Kunapipi XXVI:2

ALAN SHIMA
No Beginning, No End: The Legacy of Absence in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

A sea is large. If placed in the middle of it, you will feel the pull and tug of waves, each mounting swell adding volume to what is before and beneath you. Jamaica Kincaid’s writing can be a sea. Her narratives unfurl in the heave and thrust of thought curling back upon itself. Incidental descriptions may have the simple surface of account; but think twice because the emotional undertow of her work will take you elsewhere.1

In narrating the accidental and unavoidable events that shape the consciousness of her characters, Kincaid frequently uses the idiom of poetic imagery. This versification of views estranges the familiar, making experiences indelible and beyond common recognition. This lyrical quality in Kincaid’s writing is not driven by a metaphysical or transcendental impulse. Instead, her narratives are motivated by everyday concerns, ones that have precise locations and specific contexts. Primarily situated in the minds and migrating genealogies of culturally split subjects, Kincaid’s texts recall a disputed and undecided Caribbean history, reformulated in references that loop from the muted past to an open-ended present. Similar to her contemporaries Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff, and Caryl Phillips, Kincaid places personal and political history in direct contact, recollecting the unrestricted privileges and private abuses that wrought the New World into an extended set of Old World interests.

From her earliest short fiction, collected in At the Bottom of the River (1983), to her most recently published novel, Mr. Potter (2002), Kincaid voices the way a mind, a perceptive mind, understands (or misunderstands) a world that often refuses to acknowledge it. This critical reflection is placed in relation to what might be called the mystery of identity and its withheld anterior. Thematically, this issue is addressed in the form of an immemorial, pre-colonial origin irreversibly altered by the logic of domination. For Kincaid’s female narrators, there are no easy solutions to the problems that evolve under such circumstances. There are, however, choices to be made. If the vanquished cannot re-write a past that has disinherited them, Kincaid’s first-person narratives suggest that a person can invent a present, devise a reckoning that need not be paid in guilt and violence; that individuals can venture beyond the myth of race and nation and the other myths that have made people strange to themselves. It is this dimension of Kincaid’s work that I wish to focus on.