“I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t take them off the fan twirling over my head. It reminded me of wanting to put my hands into another type of fan in my mother’s restaurant when I was little and seeing if it would really cut my fingers off as my mother had warned me it would. It also reminded me of being hushed by my mother whenever I asked her about my father, until one day, when I was twelve, she blurted that he had left her before I was born and wanted nothing to do with us. This is what kept me from looking for him. This is what made me wish he would die”

Danticat 16

This excerpt is a great example of flashbacks being used in a seamless way to connect the current moment to another life-altering one in the past. The author uses an object (the fan) as a gateway to explore the narrator’s childhood and relationship (or the lack thereof) with her father. In these fleeting moments, the reader gets a clear idea of her father’s estrangement and her lack of motivation to mend their bond. In the present, standing in front of the dead body of her father, Nadia’s feelings are clouded. She has spent years building this purely evil caricature of her father in her head and now, with the revelations from her mother (how she never informed him of her pregnancy) and stepmother (how he had found out about her but only when she was a teenager), she feels her world deteriorating. I found this section especially moving because now we see that something as absolute as her father’s death isn’t going to help her sort her feelings out even if she had hoped for it at some point. In fact, it only complicates them further now that there is no physical entity to direct her pain and anger towards. This is an incredibly humanistic concept and made me enjoy this reading more than almost every other one this semester.

“I was thirsty again, like I had just swallowed a gallon of seawater. My mouth felt dry. Still I managed to say, ‘Did he really ask for me to come here?'” (Danticat, 10).

When I first read the above simile, I was admittedly quite confused. Sure, we all know that seawater can dehydrate, but why use water in a simile for thirst at all? Would the point not have been more clearly conveyed by comparing her thirst to a person in a barren desert? However, upon deeper thought, I understood that the comparison was quite intentional; Although it is well known that the high salinity of seawater dehydrates, shipwrecked castaways often end up succumbing to their thirst and drink some anyways, often leading to dehydration induced delusion. Similarly, Nadia found herself in a situation where she was being given many painful truths. Just before the simile, she was told that her father actually found out about her when she was a teenager, but never sought her out because he felt that he had already waited too long for her to forgive him. Then, sitting there thirsty for truth (although she knows that the truth will actually be more harmful to her as seawater is to a thirsty castaway), she still continues and asks “Did he really ask for me to come here?,” only to hear the painful answer that, even at the end of her father’s life, it was only her father’s wife who thought to invite her.

“Still, why did people think that they should share the most life-changing news during a meal? Had they been biding their time, waiting for a moment when the other person was sitting in a public place with a mouth full of food and couldn’t scream?” (Edwidge 4).

At this point, the narrator discusses how in her mother’s restaurant, people tend to share news or discuss important topics while they eat. Whether it is a declaration of love, telling their parents they are pregnant, or even discussing a dying father, it is very interesting on how people choose certain settings to disclose this information with their loved ones. I also find it relatable in the sense that my family and I do the same thing, whether it is talking about our days or even just announcing events and such, I find that eating brings a sense of togetherness and bonding as cliché as it may sound. The narrator’s take on the choosing of the setting is intriguing as well as it can also be seen that way; a public space, where people are to conduct themselves in an orderly manner, have food in their mouths so they cannot speak out loud, just like how her mother explicitly chose the corner in the restaurant to talk about her father.

“But I had already killed him over and over in my mind.”

This quote struck out to me because you can really feel the hurt that Nadia was feeling. Even though she had already created and anticipated this horrible image of her father when she met him she did not feel the kind of hate towards him that she had thought. This reminds me of when you are crushing on someone you create this personality for them in your head and when they don’t meet  those expectations you had of them you are disappointed that they are not who you thought they were. She may feel angry with her mother who stimulated this false narrative of how he chose to abandon them. 

“I couldn’t believe I had been in the house so long and had not seen the man himself. ‘Can I see him?’ I asked again. ‘Have some bread soup,’ my father’s wife said. She pours me a bowl of plain white soup filled with soaked bread, potato chunks and a few white noodles”.

This statement made by Nadia is interesting because of how its conflicts with Nadia’s initial sentiments about Maurice (Her father) at the beginning of the story. Initially, when Nadia’s mother told Nadia about her father’s declining health, she wasn’t in a hurry to see him at all. Nadia continued to grade her student’s papers while being very hypercritical after having a negative experience over the phone with her mom, giving one of her students a C. However, as the story proceeds, Nadia begins to learn more about her father and the truth behind him through her mother. She eventually starts feeling less resentful towards him and comes around to wanting to meet him and talk to him about his and her mother’s divorce and why he chose his school’s students over her. She eventually reflects on her C-Students paper and realizes that it wasn’t the execution that mattered, but rather the message that the student tried to send. This paralleled the relationship between Nadia and her mother’s recent struggle in trying to talk about Maurice and dealing with the many emotions that came along with it. Once Nadia arrives in Miami she is anxious to see her father but her mother knows something she does not, leading her to stall for time so Nadia can prepare for what she’s about to witness. Unfortunately once Nadia finally gets to see her father for the first time, it’s already too late & she finds out that he died the same morning she flew into Miami.

In Edwidge Danticat’s short story ” In the Old Days,” she successfully portrayed the complexity of each character in the historical context of the aftermath of the Haitian Dictatorship. As a reader, we feel sympathy for each character yet we also think the characters were selfish for the decisions they make. The narrator’s mother chose to stay in America to provide a better life for the narrator. She chooses her daughter over a country that needs dire help. Yet, I thought that her choice was justified because how then will the narrator have a mother who is there in her life. I was also glad that Danticat did not write a short story where the remarried wife is a jealous and resentful woman but one who is actually very understanding. Throughout the story, she guided the narrator in her process to come to terms with her father’s death. Overall, the story showed the brokenness and imperfection of each character but it is also a story about reconciliation and forgiveness in order to move on.

“Take care of one child or a few hundred, Which would you choose?’ That’s what Maurice used to tell me whenever I mentioned us having a child” (Danticat, 11)

This quote here really left me with mixed emotions because Maurice made a very valid point. In this part of the text, Nadia had asked her father’s wife if they had kids, and she responds with this, basically saying that they don’t have time for it because they’re handling so much already. When reading the story, I at first felt really bad for Nadia as she never had a father figure because he left to go back to Haiti, while her mother had no intentions of ever going back. But once I came across this line, I viewed it very differently. I feel like it is a hard concept to accept because it’s her father, but he was trying to help as much as he can. It’s a little weird because in the end, that’s still her father and he should’ve cared to be there for her, but his intentions were pure from what I see. He wanted to help as many children as he could as he knew Haiti was corrupt and poor so these children didn’t have much. I overall just really enjoyed this line because when I read it, I actually verbally said “that’s a good point”. It’s one of those situations that I feel doesn’t have a way to have happy endings for everyone so he chose the majority.

“But I had already killed him over and over in my mind. In a robbery, a
duel, a terrorist attack, with bullets, grenades…This time I had apparently succeeded. He was dead, truly dead”

This line reveals just how complex the narrator’s emotions are. From despising her absentee father and wishing he suffers for leaving their family, she is now forced to contend with the reality of his agony and the agony of those who truly knew him. The tone in this line is bitter and remonstrative and portrays how she feels towards her father and the entire situation where the father she’s spent so much time obsessing over and wondering about is reunited with her only at his death. She feels that she had been treated unfairly, and she is justified in feeling that way, and feels resentment towards her mother who attempted to hide her away from her father and her father who did not make any effort to be reunited with her. All in all, the narrator’s feelings are very complex and this is reflected in the tone of the text, and the line I selected in particular, where she is unsure whether to be happy, indifferent, angry, somber, or devastated and these jumble of thoughts and emotions creates great confusion within her.

After reading the short story, “In the old days,” by Edwidge Danticat, I had a hard time empathizing with both, Nadia’s mother and her father. Take Nadia’s father, for example, it was revealed that he used to say, “Take care of one child or a few hundred, which would you choose? (Danticat 9)” every time his wife mentioned having children. It implies that Maurice did not want to have children with his wife because he had the opportunity to help many children, especially in a country that had gotten rid of a thirty-year dictatorship. He probably had the same idea in mind when he was together with Nadia’s mother. Otherwise, had he known earlier that he was going to be a father, he would have chosen to stay and solely focus on his daughter. However, later in the story, it is revealed that he found out the truth, that he had a daughter, fifteen years later. Why didn’t he keep in touch with her?
Does this make him guilty or not?
The same question can be asked about Nadia’s mother. She did a great job raising Nadia, but she kept her a secret from Maurice and claimed that he abandoned them. Does this make her guilty?
This makes it really hard for me to feel a type of way about either of them, Nadia’s mother and her father.

‘WHAT?’ began one boy’s reaction paper. ‘I dont thank I be so kalm if my moms dyed.’

Before the phone rang, I had scribbles ‘AMEN BROTHER!’ in red pencil, in the margin of his single-spaced, handwritten, steam-of-consciuosness masterpiece. But after hanging up with my father’s wife, I wrote him a long note scolding him for oversimplifying and being careless with his spelling. Then I gave him a C.

Danticat 4

After reading on in the except, I learned that Danticat used Nadia’s students’ work to foreshadow her experience and thoughts through this tragic turn of events. Taking a closer look into the quoted section above, Nadia felt sympathy for her student’s reaction prior to the phone call with her stepmother, however, after that conversation her perspective on the situation shifted. for instance, she couldn’t ‘drop everything and come to Miami”. But this only expressed her outer feeling. But Danticat illustrating that Nadia then focused on a different perspective of her students’ work, also illustrates that this was kinda doing on in Nadia’s head as well after the phone call. She couldn’t just oversimplify the dying state of her father and needed to really hone down on it. just like how her students couldn’t just oversimplify the intensive even of the mother dying in the book and hone down on his spelling. We can see that this student’s work was truly a foreshadowing for Nadia’s path because later on, she inquired an intense meeting with her mother and eventually hone down into actually going to meet her father that was dying. Additionally, towards the end of the except, when she made it to Miami, she states that she wanted to see her father but remembered the C-student’s paper in which he was mad at people for saying it doesn’t matter when you die and closed he paper by saying ‘it do matter. Avery sekond kount.” and that Nadia will raise his grade. This incident shows that her students’ thoughts in their work are foreshadowing how Nadia feels because at that moment when she wanted to see her father she realized how every second counted. All in all, this was an interesting way for Danticat to foreshadow the events of Nadia’s interaction in the event of her father dying. Nadia needed confused throughout this except so this foreshadowing technique of giving the reader a heads up through the work of her student was clever and truly helped me have a deeper understanding in this reading.

“Au revoir, Papa,” I said, trying out the word Papa just this once. I had always wondered what it would be like to call someone Papa.”

“Aujourd’hui, papa est mort.”

I thought that Danticat’s word choice in this section was meaningful. In this moment, Nadia is speaking to her father for the first time. Her desire to use the word “Papa” comes from the surface level wanting of a father in her life, but also from wanting a connection to the culture her father represents. Nadia’s first and last words to her father are in one of the languages spoken in Haiti, French. Yet, even French is a language of colonizers, and Danticat makes the choice for Nadia to speak in French rather than Creole. In addition, “Aujourd’hui, papa est mort” is an allusion to the first line of Camus’s “L’Étranger” which Nadia’s students are reading in class. That line has sparked debate about translation work and makes us question Danticat’s own translation of the line to “My father died today”. What does temporality mean in death– to die “today?” Does culture die in this moment, or is it reborn? Danticat uses language and allusion to make us question these notions.

“In any case, this woman and her friends at the Mill Reef Club wanted to restore the old library, but she said she didn’t know if they would be able to do so, because that part of St. John’s was going to be developed, turned into little shops-boutiques-so that when tourists turned up they could buy all those awful things that tourists always buy, all those awful things they then take home, put in their attics, and their children have to throw out when the tourists, finally, die” (page 48).

This quote really stood out to me because it showcases where Kincaid gets her frustration from the tourists. After reading about how much Kincaid loves the library but was now ruined and in such poor condition due to the impacts of colonialism, and then realizing that people are more invested in “little shops-boutiques” for simply showing off and advertising to tourists, it really creates a sense of anger and frustration which I was able to relate to. Kincaid is frustrated due to the lack of hope of being able to help Antigua return to its originality and now is catered towards things that are not important. When we are young, almost everything in life seems like a fantasy or even exciting. Kincaid even describes her passion for reading at the library so much so that the librarian was suspicious of her hiding more books than she was allowed to take. However, now this same library has become “malnourished” in a sense and the same passion and spark her childhood self had is now hurt due to the lack of care and effort put in. I truly do feel bad for Kincaid and the situation of Antigua and her anger towards tourists makes a lot more sense to me compared to before when I first read this.

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid is a short nonfiction book that portrays Kincaid’s disdain with the tourism industry, her disapproval of the treatment of Antigua, and her hatred of the British. Kincaid uses various literary devices and styles to describe her perspectives and establish her agenda. She often includes long sentences along with parenthesized notes. Within these long sentences Kincaid describes the mindset of tourists and Antiguans, the dynamics between races in Antigua, and her interpretations of them. As the reader navigates the text, they might feel emotional and attacked by Kincaid’s wordy daggers.  Kincaid states on page 19 that, “They (Antiguans) are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the place you, the tourist, want to go–so when the natives see you, the tourist… they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.” As a potential tourist you might feel uncomfortable reading this statement, because there’s a possibility that Kincaid’s argument is justified. These feelings invoked by Kincaid can serve as a motivation for the reader to repent from possibly their selfish mindset and condescending views of post-colonial societies.

“The place where the library is now, above the dry goods store, in the old run-down concrete building, is too small to hold all the books from the old building and so most of the books, instead of being on their nice shelves, resting comfortably, waiting to acquaint me with you in all your greatness, are in cardboard boxes in a room, gathering mildew, or dust, or ruin.” (P43)

Kincaid reveals her thoughts of how upsetting it is that self-ruled Antigua seems even worse than how it was when it was colonized by the English, that the government is corrupt and how Antiguans cannot even trust their own healthcare. She focuses on one specific example, of the library, which she brings up often. The library is a representation of the effects of colonialism and such corruption. Kincaid also notes how in Antigua today, many young/most young people are illiterate. The run down library, where books are away in cardboard boxes collecting dust, has been in disrepair for decades. It used to be beautiful and hold such fond memories for Kincaid. Now, similarly to how the library has been neglected, the welfare, healthcare, and education of Antiguans has been neglected; They have zero faith in their own support systems and government, and the government officials do not even trust the healthcare.

In this way, the library is a physical representation of the decline of Antigua in terms of happiness and wellbeing. The effects of colonialism have had a remaining effect even though now Antigua is self-ruling.

-Hannah Khanshali

“We felt superior, for we
were so much better behaved and we were full of
grace, and these people were so badly behaved and
they were so completely empty of grace.” (30)

This sentence immediately made me think back to Disgrace and connect what Grace thought of Fiona and her nonsensical habits and mannerisms which she parades about with an air of superiority and the clothing of privilege. In both pieces, although the minority (those with less power) is less influential and wealthy than the dominant group (the actual minority and strangers to the region), they carry themselves with silent grace, knowing looks, and vitriol that they must keep to themselves in cognizance of their place in society. This sentence, in particular, does well to depict that sentiment, with the use of we, these people, and they designating the tourists/colonists as the outsiders, the ones alien to decorum, the sybaritic, empty-headed foreigners, and as amoral as they are self-deluded. Both texts, Place and Disgrace, turn the argument of civility that was the clarion call of the colonizers on its head forcing the reader to reassess their notion of what is normal or good and exhorting them to pay mind to the way they behave in foreign lands.

They say ignorance is bliss and I suppose that is precisely what Jamaica Kincaid is frustrated by. As an outsider, you will never know nor care to know the depth of the pain exhibited by people.

But I can’t help disagreeing with her assumption that all tourists are bad. And that their lack of awareness makes them bad. I could understand your frustration if these people are to permanently impact your community. If they decide to move in or stay for an extended period of time. But they are not here to truly engage in your society and your culture. They don’t want to make any changes. And that’s okay. They have every right to take in as much or as little as they would like.

I think what Jamaica in upset by lies more in her explination of Antiguan medical care.

“Will you be comforted to know that the hospital is staffed with
doctors that no actual Antiguan trusts… when the Minister of Health
himself doesn’t feel well he takes the first plane to
New York to see a real doctor”

It is in this quote we are shown that the island truly is not as easy and blissful as it is marketed to be. Having a less luxurious home or strangely subsidized cars is understandably easy to overlook. An inadequate healthcare system is not. So I don’t think Jamaica is upset by the tourists who buy into the island’s marketing. I think she’s upset that there is for her an obvious disparity between that marketing and the reality staring them in the face. The fact that it’s not a good place to live yet it is their home. The residents don’t have the luxury of overlooking or forgetting their life circumstances.

“For the language of the criminal can only contain the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me.” (Kincaid 32)

Kincaid uses juxtaposition several times across the first half of his novel to illustrate the duality of Western imperialism. This is seen in his descriptions of snobbish and elitist Europeans who judge Caribbean natives for their differences. This is seen in the ugliness of Western cities in comparison to the natural features of Antigua. This is also seen in the quality of food, water, sanitation, and healthcare provided to Westerners and non-Westerners. 

One of the most interesting points Kincaid brings up is the “cleverness” of the Western colonizer. Unlike the bountiful lands of the Caribbean, mainland European countries and large North American states suffer from drought and resource scarcity. Native Americans and Caribbeans have found a way to coexist with nature (through twine-weaved clothes and unconventional waste management). Until Kincaid brought it up, I didn’t even realize that I thought twine-woven clothes and taking a dump in a hole in the Earth were ugly. Objectively speaking, however, such practices are much more natural and closer in harmony to nature itself. This difference in values has effectively led the Western colonizer to consume more than it can produce, creating resource scarcity. Thus, through cleverness and deception, Western narratives of colonization for the improvement of lesser nations were developed–all for the sake of capturing more resources for our consumption.

-Chris

“You will be surprised, then, to see that most likely the person driving this brand-new car filled with the wrong gas lives in a house that, in comparison, is far beneath the status of the car; and if you were to ask why you would be told that the banks are encouraged by the government to make loans available for cars, but loans for houses not so easily available; and if you ask again why, you will be told that the two main car dealer- ships in Antigua are owned in part or outright by ministers in government” (Kincaid, 7).

I found this part of the reading to be very powerful because although Kincaid focuses more on the long-lasting impact of colonization, especially by the British, she also highlights the corruption and the lack of compassion that leaders feel towards their people in many undeveloped countries. She mentions how the Antiguan government supported the availability of bank loans only for cars, and not for a comfortable place to live in. This was only because the same cars, filled with leaded gasoline, a detrimental substance that has devastating health impacts, came directly from dealerships owned by ministers in the government. This goes to show how little abusive government leaders care about their people sometimes and how much they care about themselves. They name the airport after themselves, they give special privileges to the people who are close to them (like Evita, for example, who was the girlfriend of a government official), they go to New York “to see a real doctor” whenever they are sick, and ultimately leave the remaining part of the population to fend for themselves in horrible living conditions. In a way, it is almost as if colonialism never left the island, and Antiguans are still taken advantage of by their own.

Throughout the book, the author Jamaica Kincaid chooses to write the book as if it is addressing an audience who is taking a vacation trip to Antigua. As we the readers are being led to this continuous scene, Kincaid explains to us how every single element of Antigua is related to British colonialism. The Legacy of colonialism still lingers everywhere in Antigua, and it is revisited by tourism. From the taxi drivers to the roads that we drive through, we can see elements of colonialism. The dynamic between the taxi driver and tourists mirrors that of Grace and Fiona. One comes in to visit with a lot of privilege and wealth at hand while the other must be in servitude. The taxi driver must adjust and use American currency even though they are in Antigua.

Notice how in her writing Jamaica Kincaid repeatedly states “Or worse, Europe” whenever she brings up tourists from North America and Europe or artifacts/manufacturers from the two continents. Right there you can tell that the author has built up hatred for Europe or the English and that has to do with the fact that Antigua used to be controlled by the British, and though they are their own capital now, Kincaid despises the fact that Antiguans fancy when the Royals (the English) visit their Island, the very people that enslaved and colonized them. 

Because the British colonized Antigua, Antiguans were brought up by English schooling and were brainwashed with the English ways and because they have been overtaken by the English for far too long, they have become accustomed to their ways. Thus, instead of bringing up a new Antigua that benefits them, they remain “passive objects of history.” 

Second person narrative is known to be the most difficult of all of three perspective to employ in literature. As a narrator, I can tell a story of someone else and I can surely tell a story about myself. But, to tell the reader something about themselves is certainly a difficult task to attempt. Jamaica Kincaid does just this in the first section of “A Small Place” and does so with purpose.

She begins with a hypothetical proposition: “If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see” (Kincaid, 3). Here, Kincaid makes no assumptions about the reader but merely tells the reader about what they will see as a tourist. As she continues however, she starts to make some bold assumptions about the reader: “Since you are a tourist, a North American or European—to be frank, white”(Kincaid, 4). But how can Kincaid know this about the reader? As the narration is third-person, surely she does not know what kind of tourists we are! She continues later on even more aggressively: “The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being.” (Kincaid, 14). And, with this quote, we can understand the impact of Kincaid’s choice of second-person narrative. If this was written in the third-person, we can understand that the tourist of interest is an ugly human being, but surely not us! But, by writing in the second-person, Kincaid is telling us that, if we are tourists, we are ugly human beings. It’s a personal call to self-reflection only attainable by her masterful use of point-of-view.

“Oh, but by now you are tired of all this looking, and you want to reach your destination-your hotel, your room. You long to refresh yourself; you long to eat some nice lobster, some nice local food. You take a bath, you brush your teeth. You get dressed again; as you get dressed, you look out the window” (Kincaid 12)

The text as a whole makes traveling to a new place seem like its a routine when we think we are doing something so different and unique. My family and I like to travel a lot, we travel a couple times a year, but this line is exactly how it goes. Each time I visit a new country or go to a new city I think about how this is another place I’m getting to know, somewhere that I am going for the first time, yet I do the exact same thing he describes in the line above. I find it so interesting how similar we can all be without even realizing it, but being able to write about a whole night with specific detail and have it relate to myself and I’m sure many other people comes to show how un-unique we are. Landing wherever, I’m always eager to get to the hotel and rest and get ready, then excited to try the good food, almost identical to how the line describes the series of events. Ultimately, I just love how this line proves that people have a lot more in common than we think because we do small specific things in almost indistinguishable manners.

“…but in the Earthquake … the library building was damaged … soon after a sign was placed on the front of the building saying, THIS BUILDING WAS DAMAGED IN THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1974. REPAIRS ARE PENDING. The sign hands there, and hangs there more than a decade later, with its unfulfilled promise of repair…” (Kincaid 8-9)

The symbolism affiliated with the library represented really stood out among the novel for me. Especially with the how the rest of the novel is set up to introduce the problems and corruption in the post-colonial Antigua. The library really serves to represent how even decades after the natural disaster, this library, a representation of education and a place for children to go to, is still not fixed. This amplifies how corrupt the Antigua government was, not even sparing funds to fix a library, only for themselves. Additionally, it showed how they did not care for the schools or education of people as Kincaid references how the schools are so run down, a tourist would not even expect it to be a school had it not been for the sign.

“They do not like you. They do not like me! That thought never actually occurs to you . Still, you feel a little uneasy. Still~ you feel a little foolish. Still~ you feel a little out of place.”

Something that struck me was Kincaid’s switching between different pronouns to identify the roles of the reader, the author, and the people of Antigua. The “you” pronoun places us in a position we are meant to feel comfortable and familiar with (a tourist in Antigua). It presupposes that Kincaid is writing to an audience that is privileged and likely unwilling to look beyond the surface of Antiguan life and history, especially in their complacency to poverty. The “I” pronoun underhandedly criticizes the “you” for this ignorance and establishes itself as an authority on living in Antigua. The “I” speaks to the “you” in a didactic way, as if the “I” has grabbed the “you” by the shoulder, sat them down, and told them to listen. Finally, the “they” pronoun for the Antiguan people almost creates an othering effect in relation to the familiar and informal “you,” showing how far apart their worlds can be. In the text, the “you” feels indignation at the thought that “they” could dare to dislike or feel superior to “you.” The “you” wonders– how could that be when the “you” is so nonchalant and easy to have power, while the “they” is unknown and detached. I felt that these pronouns were great at forcing you into a position you may not feel comfortable to realize you are in, which is all the more powerful of an effect.

“The English hate each other and they hate England, and the reason they are so miserable now is that they have no place else to go and nobody else to feel better than.” (Kincaid 24)

When I first came upon this quote I related is to us as college students and this feeling of imposter syndrome. Transitioning to college where everyone is as smart as you can be very discouraging and frustrating because in high school you were one of the smart ones. There is this feeling that your responses are not good enough as everyone else’s because you may think that they have a fancier and more intellectual response. You may also think why even bother because someone has already commented on it and you input would not be as valued anymore.

The English have already explored and taken over the place they planned, so there is not much for them to do because everyone has also already doing it and it won’t be as unique. Since everyone is at the same level as them they feel frustrated that in whatever they do others are also as capable of doing it.