The novelist Jamaica Kincaid was originally named Elaine Potter Richardson who was born in 1949 in St. John’s, the capital city of the Caribbean island of Antigua. She lived with her stepfather, a carpenter, and her mother and completed her secondary education under the British system in Antigua. In 1965 she went to New York to work as an au pair. Then, she studied photography at the New York School for Social Research and attended Franconia College in New Hampshire for a year. Wishing anonymity for her writing, she decided to change her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973. She met William Shawn, an editor of The New Yorker, and became a staff writer for the magazine.
Antigua was visited in 1493 by Christopher Columbus, and then colonized by English settlers in 1632 and remained a British possession. In 1967, Antigua became self-governing but was not able to make itself an independent nation within the Commonwealth until 1981.
It’s worth to talk about British Imperialism and the influence and impact it made in Antigua. British colonial imperialism must completely occupy the entire region and impose the British way of life in the economic, political, and socio-cultural fields. In an interview with the New York Times, Kincaid said “In my generation, the height of being a civilized person was to be English and to love English things and eat like English people. We couldn’t really look like them, but we could approximate being an English person.” Additionally, Antigua became Britain’s gateway to the Caribbean because there were many sugar plantations that could bring a large amount of profit to Britain. The purpose of A Small Place is to learn from the influence of British imperialism on the cultural influence of colonial rule on this country, which shaped the government’s identity after the colony through the actions of former oppressors. The proliferation of patriarchal rule illustrates the great influence of political corruption in shaping the identity of the post-colonial Antigua government.
Here’s the link to an interview with Jamaica Kincaid
References:
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/10/kincaid-jamaica/
https://www.britannica.com/place/Antigua-and-Barbuda/History
https://medium.com/@xt.msomi/how-does-jamaica-kincaid-illustrate-the-influence-and-impact-of-british-imperialism-in-antiguas-489451d86252
That was a good coverage to help break down to us on what we have to know about Jamaica Kincaid. the video also brought me closer to see her face and relate to her essay.