gathering mildew, or dust, or ruin.

ld woodenbuilding painted a shade of yellow that is beautifulto people like me, with its wide veranda, its big,always open windows, its rows and rows of shelvesfilled with books, its beautiful wooden tables andchairs for sitting and reading, if you could hear thesound of its quietnes

The Earthquake

Do you know why peoplelike me are shy about being capitalists?

As for what we werelike before we met you, I no longer care. No periodsof time over which my ancestors held sway, nodocumentation of complex civilisations, is any com-fort to me. Even if I really came from people whowere living like monkeys in trees, it was better tobe that than what happened to me, what I becameafter I met you.

There must have beensome good people among you, but they stayedhome

I met the worldthrough England, and if the world wanted to meetme it would have to do so through England

For the language of the criminal cancontain only the goodness of the criminal's deed.The language of the criminal can explain and ex-press the deed only from the criminal's point ofview. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, theinjustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation in-flicted on m

what I see isthe millions of people, of whom I am just one,made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, nogods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no ex-cess of love which might lead to the things thatan excess of love sometimes brings, and worstand most painful of all, no tongue. (For isn't itodd that the only language I have in which tospeak of this crime is the language of the criminalwho committed the crime

for the English were supposed to be civilised,and this behaviour was so much like that of ananimal, the thing we were before the English res-cued us,

There they were, strangers in someone else's home,and then they refused to talk to their hosts or haveanything human, anything intimate, to do withthem.

punishment for the other. People who think aboutthese things believe that every had deed, even everybad thought, carries with it its own retribution. Sodo you see the queer thing about people like me?Sometimes we hold your retribution

Do you ever try to understand why peoplelike me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive andcannot forget? There is the Barclays Bank. TheBarclay brothers are dead. The human beings theytraded, the human beings who to them were onlycommodities, are dead. It should not have been thatthey came to the same end, and heaven is notenough of a reward for one or hell enough of a

they shouldnever have left their home, their precious England,a place they loved so much, a place they had toleave but could never forget. And so everywherethey went they turned it into England; and every-body they met they turned English. But no placecould ever really be England, and nobody who didnot look exactly like them would ever be English,so you can imagine the destruction of people andland that came from that. The English hate eachother and they hate England, and the reason theyare so miserable now is that they have no place elseto go and nobody else to feel better than.)

That the native does not like the tourist is nothard to explain. For every native of every place isa potential tourist, and every tourist is a native ofsomewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life ofoverwhelming and crushing banality and boredomand desperation and depression, and every deed,good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Everynative would like to find a way out, every nativewould like a rest, every native would like a tour.But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor.

their ancestors were not clever inthe way yours were and not ruthless in the wayyours were, for then would it not be you who wouldbe in harmony with nature and backwards in thatcharming way? An ugly thing, that is what you arewhen you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing,

though the words "I must getaway" do not actually pass across your lips, youmake a leap from being that nice blob just sittinglike a boob in your amniotic sac of the modernexperience to being a person visiting heaps of deathand ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sightof it; to being a person lying on some farawaybeach, your stilled body stinking and glistening inthe sand, looking like something first forgotten,then remembered, then not important enough togo back for

A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not anugly person all the time; you are not an ugly personordinarily

lying on the beach, enjoy-ing the amazing sun (a sun so powerful and yet sobeautiful, the way it is always overhead as if onpermanent guard, ready to stamp out any cloudthat dares to darken and so empty rain on you andruin your holiday; a sun that is your personalfriend)

they go to church and thank God,a British God,

perhaps in a world that istwelve miles long and nine miles wide (the size ofAntigua) twelve years and twelve minutes andtwelve days are all the same

he Earthquake; weAntiguans, for I am one, have a great sense ofthings, and the more meaningful the thing, themore meaningless we make it

for though you are a tourist on your holiday,what if your heart should miss a few beats? Whatif a blood vessel in your neck should break

who watches everypenny you earn so that you can afford this holidayyou are on

ot,clean air: immediately you feel cleansed, imme-diately you feel blessed (which is to say special);you feel free

the thought of what it might be like forsomeone who had to live day in, day out in a placethat suffers constantly from drought, and so has towatch carefully every drop of fresh water used(while at the same time surrounded by a sea andan ocean—the Caribbean Sea on one side, theAtlantic Ocean on the other), must never crossyour mind

where the sun always shines and wherethe climate is deliciously hot and dry

You may be the sort of tourist who wouldwonder why a Prime Minister would want an air-port named after him—why not a school, why not ahospital, why not some great public monument?You are a tourist and you have not yet seen a schoolin Antigua,