Jamaica Kincaid
Lucy
Kincaid, born in Antigua in 1949
Antigua
Home and the world/the Caribbean
and the US: Transnational spaces
• Each space is structured by the other, reconstructed
through the work of dreams, memory and history
• Intertwining of past and present
• Entering newness and finding it uncomfortable (like
undergarments) and drab (like tourist sites of one’s
fantasy); the old/the past re-membered and relived
through the experience of the new—pp. 3-4.
• Feeling cold, inside and out; outside the tropical
• The idea of homesickness worked out through
memory—grandmother’s food; the sun; calypso; the
sea; smell of clove, lime rose oil—through recurrent
images
Home
• But the novel destabilizes the meaning and
significance of home
• Home: filled her with rage; sadness; discontent;
not a place of return
• (home not a recourse for feminist politics)
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• Home as the place of the Mother, who is also the
past—distancing; refusal of her love, refusal to be
her echo; my past was my mother (90); to be not
like her
Mother/Mariah
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Mother gives birth to her; Mariah tutors her about the world
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Unopened letters: “I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her”
(91).
She is her only true love—p. 132: “For ten of my twenty years, half of my lifem I
had been mourning the end of a love affair, perhaps the only true love in my
whole life I would ever know” (132)
Betrayer—for father and sons
Mother’s desire for her to be a good girl—disobedient daughter—”I am not like my
mother…”: p. 123; expectations of a good girl: p. 133
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Mariah’s desire to rescue her; Mariah/mother (58)
Family: power to control; untruths (universal) the picture no one would take (80)
—critique of whiteness/the bourgeois white family, liberal, sensitive (fairy tales;
marshland), yet privileged (IMP: p. 72-73)—blue eyes as beautiful, in books (39);
Dinah (57-58)
Feminist solidarity and racial
difference
• pp. 48; 40-41.
• Peggy and Lucy—friendship in difference;
“you’re from Ireland, are you?” (62-63)
Migration and the (un)making of the
self
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Outsider’s perspective
Gauguin—similarities and difference p. 95
“I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different
from what you are familiar with…”
Doubled oppression: as woman and immigrant woman (p. 21: an immigrant girl who has her throat cut in the
subway)
Race and class—diners and servers (32); the motif of servitude structural
“I was a young woman from the fringes of the world, and when I left home I had wrapped around my shoulders
the mantle of a servant” (95)
Slavery remembered/domestic work//affective, care work
Her maid’s room reminiscent of a ship carrying cargo: “But I was not cargo…” (7)
Migration of the postcolonial subject:
Colonial history: image of the “stony-face, sour-mouth woman” on postage stamps (136)
Colonial education and the (un)making of the self—daffodils poem (the daffoldils nightmare—p.18, then p. 30: “I
had cast her beloved daffodils in a scene she had never considered, a scene of conquered and conquests; a scene
of brutes masquerading as angels and angels protrayed as brutes”)
Words and meanings—minions, dominion (37) “’Minions’. A word like that would haunt someone like me…”
“Where in the West Indies are you from?” (65)
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
French post-Impressionist painter
William Wordsworth, “Daffodils”
(1804)
Against the grain of feminist coming of
age narratives?
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Lucy’s point of view; her subjectivity; her rage; is she a reliable narrator?
A reader: “In books I had read…”
“…my future, a gray blank, an overcast seascape on which rain was falling and no
boats were in sight.” (p. 6)
“If I had had to draw a picture of my future then, it would have been a large gray
patch surrounded by black, blacker, blackest” (p. 6).
“uniform made of cloth or the one made of circumstances” (93)
Au pair/nurse
Who is a nurse (92)
Against all odds: birth, position—134-5
identity papers (148)
books, camera
own bed from own money
the blank book vs men’s lives that could be found in the pages of books (95)
pp. 163-164