Autobiography of My Mother
- Book Review,
by Jamaica Kincaid
Amazon.com
"My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity," writes Jamaica Kincaid in this disturbing, compelling novel set on the island of Dominica. Born to a doomed Carib woman and a Scottish African policeman of increasing swagger and wealth, narrator Xuela spends a lifetime unanchored by family or love. She disdains the web of small and big lies that link others, allowing only pungent, earthy sensuality--a mix of blood and dirt and sex--to move her. Even answering its siren call, though, Xuela never loses sight of the sharp loss that launched her into the world and the doors through which she will take her leave.
From Publishers Weekly
Kincaid's third novel (after Annie John) is presented as the mesmerizing, harrowing, richly metaphorical autobiography of 70-year-old Xuela Claudette Richardson. Earthy, intractably antisocial, acridly introspective, morbidly obsessed with history and identity, conquest and colonialism, language and silence, Xuela recounts her life on the island of Dominica in the West Indies. In Kincaid's characteristically lucid, singsong prose, Xuela traces her evolution from a young girl to an old woman while interrogating the mysteries of her hybrid cultural origins and her parents, who failed to be parents: her mother died during childbirth; her often absent father, a cruel and petty island official, cultivates a veneer of respectability ("another skin over his real skin"), rendering him unrecognizable to his daughter. At 14, Xuela undertakes an affair with one of her father's friends, becomes pregnant and aborts the child. Experiencing that trauma as a rebirth ("I was a new person then"), she inaugurates a life of deliberate infertility, eventually becoming the assistant to a European doctor, whom she later marries. Xuela's Dominica, two generations after slavery, is a "false paradise" of reckless fathers and barren matrilinear relations, of tropical ferment, fecundity, witchcraft and slums, whose denizens resemble the walking dead. With aphoristic solemnity at times evocative of Ecclesiastes, Kincaid explores the full paradoxes of this extraordinary story, which, Xuela concludes, is at once the testament of the mother she never knew, of the mother she never allowed herself to be and of the children she refused to have. 75,000 first printing; major ad/ promo; author tour; translation, first serial, dramatic rights: Wylie, Aitken & Stone. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Kincaid, who triumphed with novels like Annie John ( LJ 4/1/85), here tells the story of a 70-year-old West Indian woman who looks back over the relationships that enriched her life. The 75,000-copy first printing shows that the publisher expects this work to go far.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The rage of Kincaid's essay A Small Place (1988) is distilled here into a novel of contained fury. A Caribbean woman tells of her search for identity in a wasteland destroyed by conquest and slavery. Her mother was Carib, one of the last remnants of a vanishing people ("My mother had died when I was born, unable to protect herself in a world cruel beyond ordinary imagining, unable to protect me" ). Her father is part African, part Irish, corrupt and powerful; he doesn't love his daughter. She's without family, country, landscape, religion. Home is danger and treachery. History is defeat; it has left her people forever foreign, marginalized, other. And history cannot be overcome ("I then and now had and have no use for redemption" ). Alone, she's the archetypal hero whose search for her mother leads her to discover herself. She begins with her body, which she loves in all its sensuality, and she fuses the erotic with the deliberate conscious knowledge of who she is as an individual person, separate from any group or nation. Kincaid's language is stark, nearly monosyllabic, as the narrator makes herself in flesh and mind. The word not is used over and over like a beating echo for what is lost ("It was not nothing" ). Absence is palpable. The sentences twist and turn with surprise and bitterness. More argument than novel, it's the drama of the personal voice that makes it a spellbinding narrative. Not innocent, not reverential, this disturbing story is lyrical, brave, defiant. Hazel Rochman
About the Author
In a life not unlike those she writes about, Elaine Potter Richardson was born and raised on Antigua, a tiny island in the West Indies. Single-handedly raised by her struggling mother, she never knew her biological father. Brought up on a colonized island, Kincaid grew to harbor contempt toward the British regime, leery of the control they had. Having grown distant from her mother, she left home at 17 to become an au pair in New York, dyed her hair blonde, and changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid. She broke off all contact with her mother, took photography classes at the New School and made new friends. A few years later she entered the literary world with her first published article in Ingenue, an interview of Gloria Steinem. This led to her writing music critiques for the Village Voice. While accompanying a friend, George W.S. Trow, as he researched pieces for the New Yorker column "Talk of the Town," she started taking notes on events in the city. Trow passed her notes on to William Shawn, then the editor of the New Yorker, who spotted her talent and decided to print the notes as a piece. He went on to publish her first piece of fiction, an emotionally intense one-page monologue called "Girl," in 1978. A year later, Kincaid married his son Allen Shawn, a composer. She continued to write for the New Yorker until recently, when she left, unhappy with changes brought on by the new editor. Her first collection, At the Bottom of the River, was published in 1983, and soon after she began gaining a following as one of the decade's most notable new writers.
Often compared to other prominent authors such as Toni Morrison and V.S. Naipaul, Kincaid has continued to successfully produce acclaimed pieces of work, winning over critics and audiences alike. At the Bottom of the River received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1985 she published Annie John, introducing readers to her unique and luminous prose that has set her apart from other novelists. A Small Place(1988) and Lucy (1991) followed shortly after. The Autobiography of My Mother, which took Kincaid five years to write, has received wide recognition, shooting to bestseller lists across the country, and is regarded as her finest novel yet. When Kincaid is not busy raising her two children or obsessing in her garden, her favorite pastime, she is teaching both fiction writing and English at Harvard one semester a year.
Kincaid has risen from an economic and racially challenged childhood to one of the most revered writers of our time. Using her experience and passion, she writes moving and unsettling stories about human suffering, politics, power, and the relationships tying them together. She has said that she writes "to make sense of it all" to herself, not directing her work at anyone in particular. No matter, Kincaid's contribution to the literary world will no doubt have an everlasting effect on those who read her work.
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