the people of Antigua? These people can't tell their own story. The powerlessness to tell their own story might make us feel pathos. It might also make us think of neocolonialism.

With neocolonialism, we're talking about how dominant countries—what Kincaid calls "large places"—deploy economic, political, and cultural pressure to control other countries, countries that have typically been former colonies.

We might say Kincaid evokes colonialism proper when she tells us about the Antigua "obsession with emancipation and slavery."

As for neocolonialism, where do we spot that? We see examples of it in the first pages. Think about how the tourists might symbolize colonizers. As Kincaid tells us, if you're coming from North America or Europe, "you move through customs with ease." Yet if you're an Antiguan Black person "with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap clothes and food for relatives," you will not "move through customs swiftly."

Why is this neocolonialism? As with colonialism, we see how tourists from North American or European—the former colonizers—are treated better than the people who live there. As with colonialism, neocolonialism divides people. It grants the colonizers/tourists privilege and leaves the colonized/full-time residents with hardship and second-class status.

Kincaid did not like the English colonizers, did she? She calls them "ugly, priggish individuals." She says all Antiguans have learned from them is

how to imprison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts.

Yet what is Kincaid's first language or “native language”? It's English. We might say that her native language produces a conflict within her. Her first language was imposed on her. She says,

It distorted and erased my history and glorified your own.

Yet this external language that became her own is also remembered nicely by Kincaid. Let's look at how Kincaid recalls the library that the English built. She talks about its "beauty." She tells us it was like a "fairy tale" to sit in the "big, old wooden building" with "rows and rows of shelves filled with books."

Let's compare that to the library that Kincaid sees post-colonization. What does she call it? It’s a "dung heap."

We think the library section is quite powerful. In this part, we see neocolonialism, pathos, and native language. We see neocolonialism: tourists don't go to Antigua to read books in a library, so there’s no need to invest money into one. We also have pathos since we feel sadness at the destruction of such a beautiful building. Lastly, we have native language. It was at this beautiful building that Kincaid read books in her first language, even though it was a language that was imposed upon her by the English colonizers.

In A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid describes the role of language in the colonizing process. The national language of Antigua is English, and all other languages in the country are repressed or marginalized, including the original language of the islanders and even the Creole once spoken by the slaves. Kincaid points out that the use of English as the national language has achieved two goals for the colonizers. First, it has effectively extinguished all Antiguan culture except that of the colonial power, making Englishness synonymous with culture (which, she says, is the role of the Minister of Culture). Second, it has forced even those like Kincaid herself, who condemn the crimes of the British colonists, to "speak of this crime in the language of the criminal."

This, for Kincaid, is the greatest linguistic indignity of all. She explains eloquently, in the language of the criminals she condemns,

the language of the criminal can contain only 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 goes on to say that the colonizers, who were always the masters of the language they used and imposed on others, just as they were masters of the slaves upon whom they imposed it, inevitably understand even such words as "right" and "wrong" according to their own corrupt moral codes. It is "wrong" when they do not receive their fair share of profits from slavery or when they are cheated by a slave trader. The slaves and their descendants have no language of their own in which to express the fundamental wrongness of slavery and are forced to use violence instead, which the colonizers then condemn as "wrong" in the language they have made universal and definitive.