A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
According to the official Antigua-Barbuda website, "most Antiguans are of African lineage, descendants of slaves brought to the island centuries ago." The island was settled by agricultural Arawaks who were then displaced by the aggressive Caribs in c.1100 (note the word "displaced" -- not conquered). It wasn't for another few centuries before Columbus and then the English invaded and colonized the country. The fact is, invade and conquer is the way of the world -- one need only look at thousands of years of British history or the exploits of Alexander the Great and Caesar to know that men (and I don't mean "mankind") need to conquer. It's in their DNA -- a woman, a country, it's all the same.
What is terrible, and will always be terrible, is slavery. It is the shame of our nation. In a world of relativism -- it's OK to murder in self-defense, for example, but not for personal gain -- slavery is never OK. Kincaid rages about her countrymen's enslavement, and then about their inability to improve their lot in life after they were freed and the British left. Here in America, our African-American population feels this same rage, and also seems unable to get past the effects of that evil. I teach in a school that is 88% African-American and what is most curtious is that this is more true for the men than the women. At this year's graduation, 75% of the class was female, 25% male. The guys just don't get it yet.
Kincaid herself, however, did not evoke any empathy in me. An odd thing to say, I know, but consider this. She came here at the age of 16, went to a progressive college, caught the eye of the revered William Shawn of the New Yorker magazine, married his son -- a white man! -- and now lives in the rarefied atmosphere of the WASP-y Bennington College in relative luxury. I belileve her rage is external -- a tool to fuel her writing for without it, she'd have nothing to say (a problem, incidentally, that South African playwright Athol Fugard had after the collapse of Apartheid).
Trevor Blanchette, a wise science teacher in my school, and a black man, commented that the same is true for our male students. "If they gave up their rage," he asked, "what would they have? They'd have nothing and then maybe they might decide to become educated."
As Kincaid said at the end of her book, to be a slave is to be "ennobled." When you are freed, then you are an ordinary person. If Kincaid gave up her rage, she'd just be ordinary. And so would my male students.
What is terrible, and will always be terrible, is slavery. It is the shame of our nation. In a world of relativism -- it's OK to murder in self-defense, for example, but not for personal gain -- slavery is never OK. Kincaid rages about her countrymen's enslavement, and then about their inability to improve their lot in life after they were freed and the British left. Here in America, our African-American population feels this same rage, and also seems unable to get past the effects of that evil. I teach in a school that is 88% African-American and what is most curtious is that this is more true for the men than the women. At this year's graduation, 75% of the class was female, 25% male. The guys just don't get it yet.
Kincaid herself, however, did not evoke any empathy in me. An odd thing to say, I know, but consider this. She came here at the age of 16, went to a progressive college, caught the eye of the revered William Shawn of the New Yorker magazine, married his son -- a white man! -- and now lives in the rarefied atmosphere of the WASP-y Bennington College in relative luxury. I belileve her rage is external -- a tool to fuel her writing for without it, she'd have nothing to say (a problem, incidentally, that South African playwright Athol Fugard had after the collapse of Apartheid).
Trevor Blanchette, a wise science teacher in my school, and a black man, commented that the same is true for our male students. "If they gave up their rage," he asked, "what would they have? They'd have nothing and then maybe they might decide to become educated."
As Kincaid said at the end of her book, to be a slave is to be "ennobled." When you are freed, then you are an ordinary person. If Kincaid gave up her rage, she'd just be ordinary. And so would my male students.
posted by book1 | 11:29 AM
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