Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 in St. John's, Antigua, as Elaine Potter Richardson. Her mother's family were landed peasants from Dominica. Her maternal grandmother was a Carib Indian. Both parents were ordinary people--Kincaid's father a carpenter and cabinet maker, her mother a homemaker and political activist.  At age 17, before independence on Antigua, she left for the United States (a place she had wanted to go since she was nine) where she worked first as an au pair in Scarsdale (an upscale suburb of New York City), then as a receptionist, and as a magazine writer. She also worked as an au pair on the Upper East Side of New York City. During the years 1966-73, she also earned a high school diploma, attended a community college, studied photography at The New School, and then attended Franconia College in New Hampshire. She changed her name in 1973. She has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1976 and has been publishing fiction and non-fiction since the mid-1970s. She received her first award for writing in 1983, from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1985, she visited Antigua and was apparently shocked and outraged by the 14 years of governmental neglect following independence. That visit led to the writing of A Small Place.

For your response, answer one of the following questions: 

1. See an interview with her in Salon Magazine.  She says in the interview that she doesn't like people who "sell out."  Yet, for some 10 years, Kincaid has been living in Vermont (of all places) and teaching at Bennington College (used to be the most expensive college in the country). Has Kincaid herself sold out? 
2. We learn in the Salon interview that the New Yorker wouldn't publish A Small Place because they thought it was "too angry?" Is it?  If so, what is so powerful, so explosive about her language? How does she express this rage?
3. What specifically is Kincaid saying about Antigua and the British? What did the British do and NOT do? And, (anticipating some reader reactions) "why can't she get beyond all that"?
4. What does she mean when she says, "For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime. And what can that really mean?"
5. What is she saying about history in this statement: "Yes, and in both these places you distorted or erased my history and glorified your own"?
6. How does the speaker strike you? Is this simply an individual opinion or does she at some point seem to speak for the West Indies?