Making A Spectacle Of Yourself: The Art Of Anger In Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

In Claudia Marquis’ “Making a spectacle of yourself: The art of anger in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place”, she discusses the rhetorical devices that Kincaid uses to enhance her well-established arguments, in addition to the impediments in the essays’ publication history. The article examines the complexity of the local narrative that Kincaid uses to effectively present the insightful shift from colonialism to present day reality while remaining relevant to the contemporary audience. Marquis writes, “In this article, I take stock of Kincaid’s homecoming “rage” against Antigua’s political dereliction and cultural decay, but my principal concern in revisiting A Small Place is to bring the singularity of her performance into critical view, in an effort to understand her essay’s continuing impact” . The author responds to the unchanging dynamics of the small place that still prevail. Her point of entry is a literature review of essays that primarily focus on these dynamics. The author assumes that the audience bears inadequate knowledge of the extent to which Kincaid’s argumentative approach within the essays is extendable to present day, and therefore the audience is likely to undermine the creative extension of the text. With this article, the author aims to equip the audience with a complex understanding of the text from which they can untangle the intricate ideas that are covertly embedded.

Marquis is persuasive when she constructs the point that “Kincaid’s use of the second-person pronoun of address is by no means consistent throughout A Small Place, but from the outset it clearly plays a major role in her creation of a voice for herself – as other to this (or that) other”. Kincaid uses the second-person pronoun to situate the readers as the tourists themselves when she says “You see yourself eating some delicious, locally grown food. You see yourself, you see yourself … You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it.” Kincaid develops an informal relationship with the reader by the means of this distinct voice which identifies the reader directly with “you”, that also indicates an accusatory tone. Additionally, Kincaid adopts this second-person pronoun technique to delve into the conscience of the reader as can be seen in the passage when she repeats “you see yourself”. Through this repetition, Kincaid makes an effort to trigger the reader’s hindsight to heighten the guilt induced by the accusation. Kincaid’s use of second-person pronoun formulates a voice which is directed to criticize the reader’s ignorance and lack of retrospection. This direct criticism and development of voice through second-person allow Kincaid to strike and prove her argument through emotional appeal.

In the article, Marquis examines the use of “parentheses, which look like marks of style, but actually serve to frame a space for Kincaid herself, as participant in the ongoing, argumentative action of her essay”. The argument proposed by Marquis is persuasive to a great extent, however, does not target the predominant intention of the parentheses as a literary tool, and merely interprets one of its basic characteristics. When Kincaid discusses the mentality of the people in Antigua, she says, “(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 . . . This event soon becomes every day, for every time these two people meet each other again)”. This quotation, as communicated by Marquis, operates as an aside allowing the reader to assess Kincaid’s experiences and the insular affairs of Antigua. However, this quotation in the parentheses is also added to further intensify the rhetorical strategy of exemplification used to support the generalization of Antiguans as uninformed innocents. The passage produces this effect by providing a firsthand example of how Antiguans are invested in insignificant local quarrels while remaining oblivious to the critical national affairs. Hence, not only does the use of parentheses provide “a space for Kincaid” but it also exemplifies her argument.

In reference to the fourth essay in A Small Place, Marquis argues that “A summary account like this runs the risk of cancelling the formal essayistic moves of Kincaid’s argument”. Due to Marquis’ disregard of the importance of the fourth essay to Kincaid’s argument, her argument is transparent and therefore unpersuasive. Amid Kincaid’s vivid description of the picturesque landscape of Antigua, she writes, “It is as if, then, the beauty — the beauty of the sea, the land, the air, the trees, the market, the people, the sounds they make — were a prison, and as if everything and everybody inside it were locked in and everything and everybody that is not inside it were locked out”. Kincaid portrays Antigua as a land of indefinite beauty as well as a self-contained “prison”. The juxtaposition of the two perceptions of Antigua, which are those of the tourist and the Antiguan resident, overlap to accurately display the true composition of Antigua. This excerpt also explores the theme of power that is present throughout the texts by dividing “everybody inside”, who suffer the pain of captivity, and “everybody that is not inside”, who admire the beauty of the enclosure. This account effectively concludes Kincaid’s argument, unlike Marquis’ claim, because it identifies Antigua as a consistent place that encompasses beauty and inescapability of its constituents.