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At heart Jamaica Kincaid's work is not about the charm of a Caribbean childhood, though her first and best-known novel, Annie John (1983), may leave this impression. Nor is it about colonialism, though her angry, book-length essay, A Small Place (1988), accuses the reader of continuing the exploitation begun by Columbus. Nor, finally, is Kincaid's work about black and white in America, though her second novel, Lucy (1990), runs a rich white urban family through the shredder of a young black au pair's rage.
At heart Kincaid's work is about loss, an all but unbearable fall from a paradise partially remembered, partially dreamed, a state of wholeness in which things are unchangeably themselves and division is unknown. This paradise has been displaced by a constantly shifting reality, which is revealed to the reader through the rhythms and repetitions of Kincaid's prose. In the long, seemingly artless, listlike sentences, the reader is mesmerized into Kincaid's world, a world in which one reality constantly slides into another under cover of the ordinary rhythms of life.
The sense of betrayal, which permeates Kincaid's work, is explored first in the treachery of a once-adored mother. In Kincaid's first book, the collection of surrealistic short stories At the Bottom of the River (1983), a girl yearns for an impossible return to the perfect world that existed before the "betrayal" of birth and for union with a mother figure who will "every night, over and over,... tell me something that begins, 'Before you were born."(1) The yearning for a lost maternal paradise, however, is inextricably linked to betrayal, and elsewhere in At the Bottom of the River the mother is shown methodically transforming herself into a serpent, growing "plates of metal-colored scales on her back" and flattening her head "so that her eyes, which were by now ablaze, sat on top of her head and spun like two revolving balls" (BR, 55).
In Annie John, a more conventionally narrative coming-of-age book, the treachery of a once-adoring mother is spelled out. As the child begins to reach puberty, the mother suddenly turns on her. The mother who has previously seen her daughter as beautiful and perfect, now sees the child as a mass of imperfection and immorality. At the same time that...