Big Emotion From A Small Place
A lesson on anger from Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place
Antigua is an island of anger! This is not seemingly evident from those existing outside Antigua’s ocean walls, but the anger underlies all things. Anger is stereotypically seen as red and not in tropical colors. Jamaica Kincaid through the example of Antigua teaches that anger is an underlying constant force found most readily in those places where nothing changes.
Small places like Antigua are more prone to be changeless than large places as large places have more room for change. In the viewpoint of Jamaica Kincaid even with Antigua’s independence from the British Antiguans are still bound by the same systems with a new face.
“Not very long after The Earthquake Antigua got its independence from Britain, making Antigua a state in its own right, and Antiguans are so proud of this that each year, to mark the day, they go to church and thank God, a British God, for this.”
Anger occurs when one desires change, anger acted out is an act for change. This acting out can often be radical in nature;
“The Barclay brothers, who started Barclays Bank, were slave-traders. That is how they made their money. When the English outlawed the slave trade, the Barclay brothers went into banking…Do you ever wonder why some people blow things up? I can imagine that if my life had taken a certain turn, there would be the Barclays Bank, and there I would be, both of us in ashes.”
Antigua should be an island filled with exclamations, but the anger of Antigua is a British anger too dour for flair and too gloomy for style. Anger underlies in that it works upon a ready-built foundation. Antigua’s anger was built by the British, not the Antiguans, the British taught Antigua all that it knows including its anger. Anger always bounces off of, leaps from, an underlying already-built foundation. And it is difficult to step off our foundation and overcome gravity. Even Kincaid’s beautifully angry rhetoric is tied to the language of colonizers.
“For 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 there are those who adopt the ways of criminals, who tie themselves to the established foundations and the forces of gravity. What lent to Kincaid’s anger is not British-ness but the actions of the British; actions that can be adopted by any soul but especially the prone such as (sadly) the Antiguans.
“Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all people like me seem to have learned from you is how to imprison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts? Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants?”
The lesson here is not one of overcoming anger but one of learning the mechanics of anger in order to harness that anger. Anger is not to be avoided, anything but. Rather, what is to be avoided is that which builds the foundations of anger. These foundations of anger must begin in a small place, as all foundations do.
Yet, anger can spread across empires, and does not leave the imperial lands with the death of the empire. If anything the anger heightens as more is built upon old foundations. Those who cannot change their foundations are more prone to anger.
