this is a distinct character whom the narratee describes and
with whom she interacts.
viii
To read more about this, see the work of Fredric Jameson and his belief in postcolonial literature as
national allegory, and the book by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back. (1989).
ix
My use of the term ‘carnival’ emphasizes a particular feature of the carnival in Bakhtinian theory. Bakhtin
understands the carnival as a social festivity with subversive energies. I emphasize the subversive energies in
my use, because Kincaid’s portrayal of history is not mirthful, nor is it an organized social activity. I maintain
x
72 | KINCAID’S CARNIVAL
fundamental concepts in the carnivalesque by emphasizing its subversive energies and its themes of inversion,
renewal, and intentional chaos, but I leave aside the parts that regarding social organization and festivity. I do
not believe a performance needs these features to be ‘carnivalesque,’ though it must be subversive.
Chapter 1
Sources for information on education in the British Caribbean: Rooke, Patricia T. “Papists and Proselytizers:
non-denominational education in the British Caribbean after emancipation” (1994); King, Ruby. “Education
In The British Caribbean: The Legacy Of The Nineteenth Century.” Accessed online, 29 January 2015.
<https://www.educoas.org/Portal/bdigital/contenido/interamer/BkIACD/Interamer/
Interamerhtml/Millerhtml/mil_king.htm.>
i
Source: King, Ruby. “Education In The British Caribbean: The Legacy Of The Nineteenth Century.”
Accessed online, 29 January 2015. <https://www.educoas.org/Portal/bdigital/contenido/interamer/
BkIACD/Interamer/Interamerhtml/Millerhtml/mil_king.htm.>
ii
Source: Cummings, William K. “Patterns of Modern Education.” International Handbook of Education and
Development: Preparing Schools, Students, and Nations for the Twenty-First Century. Cummings and McGuin, eds.
1997: 63-85. Page 80.
iii
Chapter 2
Satan’s rebellion and fall from heaven is described in the following passage of The King James Bible: The Book
of Revelation: Chapter 12, Verses 7-9 (Revelation 12:7-9).
i
To read more about postcolonial interpretations of Caliban, see, for example, the following works: Duke
Pesta, “Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Postcolonial Criticism of The Tempest” (2014); Bill Ashcroft,
Caliban's Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures (2009).
ii
The narratee’s gender identity also contributes to our understanding of this persona as the ‘prototypical
Oppressor.’ The narratee hovers between multiple personas, and could actually be interpreted as changing
genders. For the majority of the text, the narratee’s gender identity is ambiguous. The tourist, disembarking
from his plane before touring Antigua, has no gender. The colonist and the slaveholder, however, are male.
Kincaid writes, “the mutilated bodies of you, your wife, and your children were found in your beautiful and
spacious bungalow” (ASP, 35, my emphasis). Here, the narratee is said to have a wife and own a bungalow. In
this passage he is identified as either a slaveholder or just a colonist, living in the 19th century, and he is male.
I believe that this discretionary gender coding is an intentional move to make the identity of the narratee
represent the prototypical ‘Oppressor.’ In the modern age, a tourist can be any gender, but in the 19th century,
the oppressor was male. Kincaid assigns the narratee a gender precisely when it will emphasize that his
identity is bound up in all of the criminality and oppression that the Westerners have inflicted on Antiguans
throughout history.
iii
Chapter 3
i
See endnote ‘iv’ in the Introduction section