-----------A Small Place
A Small Place gives a fairly straightforward impression of a St. Thomas idea of the British and American tourism and imperialism that forms the island's history and economy. She does little theorizing, and gives fairly full vent to her understandable rancor. If someone doesn't get why oppressed peoples in tourist traps resent tourists, this is a pretty straightforward version.
At the Bottom of the River is a collection of little tales that seem half prose poem, and kind of between magic realism and surrealism. Giving a synopsis of plots doesn't convey why their active. "Girl," for instance, just recounts the directives a little girl receives, as though she were going over them in her head -- which I suppose she is, years later. In "In the Night," a little girl dreams of marrying a motherly woman who will tell her stories.
The lyricism lasts more than the plot or, for me, the sense. Check this:
"In the night, way into the middle of the night, when the night isn't divided like a sweet drink into little sips, when there is no just before midnight, midnight, or just after midnight, when the night is round in some places, flat in some places, and in some places like a deep hole, blue at the edge, black inside, the night-soil men come" (6).
This is typical in its performative sentimentality, its strongly parallel cadence, its lush description, its acceptance of metaphor as little distinguished from what passes for literal.
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