Quote by Jamaica Kincaid: “The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true.”

Tourism often involves a bad faith — a nagging awareness that you are consuming someone else's poverty, history, or beauty for your own pleasure while they remain unchanged or worse off. Kincaid names the guilt tourists carry but usually suppress.

A Small Place opens with a withering second-person address to a tourist arriving in Antigua, systematically dismantling the comfortable fiction of ethical leisure travel. Kincaid wrote at a moment when Caribbean tourism was booming while the region's structural poverty — a direct legacy of colonialism — remained essentially unaddressed.

Antiguan-American novelist and essayist whose work sharply examines colonialism, mother-daughter relationships, and the Caribbean experience of British rule. Her 1988 essay collection A Small Place is a fierce indictment of colonial tourism and its aftermath in Antigua.