Rui-Long Monico - Geneva // USA Conexion

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Antigua, one of the jewel of the Caribbean sea, natural paradise for wealthy jet-setters, a small place englobed by beautiful seas. Antigua, better known for its white sand beaches, tropical weather and banking policies rather than its literature. Out of bitterness, Jamaica Kincaid breaks the illusion set upon her country to denounce it's illnesses.

In this essay, Kincaid divides her work in four distinct parts to better understand how and why Antigua's standard of living are so low today. In the first part, we take a trip around the island looking through the eyes of the typical white tourist blindfolded to the horror of poverty. Then Kincaid criticizes the government for being so corrupt and to have sold the country so rich drug dealers and foreign investors. The native Antiguans take some shot too for not challenging their way of life. Finally, the last part is about the beauty of Antigua.

Kincaid's tone during the whole 81 pages of her essay is definitively angry. Personally, I like her style. The long sentences, the simple structure, the in-your-face attitude, gives the novel a very powerful and unique fashion. Unfortunately, I think Jamaica Kincaid lacks any real solutions to the problems she points out. Of course it's not her job to find solutions, but it would have been nice to read some of her suggestions. She is also flawed by the use of two many fallacies such as stereotyping and oversimplifying group of people and some hot issues. Oh well.

This novel was not written for artistic or entertainment purpose. Instead, A Small Place was seeking to shock people. It was aimed at the average American or European that visits this island without realizing that unemployment became the norm, that there is no decent hospital or library, that education is a fancy word and that the people that owns Antigua don't even live within it's boundaries. If that was her goal, it certainly did accomplish it. It was even banned in Antigua...

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Unlike most people out there, I love reading, so when my World Lit. teacher assigned us Heart of Darkness, I didn't complained or anything. Damn was I disappointed.

I gotta admit, this is one tough book to read, not necessarily because of the vocabulary but more because of Conrad's style of writing. This guy really loved the work of impressionist painters such Monet or Renoir and had the dumb idea of applying it's concept in a novel. For those of you that are ignorant and that have never seen any paintings from Impressionist artists, just picture something very blurry and confusing. Well, Conrad's work is blurry and confusing. He jumps from topic to another, moving back and forth in times and making enough assertions that I was completely lost after a couple of paragraphs.

Passed the surprise of having to read 10 times the same sentence before understanding it, we discover a story with a very thin plot line. Marlowe is an Englishman who got hired by the Imperialistic Belgium government. He is then sent on a boat that trades Ivory along the Congo River and witnesses the slow deprecation of civilization as he goes deeper into Africa. I was afflicted by the blatant racism that you could feel on every description of the native Africans. To the author, who pretends to be anti-colonialism, Africans are nothing more than animals who do things without any knowledge of it. It's kinda sad because this novel is considered by many Western scholars as being in the top ten fiction book ever.

Anyway, to make it short, it was mildly entertaining (the only thing fun about it is that the movie Apocalypse Now was based on Heart of Darkness) and the writing was mediocre. If you too are assigned this book, don't bother reading it and check out the Spark Notes.