Kincaid, Jamaica 1949–

Jamaica Kincaid 1949–

Writer

At a Glance…

Became Resentful of Subordination

Became a New Yorker Contributor

A New Voice in Black Literature

Mothers and Daughters, Slavery and Rebellion

Selected writings

Sources

Writer Jamaica Kincaid has been called an “Instant literary celebrity” in the New York Times Magazine for her sudden rise in the world of arts and letters. Kincaid’s intensely personal stories and novels about her homeland of Antigua and her experiences as an emigre have “carved out a singular literary niche,” according to Emily Listfield in Harper’s Bazaar. Listfield added that Kincaid’s “lyrical and intelligent work has won a discriminating following. Kincaid’s books may be brief, but no one could call them small.”

Much of Kincaid’s work is semi-autobiographical, reflecting both the lilting language and the colonial legacy of her island home. Her writings achieve universality through their themes: a daughter’s ambivalent feelings for her parents, a naive expatriate’s confrontations with urban America, a black person’s rebellion against white rule and white liberalism, and a woman finding herself and learning to live with rage. “Jamaica Kincaid just happens to write short, exquisite little novels,” noted Audrey Edwards in Essence. “And while the themes may be... personal, the writing is so eloquent and original, specific in details yet universal in truths, timeless and transforming that it demands attention and respect. Like other Black women for whom writing is both an act of liberation and salvation, Kincaid says she writes to save her life—that if she couldn’t write, she would be one of those people who throw bombs, who spout revolution, who would surely be in jail or perhaps even dead. Or maybe just insane.”

Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on the tiny West Indian island of Antigua. She grew up in poverty, the daughter of a carpenter and a loving but over-bearing mother. Her home in the island’s capital city of St. John had no electricity, running water, or bathroom. As a young girl, Kincaid made trips to a public pump twice a day or more for the water her family used, carrying it home in buckets. She described her youth in the New York Times Magazine as tightly restricted, revolving around her home and her mother. “You grow up in a street and it’s a tiny street,” she said. “The street might not be as big as this yard out there, but it becomes your world, and it’s the only thing you know, it unbelievably well, with this thickness, this heaviness, and you have no interest in anything else. It would not occur to you that there might be something else.”

When Kincaid was nine, the first of her three brothers was

At a Glance…

Born Elaine Potter Richardson, May 25, 1949, on St. John’s, Antigua, West Indies; immigrated to United States, 1966; daughter of a carpenter and Annie Richardson; married Allen Shawn (a composer); children: Annie, Harold. Education: Attended a community college in New York City and Franconia College, New Hampshire. Religion: Methodist.

Writer. Worked as a nanny in Scarsdale, NY, and as an au pair in New York City during the 1960s.

Selected awards: Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1983, for At the Bottom of the River; Ritz Paris Hemingway Award nomination, 1985, for ’Annie John.’

Addresses: Home —Bennington, VT. ’Publisher’ —Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 19 Union Square W., New York, NY 10003.

born. Her Mother’s focus shifted from her to the baby, and the additional mouth to feed only enhanced the family’s poverty. “I was thought I was the only thing my mother truly loved in the world, and when it dawned on me that it wasn’t so, I was devastated,” Kincaid told Harper’s Bazaar. At almost the same time, Kincaid was beginning to mature. Separated from her mother’s love, she took solace in reading, stealing books and hiding them under the front porch of her house. “I was sullen,” she remembered in the New York Times Magazine. “I was always being accused of being rude, because I gave some back chat. I moved very slowly. I was never where I should be. I wasn’t really angry yet. I was just incredibly unhappy.”

Became Resentful of Subordination

Although most of the books she craved came from British authors, Kincaid was gaining an awareness of her status as a subject of white rule. This consciousness of subordination heightened her resentment. The author told the New York Times Magazine that none of her teachers recognized her potential as a student, and none of them offered her any praise or encouragement. “It was a colonial situation, and everybody was angry, but nobody knew why,” she said. “So if I wrote a good essay, my teachers would just say, ’Ha! At least one of you did it right.’ I remember my teachers as very angry people.”

Angry and bitter herself, Kincaid began to feel stifled by life on Antigua. “I didn’t know anyone who was as unhappy as I was,” she stated in Essence. “I felt different, but I didn’t know that was alright. I just wanted to get out. I didn’t know that I would.”

In 1966, at the age of 17, Kincaid saw her opportunity and took it. She left Antigua to work as a nanny for a family in Scarsdale, New York. She told the New York Times Magazine that as the northbound airplane rose into the sky, she looked out the window at the island she was so determined to leave. “I remember seeing it. How beautiful and small it was. I didn’t know it was so small!” she recounted. “From the air it was just this tiny place. And it looked very green, whereas on the ground it looks very brown.”

Kincaid decided to burn all her bridges. She refused to open letters from home and did not write any herself. When she left the job in Scarsdale after only a few months, she did not give a forwarding address. In fact, she would not return to Antigua for 19 years—and by that time she was famous.

Became a New Yorker Contributor

From Scarsdale, Kincaid moved to New York City, where she took a position as an au pair, or live-in nanny, with a wealthy family. For three years she cared for the four children of writer Michael Arlen and attended night classes at a local community college to upgrade her island education. She received a high school equivalency diploma while working for the Arlen family and took photography courses at night. At the time, the idea of becoming a writer, of mining her past experiences and putting them into words, had not even occurred to her.

By 1970 Kincaid was dissatisfied with the menial jobs she was able to hold—including a stint as a secretary in a photography studio—and she accepted a full scholarship to Franconia College in New Hampshire. After only a year at the college, she returned to New York City, dyed her hair blonde, and began to conduct interviews for a magazine for teen-age girls. In 1973 she changed her name from Elaine Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid. The author told the New York Times Magazine that the name change was “a way for me to do things without being the same person who couldn’t do them—the same person who had all these weights.”

Gradually Kincaid made friends among New York’s literary community. One of these acquaintances, George Trow, was a contributor to the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column. Trow began to invite Kincaid along with him as he researched “Talk of the Town” pieces, and he even began to incorporate her observations into his column. Eventually, New Yorker editor William Shawn asked Kincaid to write a “Talk of the Town” piece of her own about the West Indian Day parade held annually in Brooklyn. She submitted the essay to Trow as “notes” from which he could craft a column. Instead, Trow gave the notes to Shawn, who published them in the New Yorker verbatim. “When I saw it, and it was just what I had put on paper,” Kincaid recalled in the New York Times Magazine, “that is when I realized what my writing was. My writing was the thing that I thought. Not something else. Just what I thought.”

Kincaid became a regular contributor to the New Yorker four years before she began to write fiction. “When I first started to write, I had no money and slept on newspapers in an apartment,” she told Essence. “I used my money to buy a desk and a typewriter; I had nothing—no shelf for my books or records. I didn’t even have a chair to sit on, but I had a chair for my desk.” At that desk, Kincaid eventually began to experiment with fiction, and a veritable dam burst when she set free her searing memories of her mother, herself as a child, and the island she had fled with such loathing.

A New Voice in Black Literature

Kincaid’s first story filled a single page of the New Yorker. Published on June 26, 1978, it was called “Girl” and consisted of a string of commands issued by a mother to her daughter. Other short stories followed, and by 1983 Kincaid released her first book-length collection, At the Bottom of the River. Critics such as Ms. correspondent Suzanne Freeman praised the work for its “singsong style” and its “images that are as sweet and mysterious as the secrets that children whisper in your ear.” Village Voice reviewer David Leavitt noted that the stories move “with grace and ease from the mundane to the enormous,” adding, “Kincaid’s particular skill lies in her ability to articulate the internal workings of a potent imagination without sacrificing the rich details of the external world on which that imagination thrives.” The collection won the prestigious Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Kincaid followed At the Bottom of the River with another collection of interrelated stories entitled Annie John. The pieces in Annie John revolve around a young girl in Antigua as she establishes independence from her mother, overcomes a serious illness, and decides to immigrate to England. New York Times Book Review contributor Susan Kenney observed that in the work Kincaid “has packed a lot of valuable insight about the complex relationship between mothers and daughters.”

Ironically, Kincaid’s relationship with her own mother failed to improve substantially over the years. The author told the New York Times Magazine that her mother “has never taken me in as someone she’d want to talk to in the world. It’s really painful because some people might actually be rather proud of me. But it doesn’t enter my mother’s mind.” She continued: “It really is a mystery to me how I came to be the person I am.”

For many years Kincaid has lived in Bennington, Vermont, with her husband, composer Allen Shawn, and her two children. A daughter, Annie, is named after Kincaid’s mother, but Kincaid told Essence that the relationship she shares with her daughter is far different from the one she endured with her own mother. “We have a lot of intimacy, the kind that was never possible with my own mother. I want to see if it’s possible to be a strong person and still raise a healthy daughter.”

Mothers and Daughters, Slavery and Rebellion

Kincaid returned to the subject of familial relationships and the colonial experience in her 1990 novel Lucy. The story is presented as the flashback of a young black woman who leaves the West Indies for the United States to work as an au pair for a wealthy but troubled white family. In a Los Angeles Times review, Richard Eder commented that Kincaid, whose life closely resembles that of her title character, “has gone far beyond autobiography. At best, a biographical or autobiographical protagonist will be vivid and true. Lucy has ascended into fiction: She is vivid, true and necessary. Her voice in this harsh and graceful book tells us in the only possible way—at least while we are reading it—what it is to be a colonized subject, a Third World sensibility in the United States, a child battling with her past and a woman battling with her identity.”

Kincaid, who never changed her Antiguan citizenship, makes universal themes immediate. She addresses such topics as the insights of a black colonial subject in a Third World country, the scars of childhood inflicting wounds on an adult, and the search for identity and self-worth. The author remarked in Harper’s Bazaar, “I’m just one of those pathetic people for whom writing is therapy.”

“I’m someone who writes to save her life,” Kincaid expressed in the New York Times Magazine. “I mean, I can’t imagine what I would do if I didn’t write. I would be dead or I would be in jail because—what else could I do? I can’t really do anything but write. All the things that were available to someone in my position involved being a subject person. And I’m very bad at being a subject person.” The author added that she never wants to be at peace, that she remains acutely aware of—and bitter about—her family’s past as slaves, and she wants to continue to explore her feelings in art. “I’m never satisfied,” she confided in USA Today. “I’m always complaining. And I hope I stay that way.”

Selected writings

At the Bottom of the River (stories), Farrar, Straus, 1983.

Annie John (stories), Farrar, Straus, 1985.

A Small Place (nonfiction), Farrar, Straus, 1988.

Annie Gwenn Lilly Pam & Tulip, Knopf, 1989.

Lucy (novel), Farrar, Straus, 1990.

Contributor to New York magazine, 1976—.

Sources

Books

Black Writers, Gale, 1989.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 43, Gale, 1987.

Periodicals

Atlanta Journal, October 21, 1990.

Essence, May 1991.

Harper’s Bazaar, October 1990.

Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1990.

Ms., January 1984.

New York Times Book Review, January 15, 1984; October 28, 1990.

New York Times Magazine, October 7, 1990.

USA Today, November 8, 1990.

Village Voice, January 17, 1984.

Washington Post, November 2, 1991.

—Anne Janette Johnson