50 Essays: A Portable Anthology - Samuel Cohen 2017

Jamaica Kincaid, The ugly tourist

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua in 1949 and raised there until she left for New York when she was seventeen. Working as a domestic, she returned to school, earned her high school and college degrees, and returned to New York to write, where under her new name she eventually became a staff writer for the New Yorker. She is the author of fifteen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction about her Caribbean home, her family, and gardening, among other topics, including At the Bottom of the River (1983), Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Brother (1997), and See Now Then (2013).

“The Ugly Tourist,” which originally appeared in Harper’s in 1988, became the opening chapter of A Small Place. The editor of the New Yorker rejected the essay as “too angry,” and when the full book appeared many of the reviews agreed. However, many did not, finding the book’s tone appropriate to its subject. As you read, put yourself in the shoes of these editors and reviewers. Would you have accepted “The Ugly Tourist” for publication? What kind of review would you have given it?

The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: 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. From day to day, you are a nice person. From day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole do. From day to day, as you walk down a busy street in the large and modern and prosperous city in which you work and live, dismayed, puzzled (a cliché, but only a cliché can explain you) at how alone you feel in this crowd, how awful it is to go unnoticed, how awful it is to go unloved, even as you are surrounded by more people than you could possibly get to know in a lifetime that lasted for millennia, and then out of the corner of your eye you see someone looking at you and absolute pleasure is written all over that person’s face, and then you realise that you are not as revolting a presence as you think you are (for that look just told you so). And so, ordinarily, you are a nice person, an attractive person, a person capable of drawing to yourself the affection of other people (people just like you), a person at home in your own skin (sort of; I mean, in a way; I mean, your dismay and puzzlement are natural to you, because people like you just seem to be like that, and so many of the things people like you find admirable about yourselves — the things you think about, the things you think really define you — seem rooted in these feelings): a person at home in your own house (and all its nice house things), with its nice back yard (and its nice back-yard things), at home on your street, your church, in community activities, your job, at home with your family, your relatives, your friends — you are a whole person. But one day, when you are sitting somewhere, alone in that crowd, and that awful feeling of displacedness comes over you, and really, as an ordinary person you are not well equipped to look too far inward and set yourself aright, because being ordinary is already so taxing, and being ordinary takes all you have out of you, and though the words “I must get away” do not actually pass across your lips, you make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it; to being a person lying on some faraway beach, your stilled body stinking and glistening in the sand, looking like something first forgotten, then remembered, then not important enough to go back for; to being a person marvelling at the harmony (ordinarily, what you would say is the backwardness) and the union these other people (and they are other people) have with nature. And you look at the things they can do with a piece of ordinary cloth, the things they fashion out of cheap, vulgarly colored (to you) twine, the way they squat down over a hole they have made in the ground, the hole itself is something to marvel at, and since you are being an ugly person this ugly but joyful thought will swell inside you: their ancestors were not clever in the way yours were and not ruthless in the way yours were, for then would it not be you who would be in harmony with nature and backwards in that charming way? An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just passed cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness (you do not look the way they look); the physical sight of you does not please them; you have bad manners (it is their custom to eat their food with their hands; you try eating their way, you look silly; you try eating the way you always eat, you look silly); they do not like the way you speak (you have an accent); they collapse helpless from laughter, mimicking the way they imagine you must look as you carry out some everyday bodily function. They do not like you. They do not like me! That thought never actually occurs to you. Still, you feel a little uneasy. Still, you feel a little foolish. Still, you feel a little out of place. But the banality of your own life is very real to you; it drove you to this extreme, spending your days and your nights in the company of people who despise you, people you do not like really, people you would not want to have as your actual neighbour. And so you must devote yourself to puzzling out how much of what you are told is really, really true (Is ground-up bottle glass in peanut sauce really a delicacy around here, or will it do just what you think ground-up bottle glass will do? Is this rare, multicoloured, snout-mouthed fish really an aphrodisiac, or will it cause you to fall asleep permanently?). Oh, the hard work all of this is, and is it any wonder, then, that on your return home you feel the need of a long rest, so that you can recover from your life as a tourist?

That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives — most natives in the world — cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go — so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

For Discussion and Writing

1. What does Kincaid argue is wrong with how tourists think of natives?

2. In addition to its brevity, what is notable about “The Ugly Tourist” is the length of its first paragraph. What is the effect of reading such a long paragraph? Why do you think Kincaid chose to write it that way?

3. connections Read Kincaid’s essay next to Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Serving in Florida” (p. 136). How are both about tourism? How are both about class? What can the differences between the two tell us about each?

4. Write about a trip you have taken; it can be to another town or state, or even another part of your town — it doesn’t have to be to another country. How did it feel to be a tourist? Did anything in your experience relate to Kincaid’s description of tourism? Alternatively, write about a time when you have felt like a native in the presence of people from elsewhere visiting your home.

5. looking further Kincaid argues that it is a recognition of the “banality and boredom” (par. 2) of their lives that leads people to visit other parts of the world. Imagine a counterargument to Kincaid’s. Are there other reasons to want to see the rest of the world? How would you compare them to the one Kincaid assumes?