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inally, is it about black and white in America. At heart, her work is about loss” (466). In other words, to read Annie John solely on a polemic level is to miss much of the artistic texture and universal themes that give life to her prose. For her work on Annie John, Kincaid was selected as one of three finalists for the 1985 international Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. In addition, Kincaid is a recipient of the Anifield-Wolf Book Award and The Lila-Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Award. Kincaid also received a nomination for the 1997 National Book Award for My Brother, a gripping chronicle of her relationship with her youngest brother, during his losing battle with AIDS. Despite the praise and numerous honors, there are those who condemn Kincaid’s work, specifically A Small Place, for its “ill-chosen rage.’ A Small Place, is “a short but powerful book that can best be described as an anti-travel narrative” (Dictionary of Literary Biography, 135). In this 81 page, slim volume of nonfiction, Kincaid examines the brutal effects of Antiguan colonial oppression and relentlessly indicts its white perpetrators. She writes accusatorily and directly to her white readers: “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? Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault”. (34-35). Girl,” the first and probably most important piece of the collection, highlights Kincaid’s evocative use of language, as she explores themes of enculturation and the “patriarchal politics of oppression”