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suppose that it was just as well that the Minister of Culture was not in Antigua then, for I did not know how this man would take to me or anything I might say. It so happens that in Antigua my mother is fairly notorious for her political opinions. She is almost painfully frank, quite unable to keep any thoughts she has about anything—and she has many thoughts on almost everything—to herself. My mother, at one time, was a supporter of the second successful political party Antigua has ever had. In the years that Antiguans have been electing governments, only once have they elected a political party other than the party now in power. In one election campaign, my mother was putting up her party’s posters on a lamppost just outside the house of the Minister of Culture. When the minister, hearing a great hubbub (my mother would only do this with a great hubbub) came outside and saw that it was my mother, he said, perhaps to the air, “What is she doing here?” And to this my mother replied, “I may be a she, but I am a good she. Not someone who steals stamps from Redonda.” Whatever this meant to the Minister of Culture my mother would not tell me, but it made the minister turn and go back inside his house without a reply. Redonda is a barren rock out in the Caribbean Sea—actually closer to the islands of Montserrat and Nevis than to Antigua, but for reasons known only to the English person who did this, Redonda and the islands of Barbuda and Antigua are all lumped together as one country. When Antiguans talk about “The Nation” (and they say “The Nation” without irony), they are referring to the nine-by-twelve-mile-long, drought-ridden island of Antigua; they are referring to Barbuda, an island even smaller than Antigua (Barbuda was settled originally by a family from England named Condrington; this family specialised in breeding special groups of black people, whom they then sold into slavery); and they are referring to a barren little rock, where only booby birds live, Redonda. Once there was a scandal about stamps issued for Redonda. A lot of money was made on these stamps, but no one seems to know who got the money or where the stamps actually ended up. Where do all these stamps, in all their colourfulness, where do they come from? I mean, whose idea is it? Antigua has no stamp designer on the government payroll; there is no building that houses the dyes and the paper on which the stamps are printed; there is no Department of Printing. So who decides to print stamps celebrating the Queen of England’s birthday? Who decides to celebrate Mickey Mouse’s birthday? Who decides that stamps from this part of the world should be colourful and bright and not sedate and subdued, like, say, a stamp from Canada? I suppose that somewhere there is a stamp syndicate and that from time to time its people decide what would be best for the syndicate’s financial interest, and they issue these stamps to these poor sap countries like Antigua.
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    In a small place, people cultivate small events. The small event is isolated, blown up, turned over and over, and then absorbed into the everyday, so that at any moment it can and will roll off the inhabitants of the small place’s tongues. For the people in a small place, every event is a domestic event; the people in a small place cannot see themselves in a larger picture, they cannot see that they might be part of a chain of something, anything. The people in a small place see the event in the distance heading directly towards them and they say, “I see the thing and it is heading towards me.” The people in a small place then experience the event as if it were sitting on top of their heads, their shoulders, and it weighs them down, this enormous burden that is the event, so that they cannot breathe properly and they cannot think properly and they say, “This thing that was only coming towards