White-man came with Peace: on Kincaid's "A Small Place"

Kincaid says Antigua wasn’t successful on creating a nation, because of having no or few national memories. For her, the memories can be gained through libraries and books, they are not accessible because the library damaged and not re-constructed, even if it is so, the books in Antigua tells about the memories of the colonizers. Besides this, “the memories” do simply not exist in Antigua due to their destruction by English destroying everything which are “not English”. Apart from these, to create a nation there must be some “forgetting” process which means the Antigua in colonial times should be completely erased, for her the independence of the Island is not erasing the colonial Antigua: firstly, the economy of the country is based on tourism (give the tourists the best of what they ‘expect’, make them happy and serve them) secondly, the corrupt rulers are favoring themselves rather than ‘constructing’ images to show independence, and lastly, the ones who have money do only give their money to renovate the old institutions, than building new ones. Then for her, the nations are build up by the people on social institutions, which ‘creates’, remembers or erases the memories.

Last time, we have seen how the history can be silenced through the narration: the narratives and narrators were doing it together to silence some events which are actually happened in “the past” (as a location) to favor the present (another location which is causally related to “the past”). The ideas of one location there, have been imposed to the other location with the help of “the location of past”, the subjectivity on picking up the events to be recorded in history leaves us no space to express our opinions in present location. Kincaid expresses that what if the events which happened in the super-past were destroyed by the past and the present remains same as the past because there is no change in the past? As we see in the Antigua case. There is no history, no story, no national narrative, because of having no access to printed sources of knowledge, lack of institutions to create such knowledge and industry to print these sources. For her the history is destroyed and it is wanted to be remained as destroyed, therefore the things are repeating themselves.

We have read four authors’ works showing us the nations are produced in one process: Anderson, Hall, Trouillot and Kincaid. There are so many common points that they show us to understand, in my opinion the most important one is about the time. The time is a location in which the nations create themselves or created by some. This location is a consequence of a change in social apprehension of time and location-based views. These two actions shapes the societies in one pattern, for instance with the industrial revolution people came to understand the time as a location then, they created nations which can move in this locations and they are shaped by what they have created: Nation-states. Now we declare that, we are living in post-modern/industrial epoch and the epoch of information and intelligence. The borders between “the things” are now blurred distinctly, therefore they are so complex. However, nothing is actually different than before! The pattern as a whole repeats itself, the whole system works for one at last. The ones who own the means of something can control everything. It was land 200 years ago, after sometime the production tools and now it is the information. The societies evolve, but the system does not. Antigua is the best example of that, even though they de-colonized from England, the pattern repeats itself the White-man is still the one who takes advantages from the black. The oppressor do oppresses in a different way and legitimizes it with different tools.

Living in the World of “Woulds”: What if Khadija was Choosen as Prophet

The woman is oppressed, controlled, dominated, insulted, exposed to injustice, and killed. One happens to be sad when s/he hears it, but none of the listed is as bad as this one: the woman is silenced. It is the worst thing that can happen to a person; the incapability of talking means incapability of resisting and change. Then woman is erased from the humanity, because human was capable to be independent. We tend to say that the tragic erasure of woman had started with the narratives in history, religions, philosophies and sciences; to some extent they all were indicating and justifying “the role” of woman: inferior, fragile, less powerful than man, possessed, a mother, and a wife. But when we look at this situation in detail, the very starting point of these narrations is the sense of “private property”. The source of inequality between man and woman is once again, the capitalistic mentality.

Islam, like the others, is a religion given to a man, written by man, and written for man. May it be still called as a religion if the Quran was given to Khadija instead of Mohammad? I think not. The social and historical context of Arabia at that era was completely dominated by man. The new-born girls were buried alive, just because of their sexes. Woman had no freedom, even not considered as human, and often considered as a disgrace to the family. In such circumstances, if Allah would give Quran to Khadija she would have no followers or disciples, and after sometime would be stoned because of witchcraft. The people could not just accept her, because a woman prophet means that there is a Goddess, rather than God; a woman that everyone has to pray to, read her words and spread them.

Let’s say Khadija survived and accomplished her task, and Islam today is still widely accepted religion. How would it look like? I think it would be just great! We would see no GMC cars filled with women and driven by a man in the streets of Mecca, nothing could exist as Al-Qaida, no ridiculous cartoons would be drawn by some anti-Islamist, but wait! Islam would be their own religion, because the West is known for the value of woman! Or is it? Would West accept Islam as their religion? Or do I talk about some kind of radical shift in the powers of the world? I don’t know about that, but I think that a religion like that would be much more meaningful than any religion that we see today (everything is great in the scripts, almost no one can act like in the scripts) and I would be in that religion.