Content area
Full text
Ludimila Moreira
Special to EM
The novels of Jamaica Kincaid, an established Caribbean author from the islands of Antigua and Barbuda, are known for their intimate language that reveals an extraordinary stylistic approach in exploring and interweaving textures, pains and portraits of different subjective and historical temporalities.
The books already published in Brazil by the Alfaguara label, such as "Autobiografia da minha mãe" and "Agora veja então", together with the recently released "Annie John", from 1985, confirm the author's mastery - recently confirmed as one of the attractions at the São Paulo Book Fair at the end of June - in creating complex and reflective fictional worlds without resorting to linguistic experimentalism and poetic flourishes.
The memoiristic prose, with its dramatic commitment, may at first sound simple due to the choice of themes that revolve around family relationships, but over the course of a language full of characters and their suffering psychic apparatuses, it shows philosophical and political ambitions.
By exploring family cosmogonies and their founding fathers of beliefs, values and traditions, Kincaid also opens up space for intergenerational discussions about cultural inheritance, social change and the intersections between the individual and the collective in the Caribbean islands of Antigua and Dominica.
In a tour of the conquest of adulthood and the revelation of the upheavals of childhood and adolescence, marked by an openly feminist and anti-racist diction, which forged the identity of "Annie John", Jamaica Kincaid unravels the marks of colonialism...