So...before these two texts drop off our radar screens completely, I wanted to let fly a few parting thoughts about A Small Place and “If I Could Write This in Fire.” 

We noted how the figure of the library leads off the second half of Jamaica Kincaid’s caustic little book, and we agreed that the library is important for her not only because of her personal history (it was part of her intellectual liberation, part of her way out of this small place), but because of what she describes as a kind of national learning disability:  “What is going on here now?” is the question on everyone’s lips, but “dem are big tief” is as deep as anyone’s analysis goes; they can’t articulate their thinking any more precisely than that.  Why?  In large part because it’s in the government’s interest to keep people stupid or distracted or overwhelmed by small, inconsequential things, so that some really big-time thieving can go on, unimpeded, in the background.  If great numbers of people really knew the facts, if they really were able to develop a global vision and a historical perspective, then they might know who really to blame for their misery:  not the tourists, who only make convenient (and conspicuous) targets for resentment.  Meanwhile, the people who created the possibility—the necessity—of tourism are way out of reach.

But I think it’s important to see that the same goes for non-Antiguans too.  This book is not justa rant, but also, I think, a call to action, and the action we’re all being exhorted to take is: do your homework.  The point of developing a “grown-up” perspective on the historical and economic forces that created the phenomenon of Caribbean tourism isn’t to feel guilty about your implication in them or your ignorance about them; at best that’s just a starting point that might prompt you to do some further investigation.  There’s an inverse relationship, I think, between Antiguans’ ignorance, their reluctance or their inability to ask fruitful questions, and “your” deliberate avoidance of unpleasant questions that might spoil your vacation.  I’m not trying to sound like some fire-breathing conspiracy theorist when I say that our government, like our news media, and our 1%, works hard to keep us stupid, too; it encourages us to think that economics, especially global economics, is such a hopelessly complex topic that we couldn’t begin to understand it, so we’re better off leaving it to the experts.  It would just as soon we didn’t look too deeply into global trade agreements or IMF development schemes (or the CIA Budget or the Pentagon budget or tax giveaways for the rich or other forms of government-sponsored corporate favoritism in an allegedly “free-market” economy).  It would rather we were diverted by Hilary’s e-mails, or Trump’s latest tweet, or political correctness on campus, or some artist whose “offensive” work was funded with a few thousand dollars out of a national arts budget that’s smaller than the budget of the Marine Corps marching band, or whatever trivial or manufactured news story is making the rounds in any given week.

But more particularly, the same goes for us because just as there’s a connection between slavery and the Hotel Training School (55), so also is there a connection between slavery and that floating turd grazing our ankle (14), between the wonderful life that the Swiss lead and the ill-gotten money resting in Swiss bank vaults (60) (or, these days, Cayman Islands tax shelters), between the greed and wanderlust that propelled the European invaders and the vague discontent that motivates many of us to seek pleasure and gratification in Third World tourist spots (80).  Once you develop that kind of critical, historical perspective, once you do your homework and understand that, for instance, the fundamentally arrogant attitudes at the heart of colonialist ideology (e.g., that people with darker skins are naturally servile, or that the earth and its resources exist for the pleasure and profit of the powerful) are the same attitudes that make tourism in the Caribbean possible; or that the strategic underdevelopment that was perpetrated upon places like Antigua under colonialism is precisely what now makes tourism necessary, then you're no longer Kincaid’s “you.”  You don’t have to give in to paralysis or frustration.  You can abandon what one former student of mine called “that sharply binary perspective” which dominates the rest of the essay.

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I suggested that the question which really animates Michelle Cliff’s piece also has to do with pronouns: “how did we become them”?  How and when did the formerly downtrodden aspire to, then assume, the role of oppressor?  Cliff initially hopes she can answer that “us/them” question by figuring out who “she” is—by going back to a more innocent time and place before things got so complicated, so corrupted.  But it turns out that there never was such a place:  what she immediately discovers is that the idyllic landscape of her childhood was already, intextricably, mixed up with color, class, and colonial economics.  And tracing her own personal history just leads her to feel trapped by paradoxes:  she wants to embrace her blackness but she’s separated from it; she loves Jamaica but can’t really live there; she can’t be a friend to Zoe even though “they was girls together”; she feels guilty about her privilege but can’t give it up either.  So I guess the real question then becomes how to live with those paradoxes.

One way, for Cliff, is to accept that her identity is complex, multiple, shifting; provisional, contingent, circumstantial.  Depending upon the situation, it might be more important to identify primarily as black, or woman, or lesbian.  “I remember our different skins and our different experiences within them,” she says (74).  And while that may mean she possesses a kind of “double vision” (78), it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s split or schizophrenic or disconnected.  Just as the tourist must become oblivious of uncomfortable questions, so the colonized person must become insensitive to suffering—and she can’t do this.

But the other way that Cliff decides to work through the paradoxes of her lived experience is to write her identity (in fire)—to build it out of words.  In part that means reimagining her relationship to her literary forebears (Austen, Dickens, DeFoe, Robert Browning, Albert Schweitzer, W.E.B. DuBois, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison).  But it also means finding an appropriate form for her fractured history (which is one reason her piece is written in snippets, fragments, separated by white spaces), and it means finding a language for it, too.  Out of the instability/volatility/self-division that Cliff discovers comes a pronomial pun.  In Kincaid, as I mentioned a minute ago, a number of you emphasized the final passage, where she imagines a time when the I/you, us/them, master/slave dichotomy might fizzle out and fade away, once we’ve achieved a historical perspective on the forces responsible for “what is going on here now.”   But for Cliff, the “they/you” split she’s referring to isn’t external; it’s contained within herself.   And so all the pronouns get blurred in a perpetual dance of volatile instability: 

As I read back over it, I see that we/they/I may become confused in the mind of the reader: but these pronouns have always co-existed in my mind. The Rastas talk of the “I and I”—a pronoun in which they combine themselves with Jah. Jah is a contraction of Jahweh and Jehova, but to me always sounds like the beginning of Jamaica. I and Jamaica is who I am. No matter how far I travel—how deep the ambivalence I feel about ever returning. And Jamaica is a place in which we/they/I connect and disconnect—change place.