A Small Place - My reaction to Chapters 1 & 2

     After reading the first two chapters of her book, I get the sense that Jamaica Kincaid has a lot of resentful feelings -maybe even hatred- against tourists in her country. To me, this group, the "tourists" represents an extensively wide spectrum of people that I, personally, would not dare to classify all together as the author does. I mean, after having been to Antigua myself, I get the sense that not all "tourists" there are the same, since all kinds of people from all kinds of places visit this gem of an island in the middle of the Caribbean every single day, wether it be on a cruise ship or any other mode of transportation.
     However, she still makes this generalization all throughout her book. I believe this to be a great disadvantage for her, not only as a writer, but also as a human being. Having such a limited point of view makes her experiences and thoughts so prejudiced, that this may prevent her from fully taking in and learning from her own life. Then again, one has to stop and think about the relativeness of it all. The truth is that we all carry our own set of experiences and ideas, those who define us and have molded us into the person that we are now. Which means that even my own liberal point of view about all of this, all this giving the tourists "the benefit of the doubt", could be a result of the limitations caused by my own perspective... since Jamaica may lack some knowledge as a result from her limiting standpoint, but she also must possess some knowledge from her own experiences that only she can account for.
     As I kept reading, I noticed that Antigua's history has a great number of similitudes from that of Puerto Rico. We also were colonized, slaved, robbed, and the list goes on... or rather, our ancestors were. Although some of our circumstances were similar, I don't share any of her resentful feelings towards neither Spain nor the U.S, which would be the analogous countries to U.K. in this comparison. Then again, my reality may be a lot different than Jamaica's. Not only are we speaking of two different countries with similar, but at times very different sets of circumstances, but this book was also written during a completely different moment in history than the one that I've had the opportunity to live through. From her book, I feel that in Antigua racism still plays (or played, at the time written) a great part in society's structure. Us Puerto Ricans are so mixed by now (and this is very evident by the physical characteristics from everyone on the island), that it's hard for racism to be as tangible, I guess.
     Regardless of Jamaica's envious feelings origins, I still think that she may have taken her grudge too far. By living under a constant battle against such a broad group of people and holding on to the past, she's only making her own life more difficult and reliving a part of her worst unhappiness. I've always been a firm believer in this: "we can't control what happens to us, but we have the power to choose how it affects us and how we want to react to it." Life would be more enjoyable and the world would probably be a more beautiful place if we were all more captious with our feelings and worked on discarding or working on those that serve no good. Then again, we all know that's easier said than done.