Summary
In this extended essay, the narrator speaks directly to "you," the reader. She begins by explaining what you will see if you go to the Caribbean island of Antigua as a tourist. You would land at V.C. Bird International Airport, named after the Prime Minister of Antigua. You would probably think how beautiful the island is as your plane lands—so much better than the cold, dark, long days you spend at work in North America or Europe. You are excited about the hot, dry climate, and probably never think about how the people living there constantly worry about drought even though they are surrounded on all sides by ocean.
You move through customs easily because you are a (likely white) tourist, not a black Antiguan returning home. You hire a taxi driver driving a brand new Japanese-made vehicle to take you to your hotel, and you are probably excited and frightened by how reckless of a driver he is. You marvel at the fact that someone like this is driving a brand new, expensive-looking car, and if you were to ask someone (you probably wouldn't), you would learn that banks are encouraged to make loans available for cars but not for houses, since the two main car dealerships in Antigua are owned by government ministers.
On your way to your hotel you would pass dilapidated buildings labeled "school" and "hospital," and you would not think at all about the care you would receive if you were to become sick or injured on your holiday—how Antiguans don't even trust the doctors they have here, and rich government officials will go to the USA for the medical care they need. There is no library in Antigua anymore, since The Earthquake in 1974 damaged the beautiful library building they used to have. Since then (it is now 1988), a sign has been hanging on the door saying "repairs are pending." It is never repaired. But you do not need the library because you have brought your own books with you—perhaps a book on economic history that explains how the West got rich, neglecting to mention the slave labor of people like these Antiguans throughout history in its explanation.
Next, you would pass by a mansion belonging to a merchant family from the Middle East that moved to Antigua less than twenty years ago and now owns much of Antigua's real estate. After this, you'd pass the mansion of a drug smuggler so rich that he is said to buy cars in tens. Finally, there's the mansion of a woman named Evita, notorious for the wealth and influence she has derived from a relationship with a high-up government official. At last, you reach your hotel, take a bath, brush your teeth, and look out the window at the beauty all around you. You imagine yourself enjoying this beach, and do not think about the contents of your lavatory that may later be deposited into this ocean, since Antigua does not have a proper sewage disposal system.
The narrator says that your suspicions about yourself are correct: as a tourist, you are an ugly human being. You are not an ugly human being all the time, and on a day-to-day basis in the city that is your home, you are a nice, attractive person with people around you who love you. But one day, when you feel alone and unsettled in this big crowd in which you live, plagued by the struggles of being ordinary, you decide you need to "get away"—then, you become that ugly tourist, that "person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it" (pg. 14). You look at these people around you, marvel at the "simple" way they live their lives in harmony with nature, and probably think that terrible thought: that their ancestors were not as clever or ruthless in the way yours were, because otherwise it would be you living in this "backward" way.
It does not occur to you that the people whose lives you are watching cannot stand you, that they make fun of you to each other behind your back. It is not difficult to understand that the native does not like the tourist, the narrator says, because every tourist is a native somewhere and likely feels similarly. Every native feels frustrated with their everyday life sometimes, and every native would like the chance to get out and forget it for a while—but unlike you, most natives are too poor to go anywhere, and even too poor to live properly in the places they do live. When natives see you as a tourist in a place like Antigua, they envy your ability to escape the banality and boredom of your lives, and how easily you can turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.
Analysis
This essay's style is immediately jarring because it uses second-person, speaking directly to "you," the reader. This choice of perspective reveals Kincaid's target audience. She is speaking specifically to Western tourists, the kind who will travel to Caribbean islands like Antigua in order to escape the mundanity of their own lives. In almost all cases, these tourists are white, set apart in physical appearance as well as lifestyle from the native black Antiguans on the island. "You" makes it clear exactly who Kincaid hopes will pick up this book and read it.
The second-person point-of-view, combined with the narrator's accusatory tone, serves Kincaid's goal of making readers feel deeply uncomfortable. Most of her readers will have had an experience like the one she describes here: arriving somewhere as a tourist on a vacation you have saved up for and desperately looked forward to, blissfully unaware of the lives of local people around you as you pursue your own pleasure. You can distance yourself from the "ugly tourist" she describes and pretend you have not done the things she condemns, but the way she points a finger at tourism leaves readers thinking about whether the travel they have done has been responsible and socially aware. She makes her accusations carefully, little by little, and never so harshly that her audience will get so offended that they close the book.
There is an "I" in this essay, too, though she is only briefly revealed in Section I in the line "we Antiguans, for I am one, have a great sense of things, and the more meaningful the thing, the more meaningless we make it" (pg. 8). The "I" is Kincaid, and she speaks from her own perspective in this section just long enough to let readers know that she is an Antiguan herself. This announcement legitimizes the claims she makes about the lives, thoughts, and feelings of locals, granting them the kind of authenticity they can only have when made by someone who has had these experiences herself. It also leaves readers wondering when they will hear more about Kincaid's personal experience growing up in Antigua.
Two important themes are briefly introduced in this first section: corruption and colonialism. Kincaid's narration reveals that there is corruption all around Antigua that tourists do not notice, from car dealerships owned and favored by the government; to public buildings that are left in disrepair while important officials' mansions are kept pristine and polished; to people, like Evita, who have relationships with high-level officials living privileged lives that most Antiguans cannot even imagine. Colonialism will become more important later on in the essay, but Antigua's colonial legacy is briefly hinted at in the description of colonial buildings in the capital St. John's and Kincaid's frequent "or worse, Europe" admonition, showing disgust for European tourists above all others because of the region's experience with European colonialism.
This section also dives into another of the essay's key themes: the fraught relationship between tourists and natives. Tourism, by nature, makes a spectacle of other peoples' lives, and there is often extreme disparity between tourists' wealth and status and those of the people in the places they visit. Tourists rarely think about the locals whose lives they are interrupting, nor how their behavior or the industry that is serving them will affect the people around them. As such, the two groups sit on opposite ends of a spectrum, and in a nation like Antigua whose very existence is so dominated by tourism, this polarizing relationship creates a problematic disturbance.
