This author is very angry, and I felt chastised! First among various reasons for being a tourist! It should be required reading for anyone vacationing in the Caribbean, where the tourists have plenty and the locals do not. Take for instance, water. Tourists can swim in it, and then bathe in it, and drink as much as they like. But many islands have no water source so the locals have to conserve every last drop. From there, the author delves into how the residents of Antigua came to live there—slave ships, and the dire faults in the English empire. It’s a tongue-lashing for sure. ( )

Honest and Raw.

I read this for a Postcolonial literature class at CU Boulder. While I know a lot of folks can't get past the bitter, I think the point is that most of us are reading this from the comfort of privilege, especially those of us privileged enough to be reading it in a university.

I love the message . We can't "get over" our past. We can't turn away from our history. But we can meet each other in the middle, acknowledge our past and embrace our history - which might help all of us start acting a little more human.

Two thumbs up. ( )

I‘m struggling to review this precisely. It reads like a stream of consciousness diatribe to the point I had trouble finding cohesion sometimes as I read. Nonetheless, it has a lot to say about how overwhelming and multi-sided corruption can be and the difficulties of untangling it. It dealt also with the problems of tourism and outside influence on a small nation. I can‘t say I enjoyed reading it, but it‘s a pick for the emotional force it has. ( )

I'm not sure I've ever come across a voice so forthright and beautiful at the same time. Jamaica Kincaid manages to reveal the underbelly of colonization (specifically in regard to her birthplace Antigua) while writing with blurry metaphor (blurry in the sense that things seems like metaphors and also not metaphors), wry humor, and a telling of political history in an almost folk-style narrative like a parable, but in reference to specific people. She unflinchingly deals out critiques yet manages to convey a sadness at the same time:

"And it is in that strange voice, then--the voice that suggests innocence, art, lunacy--that they say these things, pausing to take breath before this monument to rottenness, that monument to rottenness, as if they were tour guides; as if, having observed the event of tourism, they have absorbed it so completely that they have made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction." (69)

In eighty short pages, Kincaid shares a truthful experience of a land, the likes of which few get to see or experience when caught up in the "unreal beauty" of a tourist destination. Kincaid describes beauty as a prison, and in so doing, changes our understanding of that which might deserve a deeper look beyond the blue of the ocean and the colors of the sky. ( )

i've never read anything like this; it's really special and will stick with me for a long time. ( )