Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid (b. 25 May 1949), born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson in St. John’s, Antigua, is one of the most important and uncompromising writers of the postcolonial era. Her fiction and nonfiction — spare, rhythmic, incantatory, and furiously intelligent — explore the colonial condition not as a political abstraction but as a lived experience that deforms every relationship it touches: between mother and daughter, between colony and empire, between self and place. She has said that she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid because she needed to write without her family knowing — and the reinvention captures her central theme: the colonial subject’s need to destroy and recreate the self in order to survive.

Life and Career

Kincaid was born in Antigua, then a British colony, and grew up in poverty. Her mother — a dominant, powerful, loving, and suffocating figure — is the central presence in her fiction. At seventeen, Kincaid was sent to New York to work as an au pair — a form of domestic service that she has described as a continuation of the colonial relationship. She never returned to Antigua to live. She educated herself, began writing for The Village Voice and Ingenue, and in 1976 joined The New Yorker, where she became a staff writer and wrote the “Talk of the Town” column for nearly two decades.

At the Bottom of the River (1983) — her debut story collection — established her voice: poetic, repetitive, incantatory prose that owes more to the rhythms of Caribbean oral tradition and biblical language than to the conventions of American short fiction. The stories are about mothers and daughters, about the landscape of Antigua, and about the violence that colonialism inflicts on consciousness.

Annie John (1985) — a coming-of-age novel about a girl growing up in Antigua and her intense, eventually severed relationship with her mother — is her most widely read book and one of the defining novels of Caribbean literature. The mother-daughter relationship in Annie John is rendered with a specificity and emotional intensity that transcends its colonial context: the daughter must separate from the mother to become herself, and the separation is experienced as both liberation and death.

A Small Place (1988) — a short, incandescent essay about tourism and colonialism in Antigua — is Kincaid’s most famous nonfiction work. Written in the second person (“you”), it addresses the tourist directly, stripping away the pleasant fictions that enable wealthy visitors to enjoy a poor country: “You are a tourist, a North American or European — to be frank, white — and not an Antiguan black returning to Antigua from Europe or North America with cardboard boxes of old clothes and food.” The essay was rejected by The New Yorker for being too angry. It remains one of the most devastating critiques of tourism as a form of neocolonialism.

Lucy (1990) — about a young Antiguan woman working as an au pair for a wealthy white family in New York — extended Kincaid’s autobiography into the diaspora. The novel’s treatment of the employer-servant relationship as a recapitulation of the colonial dynamic gives it political force, while Lucy’s fierce intelligence and capacity for cruelty make her one of the most complex narrators in contemporary fiction.

The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) — narrated by Xuela Claudette Richardson, a Dominica-born woman who refuses to love, to be loved, or to reproduce — is Kincaid’s most radical novel. The autobiography of the title is a paradox: the mother whose autobiography this purports to be has no interest in being a mother, and the novel’s refusal of maternal warmth, reproductive obligation, and emotional connection is a formal enactment of the colonial subject’s refusal to participate in the systems that have defined her.

My Brother (1997) — a memoir about her brother Devon Drew’s death from AIDS in Antigua — is her most personal and devastating work of nonfiction. Mr. Potter (2002) — about her absent father — continued the family project. See Now Then (2013) was a novel about a marriage’s dissolution.

Kincaid is also a passionate gardener and garden writer. My Garden (Book): (1999) is a collection of essays about gardening that treats the garden as a colonial space — noting that the plants in Caribbean gardens are imports imposed by European colonisers, and that the act of gardening is inseparable from the history of plantation agriculture.

Themes and Style

Kincaid writes about colonialism as a condition that pervades every aspect of life — language, family, sexuality, landscape, gardening. Her prose style — repetitive, incantatory, building through variation and accumulation rather than conventional narrative progression — creates an experience closer to music than to traditional fiction.

Her central relationship is the mother-daughter bond, which she treats as simultaneously the most intimate and the most colonial of relationships: the mother shapes the daughter, the daughter must resist or be consumed, and the violence of the separation mirrors the violence of decolonisation.

Critical Standing

Kincaid is one of the most important Caribbean writers and one of the most formally innovative writers in English. She is a professor at Harvard and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Key Works

• Annie John (1985)
• A Small Place (1988)
• Lucy (1990)
• The Autobiography of My Mother (1996)
• My Brother (1997)

Collecting Kincaid

At the Bottom of the River (1983, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — first edition brings $40–$100. A Small Place (1988, FSG) brings $30–$80. Annie John (1985, FSG) brings $25–$60.