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You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him—why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument? You are a tourist and you have not yet seen a school in Antigua, you have not yet seen the hospital in Antigua, you have not yet seen a public monument in Antigua.
You are looking out the window (because you want to get your money’s worth); you notice that all the cars you see are brand-new, or almost brand-new, and that they are all Japanese-made.
Antiguans are so proud of this that each year, to mark the day, they go to church and thank God, a British God, for this.
it would amaze even you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed up.
The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being.
THE ANTIGUA that I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see now. That Antigua no longer exists.
Princess person, how every building that she would enter was repaired and painted so that it looked brand-new, how every beach she would sun herself on had to look as if no one had ever sunned there before (I wonder now what they did about the poor sea? I mean, can a sea be made to look brand-new?),
not racists;
not a racist;
not a racist;
not racists.
Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all people like me seem to have learned from you is how to imprison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts?
how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants?
your ...
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There must have been some good people among you, but they stayed home. And that is the point. That is why they are good. They stayed home.
Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.
I stole many books from this library. I didn’t mean to steal the books, really; it’s just that once I had read a book I couldn’t bear to part with it),
sit and look at books and think about the misery in being me
childhood is usually filled with happy thoughts,
An event that occurred one hundred years ago might be as vivid to them as if it were happening at this very moment.
But event turned into everyday and everyday turned into event do not remain event and everyday, in a fixed state.
The Syrians had suffered a series of break-ins and robberies, and they had their house wired with live wires, so that if someone broke in, the intruder would be electrocuted; they had forgotten to turn off the wire leading to or around the swimming pool, and the Acting Governor General was electrocuted.
he looked black, as if he had been scorched from the inside.
It was his heart; he had had a heart problem. He was poisoned; how can your heart make you vomit and froth at the mouth and fall down in a stupor and then revive and go on as before?
In Antigua, people say that the man who has headed the government for twenty-five years perhaps by now thinks that the government of Antigua is his own business,
ANTIGUA is beautiful. Antigua is too beautiful. Sometimes the beauty of it seems unreal. Sometimes the beauty of it seems as if it were stage sets for a play,
for no real sunset
no re...
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no real cloud
no real day
no real...
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No real day and no r...
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no re...
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No real sand
no real flowers
no rea...
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no real earth
no real grass
no rea...
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no rea...
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no rea...
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No real v...
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no real v...
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not real like any other real thing that there is.
What might it do to them to live in such heightened, intense surroundings day after day?
The unreal way in which it is beautiful now is the unreal way in which it was always beautiful. The unreal way in which it is beautiful now that they are a free people is the unreal way in which it was beautiful when they were slaves.
Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master’s yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.
