Reading Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place Beyond the Binary.
Kincaid writes of a world divided—between the tourist and the native, the privileged and the overlooked, the Black and the White. But what if I fit into neither category? What if my existence is not captured in her binary?
What if I am Brown?
What if I don’t have just one land to belong to? What if I sometimes feel like a tourist in my own community? What if home is not a single place, but a string of lived moments across different landscapes?
My mother is Indian, born and raised in Nepal. My father is Nepalese, born and raised in India. I have lived in my ancestral village, in Kathmandu, in Qatar, in Guwahati, in Siliguri, in Delhi, and now in Madison. I am not from one place—I am from many. But does that mean I am from nowhere? Where am I from?
I am diverse. But, my diversity is not just in lineage but in lived experience. In my sensitivity to different environments. In my ability to feel both at home and like an outsider at the same time.
Kincaid critiques the tourist’s gaze—the way privilege allows some to move freely while others remain trapped by history, by power, by the aftermath of colonialism. If a White traveler in Antigua is a tourist, would I not be seen as one too? Would my presence be less foreign simply because my skin is darker?
If I am Brown, can I not be a tourist in Antigua?
What if someone is both Black and White—do they not belong anywhere? What is home for the child of an immigrant?
Identity is more than just color. It is lived experience. It is how history moves through us, how it shapes what we see and how we see it.
I may not fit neatly into Kincaid’s narrative, but perhaps that is the point. Identity is never neat. It is layered, shifting, shaped by place, by memory, by movement. And in that movement, I am not lost. I am becoming. It is not a question of whether I belong, but of how I choose to exist within the contradictions.
Kincaid divides the world into categories. But I exist beyond them.
I am neither just tourist nor just native. I am everywhere I have been—sometimes a tourist, sometimes a native. I am everything I have seen. I am diverse. I am I.
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