Kunapipi XXVI:1

PAUL SHARRAD
Cloth and Self-Definition in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

Out of the 250 citations for Jamaica Kincaid in a database, apart from basic book reviews, most entries refer to flowers and plants, some to a creole voice, a few to mother-daughter relations, the obligatory pieces on Wordsworth and Milton in relation to Lucy and one or two to the female body. All these are perfectly reasonable pathways towards understanding Kincaid’s writing, but I want to look at another, clearly uninspected facet of her work. The slowly filling out photograph of a West Indian woman in her finery of patterned skirt, plain blouse, scarf and headscarf that provides the cover and chapter design in The Autobiography of My Mother indicates, as Kincaid’s story ‘Biography of a Dress’ suggests, that part of the quest for identity running through her work is figured in terms of clothing.1 This should not be surprising, since Kincaid was herself sent to work for the local dressmaker as a child (Ferguson), something reflected in sections of her earlier work, At the Bottom of the River; ‘Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; … when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash’ (‘Girl’ 3); ‘so is my life to be like an apprenticeship in dressmaking, a thorny path to carefully follow or avoid?’ (‘Wingless’ 23).2

Cloth and clothing remain important motifs in Kincaid’s other work as well. In her paradoxical self-construction through autobiography that is also a ‘self-exorcism’ (Ferguson 162) of confession and self concealment in fictive distancing, the writer marks relationships with dress. In Annie John, the girl narrator has a trunk under her bed where her mother has stored all the embroidered covers and smocked dresses of her first few years (20). Later however, Annie finds a bright piece of cotton and suggests it would look good on both herself and her mother, but is told, ‘Oh no. You are getting too old for that…. You just cannot go around the rest of your life looking like a little me’ (26). She gets her dress, but her mother chooses another, and whenever either are worn, Annie feels ‘bitterness and hatred, directed not so much towards my mother as toward, I suppose, life in general’ (26). When Annie grows up and is about to leave Antigua for England, the last thing she does is dress; she changes from ‘an around-the-yard dress of my mother’s’ into a blue skirt and blouse (135).