Two works under discussion reflect the suffering and hopeless conditions of the local in the global transformations of rights in their writing and shooting styles. A Small Place is written in a very ambiguous way. It puts all the readers in a confronting
position by referring to them as “you.” The “you” in the narrator’s mind is not consistent. It can both be identified as tourists and colonialists. Kincaid also imitates the style of tourist guidebook. Although the essay keeps talking about the hateful tourists, colonialists, businessmen (capitalists), and the Antiguan government, it is still introducing Antigua as a tourist guidebook will always do. What the narrator introduces includes the past and the present, colonialism and tourism, racial hierarchy and social classes, which are mixed up all the time. For example, when the narrator shows the tourists the rich drug smuggler’s house of the best paved road in Antigua, it immediately relates it to “the road that was paced for the Queen’s visit in 1985” (12).
The image of the best-paved road mingles Antiguans’ memory and detestation about
the present capitalist social hierarchy and the past colonial experience. The unclear distinction between the past and present would imply that the Antiguans are living under the reoccurring endless experience of colonialism and slavery. It causes a sense of confinement in history. James Clifford’s interpretation of the black ex-colonial experience might help us see Kincaid’s intention of choosing this writing style:
Linear history is broken, the present constantly shadowed by a past that is also a desired, but obstructed, future: a renewed, painful yearning…Enslavement and its aftermaths—displaced, repeated structures of racialization and exploitation—constitute a pattern of black experiences inextricably woven in the fabric of hegemonic modernity.
(264)
The narrating style of A Small Place is not chronological but it keeps switching between the past and the present. The past-shadowed present of exploited Antiguan echoes how Kincaid regards Antigua: a place of “smallness,” of confinement in its history.
Life and Debt is using the non-chronological techniques of the narration of A Small Place and multi-perspectives, one of which belongs to the tourists and another a
critic of globalization, to analyze the global violation in Jamaica. It relies on black-and-white scenes and non-chronological narration to represent the reoccurring past events in the present, such as the reference to slavery in black-and-white shots of the Chinese laborers and that of Jamaican women getting out of prison-like Free Zone.
Slavery, colonialism and globalization are all mixed up in these scenes. They reveal not only the interrelation between these historical and contemporary developments but
also a sense of confinement in the past that Jamaicans will never get over. The film can expose the global violation done to Jamaica since colonialism because it takes advantages of its multi-positions of camera. The camera eye represents at the same time two perspectives, that of tourists and that of a protester of globalization. It first identifies with the tourists then it looks back at the tourists to criticize their ignorance.
As a superior tourist, it can deal with the reality and go to the exploited areas that most tourists will not go. Having the audience first on the side of tourists, the multi-perspective camera exposes the ignorant audience to the reality of global exploitation.
Life and Debt also uses several symbols to emphasize the plights of Jamaica.
Hands and wire fences are two major symbols that keep showing up to highlight its theme. As mentioned before, the wire fences, appearing throughout the whole film in Free Zone, in Jamaican ghetto, and in tourist fancy hotel, express the suffering and confinement of Jamaican people. Hands are also an important symbol. There are basically two kinds of hands in the film. One is a white soft female tourist hand. It appears in few scenes to touch the windows of the airplane and jeep and to flush the toilet in the hotel room.12 It expresses the tourist desire to “touch” exotic places with safe distance. The other kind of hand is the hard-working hands. Those hands are always black and they belong to the Jamaican laborers. They appear to wipe the white chair in hotel, to milk a cow, and to turn the tap on to dispose of gallons of fresh milk.
Hands represent the life and social status of people in Jamaica. Using white female hands to represent all tourists, the film may imply the ignorance and softness of the
12 Black uses a female hand instead of a male’s to refer to herself who was once a tourist and ignorant of the sufferings of Jamaica.
tourist who are protected from hard reality. They experience Jamaica within the world surrounded by transparent windows through which they can see everything while stay safe and distant. The hard-working local’s hand is exactly the contrast of the tourist hand. It deals with real life. When the tourist hand flushes dirty water away from their hotel room, the local hand turns on the tap to throw away the white fresh milk along with which their living is destroyed. The suffering of the dilemmatic life of Jamaicans is clearly displayed in the metaphorical images of fences and in the contrast of different hands.
Although dealing with the unavoidable trend of globalization, two works still express some hope in their representations. As Balibar perceives that whenever there is a movement, there will be a dispersed border; whenever there is a border, there will be a border area. It refers to a space where differences cruelly and directly confront with one another so there may be violation, sufferings, and struggles but as well as possible hope for democratic development and coexistence (1-2). In A Small Place and Life and Debt, global people and capital flow forms border areas among both Caribbean region and Western countries. The border areas, like Free Trade Zones that reorganize the national territories, may bring the foreign force to oppress the local but at the same time, thanks to global flow, the local may also gain some opportunities to cross the porous borders to struggle abroad for better life. Economic globalization and global labor division do harm to these two poor countries by establishing Free Trade Zones and bringing foreign firms to exploit the local people and their living spaces, but globalization and global labor division as well grant the local mobility and agency to struggle for better economic living conditions for their family just like those
Chinese women represented in the film.
For both works notice the mobility of the local people who may work in Europe or North America (which are their ex-colonizers) to earn some money and improve the life of their family back in Antigua and Jamaica. “…an Antigua black returning to Antigua from Europe or North America with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap clothes and food for relatives” (4). The queuing people with cardboard boxes suggest that some of Antiguans and Jamaicans have chances to go abroad to work. Their mobility or agency is due to global flow that opens up all countries and their borders.
They get a job that Europeans and Americans disdain to do and bring foreign money back to their countries. It is important to note that in both works, the local people practice their mobility for economically improving the poor life of their whole family, unlike the foreign corporations and tourists who move for accumulating more capital or entertaining themselves. Their mobility represents hope of economic improvement for their family and country. They are not totally relying on and waiting for foreign investment and tourism in a passive way to give them a chance to survive in the age of globalization. Although their works in Europe and the U.S. are possibly dirty and dangerous as implied by those Chinese women, because of economic globalization, they still have some agency and global mobility to bring hope to their homeland.
On the other hand, facing the traumatic reoccurring experiences of colonialism and globalization, Kincaid suggests that the very last hope of the miserable small place may still count on having rights returned to their primary and fundamental meaning, that is, returning rights to human being and be body-based again.
Body-based human rights are the basis on which people of the small place can be
equal with the people of the huge and powerful world. The ending of her essay says, Antigua is a small place…it was settled by human rubbish from Europe,
who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa…Of course, the whole thing is, once you [colonialists, tourists] cease to be a master…you are on longer human rubbish, you are just a human being…So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings. (80-81)
Calling the colonialists who think they are superior “human rubbish” and slaves who were treated as worthless rubbish “noble and exalted human beings,” Kincaid reveals the unequal relationships between different identities (81). No matter how Antiguans are glorified and the colonialists, who later become tourists, are degraded, their relationship to the end is still unequal. As long as there is inequality among human beings’ status and value, there is disdain, violation or oppression in the world. Kincaid re-proposes the known idea of “human beings” to replace all the terms of human rubbish and noble human beings (81). The idea of human being is the starting point of equality and justice among people. Getting rid of the social hierarchy formed by all kinds of economic, social and cultural capital, each human being may reach equality and deserve justice simply by owning his/her body as the site of rights.
Life and Debt, shooting from a tourist perspective, puts its hope on the growth and change of the tourists. Identifying with the tourist eye, the camera starts with the shots that most tourists expect to see when they visit Jamaica. John Urry summarizes Edensor’s research that the tourists are protected from harsh reality by their surrogate
parents, travel agents and hotel managers, among others. (7). The film, first seeing things tourists normally see, challenges their protecting bubbles to unveil the miserable Jamaican everyday life by giving the audience/tourists an alternative tour.
As what Black says in her interview, the target she criticizes is not the tourists but the lack of knowledge of the tourists. “I [Black] felt that there’s a certain victimization in lack of knowledge…So the tourists are a metaphor for the lack of understanding, of our own policies, imposed in our name.”13 Bringing tourists to see things they are not able to see, including themselves, Life and Debt tries to speak the unspeakable trauma of repeating exploitation that is never able to reveal itself to tourists. Successfully educating the audience what tourists will never learn through the “surrogate parents”
of global tourism as Urry describes, it hopes that the tourists would grow with the camera to be sophisticated and see the truth hidden under their naïve imagination of Jamaica as a paradise inhabited by happy people.
The whole narrative style of the film corresponds with the attempt to hopefully educate the public. The film is basically shot in a circular structure, which is often used in buildungsroman. It begins with natural scenes and local news talking about street riots and violent protest in Jamaica. In the end, it juxtaposes several interlaced shots of the ignorant tourists ready to go home with great satisfaction and that of the street riots still going on. It then returns to the natural scenes of Jamaica. Although the beginning and the end are almost the same, when the audience sees the ending, they are supposed to grow more sophisticated than they are in the beginning. After showing the natural view, the film has the reggae singer sing about everyday reality in
13 Quote from the web site: http://www.popmatters.com/film/interviews/black-stephanie.html
the street and the Jamaican people peacefully surround the campfire to sign and read Biblical works. These two elements, reggae music and fire, are related with hope Stephanie Blacks wants to bring in her work. Reggae is famous for criticizing capitalism, associating “freedom and justice with truth” (Gilroy 207). In the film, it is music of truth. More importantly, it is spread globally. Like reggae music, the symbol of fire represents as well the reality or knowledge of truth. On the other hand, the gunfire, the car set on fire, and the campfire around which intellectual Jamaicans share their knowledge about globalization reveal the traumatic consequences of exploitation to the audience.
The very last shot of the film suggests an appeal for the growth of the tourists.
It is an extreme long shot that a Jamaican kid sitting on the dock and gazing upon the sea at sunset. Meanwhile, the narrator says again the exact same words in the beginning, “If you come as a tourist, this is what you will see.” In the beginning, what tourists see is Jamaican paradise-like Nature satisfying tourists’ imagination. In the end, they see in the distance a little immobile and hopeless shadow of a young life without an identifiable face. The film expects the audience at least grow in the end to be able to accept reality even though they may not be able to identify themselves with Jamaicans. As long as they think deeper and become more sophisticated, they would see things differently. Their surveillance gaze might then probably not ignorantly exploit Jamaica but gaze back to criticize economic globalization.
Observing the impacts of globalization on human rights, both works warn seriously that these global transformations of rights, including capitalization and de-bodiness, aggravate the disparity between the so-called first and third world. These
transformations make it harder for the two poor ex-colonized Caribbean countries to survive. When the rights of corporations are virtually globalized and protected by global institutions, such as WTO and IMF, the rights of human beings still count on the national government which may benefit from exploiting its people, just like what Kincaid discloses angrily in her essay. No supra-national organizations of real executing power in both representations can rival with these economic ones to secure individual rights. Both works not only represent some kind of contemporary economic oppressions in Antigua and Jamaica but also foresee a miserable crisis in the unbalanced development of globalization. The crisis is caused by the undue emphasis on the global development of economic rights at the expense of human rights which are the foundation of global justice. Both texts endeavor to expose the hard reality about the serious ongoing crisis which is totally concealed from the paradise-like world imagination promoted by global tourism.