Jamaica Kincaid: A Literary Companion

Abstract

Abbott reviews Jamaica Kincaid: A Literary Companion by Mary Ellen Snodgrass.

Publisher: McFarland, NC, 2008, $39.95.
ISBN: 978 0 7864 3580 7. McFarland Literary Companions, 6

The subject, born in Antigua, Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, was the oldest child of Annie Victoria Richardson Drew who married the carpenter and cabinet maker, John Drew, after her daughter was born. The child's biological father, a man she never knew, was a cab driver and chauffeur named Roderick Nathaniel Potter. He abandoned Annie two months before her daughter was born. Her mother's marriage to Drew produced three sons. Annie Drew, who was born in Dominica, shipped her daughter back and forth from Antigua to Dominica, sometimes for schooling, sometimes for punishment and sometimes to escape black magic or obeah, a Caribbean form of voodoo.

Despite being passed back and forth in the family, Elaine demonstrated an excellent mind, always the best student in any school she attended. Elaine had an intense love of books and reading. Her love for books led to hoarding them, stealing them, unable to part with any book she had read. She would hide away from her mother, reading books in secret instead of performing chores or helping to look after her younger brothers. When the author was 15, her mother, tired of her daughter's lack of cooperation, made a bonfire of her daughter's books and set them on fire in the yard.

At the age of 16, to help support her family, Elaine moved to the United States to become an au pair , or what she would later define as a "servant". It would be over 20 years before she would return to Antigua. Relocated in Scarsdale in Westchester County, New York, Elaine felt more isolated and abandoned than ever. Her relationship with her mother was poisonous. At the age of nineteen she left her au pair position and became a governess to the children of writer Michael Arlen in Manhattan. She studied photography at the New York School for Social Research in 1969, while educating herself by reading American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara.

Working at the teen magazine Ingenue in 1972, one day on the elevator to her office, she met the satirist Michael O'Donoghue, a writer for Saturday Night Live . O'Donoghue introduced Elaine to George Trow, an essayist and playwright and a founding editor of National Lampoon . This connection was pivotal in the young author's life, as Trow became her mentor and provided her entryway into New York literary haunts, including The New Yorker. The young author became best friends with fellow New Yorker writer Ian "Sandy" Frazier, a man she would later call "my only true brother".

Her family did not approve of her writing, and in 1973 Elaine Richardson changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid to shield her identity. Kincaid became a regular contributor to The New Yorker , working for William Shawn, the magazine's longest-serving editor and a shaper of young writers. She would later marry his son, Allen, a composer and professor, and the two would have two children together and live and teach in Bennington, Vermont. Meanwhile, Kincaid contributed essays to New Yorker's "The Talk of the Town". In 1978, Kincaid published her first book, a short story collection titled At the Bottom of the River . Kincaid would describe her style of writing as "autobiographical reminiscence about life".

Kincaid's fictional and non-fiction books are entirely drawn from her own experiences and are tightly interwoven with her familial relationships. Kincaid's mother plays an essential part in many of the author's works. Her first novel Annie John is about growing up, a story written about and for children. A later work, Lucy, continues the theme started in her first novel. A Small Place , described by critics as a jeremiad, is a frank look at the evils of colonialism, the ugliness of tourism, and the sickening results that come from foreign occupation and the enslavement of African peoples. This book, an angry evaluation of life in modern-day Antigua, catapulted Kincaid from being known as a capable writer who established a niche for herself in writing of Caribbean life into a writer more similar in flavor to William Faulkner or Sherwood Anderson, a writer who could capture a particular region of the world and lay bare its faults and the failings of its inhabitants.

Kincaid's subsequent novels, The Autobiography of My Mother , My Brother , and Mr Potter mix life experience with fiction marinaded in a bittersweet jerk sauce. For example, My Brother is the account of the death from AIDS of Kincaid's youngest brother, Devon "Sugar" Drew, a young man who lived for sex, music, gardening and marijuana. A man in his 30s, Kincaid last saw her brother when he was three. She watched as her mother tended to him, sacrificing everything for his care. Kincaid found nothing to praise in her mother's behaviour, claiming her mother loved her children most when they were dying, when they were helpless, when they literally could not live without her. Jamaica Kincaid's mother did not know how to relate to an independent, successful, intelligent daughter. Kincaid's mother could only give totally of herself in times of trouble, unable to share in another's triumph, she thrived on and passionately embraced martyrdom.

Snodgrass presents her subject in full view, every theme in each story and novel is given its space. Arranged alphabetically, these themes include death, injustice, misogamy, mothering, reading, self-esteem and sex. This work begins with a detailed, richly annotated chronology that is essential reading for understanding Kincaid's background and literary motivations. Additionally, every work is given its own entry, including non-fiction works like A Small Place and My Garden . Each entry includes a section on Further Reading. A glossary describes unique Caribbean words, ideas, plants and foods. A bibliography is included that carefully documents Kincaid's works in The New Yorker and other magazines and includes her books as well. This is the section to find reviews and criticisms of Kincaid's major works. A detailed index can guide the reader through the topics discussed in the work. This is a very well constructed literary companion on important writer.

Reviewed by: Randy L. Abbott, Head Reference Librarian, University of Evansville Libraries, Evansville, Indiana, USA