"A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day-to-day."
This quote distinguishes the kind of people tourists are on holidays from the kind of people they are back home. On a day-to-day basis, people simply live their lives, comfortable in their own homes and loved by the people who are supposed to love them. As soon as a person begins to feel discontentment with where they are, though, and decides they need to get away, they become an ugly tourist, traveling to observe the death, ruin, and struggling of the local people in a place like Antigua and using it as a source of their own pleasure.
"When natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself."
This quote comes as Kincaid is making a point about how the natives of a place do not like tourists. She argues that everyone would like to get away sometimes, to tour a new place; the difference between Antiguans and the white tourists who visit them, though, is that Antiguans are simply too poor to escape their own lives. For this reason, Antiguans scorn the tourists who are able to escape their own boredom and turn the Antiguans' boredom into entertainment.
"For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For 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."
Here, Kincaid highlights one of the most troubling paradoxes of colonialism. When the British withdrew from their colony of Antigua, they left behind the English language, having erased the native language over decades of rule. Nearly all formerly colonized nations across the world face a similar situation. Kincaid laments that all she has to talk about the crime of colonization is the colonists' language itself, which is biased in favor of the colonist. She has no native language with which to properly express her agony.
"Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all people like me seem to have learned from you 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? Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants?"
This quote is spoken as an accusation to Western colonial powers, claiming that the reason Antiguan society is so corrupt and broken today is that all they learned from their occupiers was how to govern badly and mistreat people. The British did not set a positive example, nor did they give Antiguans the tools they needed to govern properly, so they left a mess in their wake when independence was finally granted.
"The people at the Mill Reef Club love the old Antigua. I love the old Antigua. Without question, we don't have the same old Antigua in mind."
This quote highlights the disparity between black Antiguans and those descended from white colonists, referring to the white people who run the Mill Reef Club in modern-day Antigua. These people are nostalgic for the Antigua of colonial times, where there was order imposed by the British and people like them were in power without question. Kincaid, on the other hand, longs to return to an Antigua that belonged to her, to local people, without the destructive force of colonialism. They both love the old Antigua, but this "old Antigua" is different for each.
"But if you saw the old library, situated as it was, in a big, old wooden building painted a shade of yellow that is beautiful to people like me, with... its beautiful wooden tables and chairs for siting and reading, if you could hear the sound of its quietness... the smell of the sea... the heat of the sun...the beauty of us sitting there like communicants at an altar, taking in, again and again, the fairy tale of how we met you, your right to do the things you did, how beautiful you were, are, and always will be; if you could see all that in just one glimpse, you would see why my heart would break at the dung heap that now passes for a library in Antigua."
Kincaid is conflicted over her nostalgic memories of the library in colonial Antigua. On one hand, it was a beautiful place, where she would go to spend time reading in quiet, smelling the sea, and feeling the heat of the sun. On the other hand, though, she knows now that the library's presence was part of colonial manipulation, with the British crown attempting to "educate" local Antiguans about "civilized" society and remind them how powerful, beautiful, and important the British were. It was another means of control and quelling dissent, but Kincaid still misses its presence in Antigua all the same.
"But let me just tell you something about Ministers of Culture: in places where there is a Minister of Culture it means there is no culture. For have you ever heard of any culture springing up under the umbrella of a Minister of Culture?"
Kincaid speaks scathingly about Antigua's Minister of Culture, claiming that the office only exists to try to recreate some semblance of culture because the British bulldozed all local culture during their occupation. She compares it to Liberty Weekend in the United States, which was ironically held after a major Supreme Court decision that severely cut back individual liberties.
"Antigua is a small place. Antigua is a very small place. In Antigua, not only is the event turned into everyday, but the everyday is turned into an event."
Life in Antigua is characterized not by time, but rather by the occurrence of what Kincaid calls "events." Because Antigua is such a small place, these events become distorted in importance; Antiguans speak about "emancipation" with nonchalance as if it were an everyday occurrence, while smaller, quotidian happenings—like arguments between people—get blown up to dramatized importance.
"It is as if, then, the beauty—the beauty of the sea, the land, the air, the trees, the market, the people, the sounds they make—were a prison, and as if everything and everybody inside it were locked in and everything and everybody that is not inside it were locked out."
Kincaid calls Antigua's beauty a prison, that traps Antiguans in a cage of constancy as they struggle to define themselves and develop an identity following decades of colonial rule. Its beauty has been the same for as long as people remember it, and it distorts local Antiguans' perception of the time that has passed and the events that have happened to them.
"The whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. 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."
The final two sentences of the text shed light on the complexity of understanding Antiguans' relationship to their former colonizers now that slavery and colonization have formally ended. When individuals wear the distinct label of "master" and "slave," it is easy to demonize one and exalt the other. When these labels have been cast off, it becomes harder to define them, as both are now simply human, facing all of the everyday struggles of humanity. However, without the labels, it is also easier to turn a blind eye to the unequal relationships that do still exist between them.
