A Small Place

by Jamaica Kincaid

  Antigua is a small place. Antigua is a very small place. In Antigua, not only is the event turned into everyday but the everyday is turned into an event. (Here is this: On a Saturday, at market, two people who, as far as they know, have never met before, collide by accident; this accidental collision leads to an enormous quarrel—a drama, really—in which the two people stand at opposite ends of a street and shout insults at each other at the top of their lungs. This event soon becomes everyday, for every time these two people meet each other again, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design, the shouting and the insults begin.) But event turned into everyday and everyday turned into event do not remain event and everyday, in a fixed state. They go back and forth, exchanging places, and their status from day to day depends on all sorts of internal shadings and internal colourings, and the forces that manipulate these internal shadings and internal colourings are kept deliberately mysterious and unknown. And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live and in the place they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead these people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship, a relationship in which they are not victims all the time of every bad idea that flits across the mind of the world? And might not knowing why they are the way they are and why they do the things they do put in their proper place everyday and event, so that exceptional amounts of energy aren’t expended on the trivial, while the substantial and the important are assembled (artfully) into a picture story (“He did this and then he did that”)? I look at this place (Antigua), I look at these people (Antiguans), and I cannot tell whether I was brought up by, and so come from, children, eternal innocents, or artists who have not yet found eminence in a world too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own lunatic asylum, or an exquisite combination of all three.

  For it is in a voice that suggests all three that they say: “That big new hotel is a haven for drug dealing. The hotel has its own port of entry, so boats bearing their drug cargo can come and go as they please. The bay where the new hotel is situated used to have the best wilks in the world, but where did they all go? Even though all the beaches in Antigua are by law public beaches, Antiguans are not allowed on the beaches of this hotel; they are stopped at the gate by guards; and soon the best beaches in Antigua will be closed to Antiguans. A Japanese-car dealership, one of the largest Japanese-car dealerships between the borders of Canada and South America, bears the name of a Syrian national, but some of the ministers in government own shares in it, and that is why all government vehicles are that particular brand of Japanese-made vehicle. All the customs inspectors have as their private vehicle that particular brand of Japanese-made car, and a luxurious model, at that. Every year, the customs inspectors get the latest models. Some other ministers in government have also gone into the Japanese-car import business; and if they someday find themselves in the right position, they will change the government’s vehicles to the make of Japanese vehicle that their company imports. The utility poles not only hold the electric and telephone wiring that utility poles usually hold; they also carry the heavier wiring for cable television. The electric and telephone services are owned by the government. The cable-television service is owned by a minister in government, a son of the Prime Minister. The utility poles are old and rotten, and they sag and then fall down under the weight of the wires and cables. When they fall down, the government replaces them with new ones, and at no cost to the owner of the cable-television franchise. Some ministers in government have opened their own businesses; the main customer for these businesses is the government itself; the government then declares that only that company can be licenced to import the commodity that the business sells; great effort goes into concealing who the owners of these businesses are. People close to the Prime Minister openly run one of the largest houses of prostitution in Antigua. Some offshore banks are fronts for bad people hiding money acquired through dealings in drugs, or the other bad ways there are to acquire money, though it seems to be true that in Antigua all the ways there are to acquire large sums of money are bad ways. It is not a secret that a minister is involved in drug trafficking. That minister and another minister in government benefit from the offshore banks, with their ill-gotten deposits. (These offshore banks are popular in the West Indies. Only tourism itself is more important. Every government wants to have these banks, which are modelled on the banks in Switzerland. I have a friend who just came back from Switzerland. What a wonderful time she had. She had never seen cleaner streets anywhere, or more wonderful people anywhere. She was in such a rhapsodic state about the Swiss, and the superior life they lead, that it was hard for me not to bring up how they must pay for this superior life they lead. For almost not a day goes by that I don’t hear about some dictator, some tyrant from somewhere in the world, who has robbed his country’s treasury, stolen the aid from foreign governments, and placed it in his own personal and secret Swiss bank account; not a day goes by that I don’t hear of some criminal kingpin, some investor, who has a secret Swiss bank account. But maybe there is no connection between the wonderful life that the Swiss lead and the ill-gotten money that is resting in Swiss bank vaults; maybe it’s just a coincidence. The Swiss are famous for their banking system and for making superior timepieces. Switzerland is a neutral country, money is a neutral commodity, and time is neutral, too, being neither here nor there, one thing or another.) Some gambling casinos in the hotels are controlled by mobsters from the United States. They pay somebody in government who allows them to operate. If they benefit from the operation of these casinos, they—people in Antigua—cannot see in what way, except for the seasonal employment it offers a few people, for, after all, all government services are bad. (Gambling, linked here completely to tourism, is another popular industry in the West Indies. Every government in the West Indies seems to want hotels with gambling casinos. It would appear that nobody wants to go to the West Indies without being able to spend time in a gambling casino. I once heard a semiliterate-sounding man on Radio Montserrat berating people, mostly clergymen, who were opposed to the opening of gambling casinos on the island of Montserrat. He said that when the people of Montserrat were hungry, they didn’t look to the church for food, or to those other people who opposed the casinos, they looked to the government, and so he had to find a way to feed them. It’s possible that if someone had told him that the operation of gambling casinos in hotels in the West Indies seems to feed, in a very big way, everybody connected with them, except for the people he had in mind, it might have given him pause. I do not know. At the end of the program the announcer identified this man as the head of government of Montserrat.) The government of Antigua allowed some special ammunition to be tested in Antigua—ammunition that the government knew very well was to be shipped to the government of South Africa. The government allowed meat known to be contaminated by radiation to be distributed in Antigua. A food importer, a man from an old Antiguan family, regularly lends the government money. How does a food importer on a small island have enough money to lend to a government? Syrian and Lebanese nationals regularly lend the government money. Syrian and Lebanese nationals own large amounts of land in Antigua, and on the land they own in the countryside they build condominiums that they then sell (prices quoted in United States dollars) to North Americans and Europeans. (The condominium style of building, ugly in any climate, is especially ugly in a small, hot place. Imagine these concrete, boxlike structures, stacked against each other as if they were tinned goods in a store with not enough shelf space, overlooking an expanse of three different shades of blue seawater. It’s true—condominiums degrade everything around them.) The Syrians and Lebanese own large amounts of commercial property in Antigua. They build large concrete buildings, and then the government of Antigua rents all the space in these buildings. Why can’t the government of Antigua build its own government buildings? What is the real interest paid on these loans made to the go
vernment? And are the loans made to the government or are they really made to persons in the government but charged to the government? What is the real rent paid to the Syrian and Lebanese landlords, for no one believes the sum quoted, even though it is quite high; for some of the spaces rented, the rent already paid could have bought the building (the library on Market Street) many times over. In the Antigua telephone directory, the Syrians and Lebanese have more business addresses and telephone numbers than any of the other same surnames listed. Antigua’s Ambassador to Syria is a member of a Syrian family. It makes sense. He speaks Syrian. But why does Antigua need an ambassador to Syria? The Syrians and Lebanese are called “those foreigners” even though most of them have acquired Antiguan citizenship. North Americans and Europeans are not foreigners; they are white people. Everybody is used to white people. The Syrians and Lebanese are not “white people.” They have no cultural institutions in Antigua—not even a restaurant. The Syrians and the Lebanese look as if they know that at any time they could be asked to leave, and perhaps they are right, for who knows how everything will turn out? A calypso singer’s sister’s body was found, with the head chopped off, near the island’s United States Army base. To this day, no one has been charged with this murder. A European woman was found murdered in her home out at Freeman’s Village. No one has been charged with this murder. A man, a government official who was gathering evidence of financial wrongdoing by the government, was electrocuted when he went to his refrigerator to get himself a drink. His son, who came into the kitchen and found his father’s body stuck to the refrigerator, was electrocuted, too, when he grabbed his father and tried to remove him. Father and son were given a double funeral, and practically all of Antigua turned out either as mourners or as observers of the mourners. No one can understand, to this day, how an ordinary refrigerator can electrocute someone who opens the door, unless it was fixed to electrocute someone who opened the door. In the months that lead up to carnival, the Governor General, a very stuck-up man, with an even more stuck-up wife, or a very ordinary sort of man whose wife does her own shopping at the supermarket, goes to England. The house in which he lives, Government House, is right across from the grounds where carnival events are held, and he goes to England because he can’t stand the noise. When he is away, the Prime Minister names a person, another man, to be Acting Governor General. This man is usually someone connected to the Prime Minister’s party. One year, the man who was Acting Governor General died while taking an afternoon swim in the swimming pool of one of the Syrian nationals. This man and the Syrian nationals were very good friends. He was a shareholder in their Japanese-car company. He was the one who had first brought them into government schemes. He died while swimming in this swimming pool. The Syrians had suffered a series of break-ins and robberies, and they had their house wired with live wires, so that if someone broke in, the intruder would be electrocuted; they had forgotten to turn off the wire leading to or around the swimming pool, and the Acting Governor General was electrocuted. Lying in his coffin, he looked black, as if he had been scorched from the inside. His funeral was practically a pageant, and Antigua had never seen anything like it. The man who succeeded him, the second Acting Governor General in two months, got sick at this funeral. He said he felt sick. He vomited. He was taken home in a car; then he got better. While attending the funeral of another big person, he fainted. He vomited. Doctors, attending the funeral as ordinary mourners, said there was nothing really wrong, but just to be sure, they looked at him, had him admitted to hospital. (The hospital in Antigua is so dirty, so run-down, that even if the best doctors and nurses in the world were employed, a person from another part of the world—Europe or North America—would not feel confident leaving a domestic animal there.) The doctors said there was nothing wrong with him, but just to make sure, just to be on the safe side, he was placed in Intensive Care. The Intensive Care part of the hospital is the only part of the hospital that would inspire confidence in a sick person, and for a man as prominent as he was that was the only thing to do. His friends visited him in the hospital. He told jokes. They laughed. They said, “See you tomorrow.” They left him. He died. They were surprised, because he had seemed his old self. It was his heart; he had had a heart problem. He was poisoned; how can your heart make you vomit and froth at the mouth and fall down in a stupor and then revive and go on as before? Twice, he got sick at funerals, so it must have been something he ate. Bradley Carrot (the name of the third Acting Governor General in two months) is looking over his shoulder. All of the ministers in government go overseas for medical treatment. Not one of them would stay in the hospital here.

  Eleven million dollars that the French government gave to the Antiguan government for developmental aid has vanished. A high government official got millions of dollars in bribes for allowing a particular kind of industrial plant to be built. The salt floating around in the Antiguan air soon caused the plant to rust. All the airwaves in Antigua are owned by the government or ministers in government. On the airwaves, the opposition parties are never mentioned except to denounce them and to say that they are Communists and that they have received money from Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi. Antigua was going to have an oil-refining industry. West Indies Oil, it was going to be called. The government built the big tanks to hold the oil before it was refined and the oil after it was refined. They built a platform far out at sea, where the large tankers would load and unload the cargo. The government built a refinery. Something went wrong. The refinery is rusting. The tanks are rusting. The platform is rusting. The foreigner who did the bad things in the Far East was involved in this. He is not rusting. He is very rich and travels the world on a diplomatic passport issued to him by the government of Antigua. He has more plans. He wants to build for the people of Antigua a museum and a library. The papers of the slave-trading family from Barbuda (the Condringtons), the records of their traffic in human lives, were being auctioned. The government of Antigua made a bid for them. Someone else made a larger bid. He was the foreigner. His bid was the successful bid. He then made a gift of these papers to the people of Antigua. And what does it mean? The records of one set of enemies, bought by another enemy, given to the people who have been their victims as a gift. The people who go into running the government were not always such big thieves; nor have they always been so corrupt. They took things, but it was on a small scale. For instance, if the government built some new housing to be sold to people, then a minister or two would get a few of the houses for themselves. They would then sell them outright, or rent them. Everybody knew about this. Some of the ministers were honest. One of them, a famous one in Antigua, a leader of the Trade and Labour Union movement, even died a pauper. Another minister, when his party lost power, had to drive a taxi. It is he, the taxi-driving ex-minister, who taught the other ministers a lesson. If you say to them, “Why you all so thief?” they say, “When I leave here, you want me to go drive taxi?” All the ministers have “green cards”—a document that makes them legal residents of the United States of America. The ministers, the people who govern the island of Antigua, who are also citizens of Antigua, are legal residents of the United States, a place they visit frequently.

  And it is in that strange voice, then—the voice that suggests innocence, art, lunacy—that they say these things, pausing to take breath before this monument to rottenness, that monument to rottenness, as if they were tour guides; as if, having observed the event of tourism, they have absorbed it so completely that they have made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction.

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  An event in Antigua has been the founding, in 1939, of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union, an organization whose purpose was to obtain better wages, better working conditions, and just a better life in general for working people in Antigua. It eventually became, along with being a union, a political party, demanding universal suffrage, demanding that land in Antigua not be owned by syndicates made up of English peo
ple (most of whom still lived in England and had never laid eyes on Antigua), but by Antiguans, and demanding that Antiguans rule Antigua. An event in Antigua has been that the president of this union has headed the government in Antigua, as Premier and then, when Antigua became independent from Britain, as Prime Minister, for twenty-five of the thirty years that Antigua had had some form of self-government. Sometimes, when Antiguans look at this man, they see the event of George Washington, liberator and first President of the United States; sometimes, when Antiguans look at this man, they see the event of Jackie Presser, the head of the Teamsters Union in America, who is now serving time in prison for misappropriating his union’s funds. For five years, Antigua had another Prime Minister. He stood for but was not re-elected to that office. The Prime Minister whose reign he interrupted then had him charged with using his office for personal profit, and he was sent to jail for eight months. The event of the Prime Minister whose career ended in political defeat and then jail is a sad event, for people had hoped that he would replace the old, dull, corrupt event with honesty, brilliance, and prosperity; instead, the sugar industry went bankrupt, the tourists did not come, his Minister of Public Works was dismissed because he was thought to have taken large amounts of public money, his illegitimate half brother, a member of his cabinet, spat on a stewardess while an aeroplane on which he was a passenger was in flight.