The Autobiography of My Mother
By Jamaica Kincaid
reviewed by K.T. Mcguire
The Autobiography of My Mother
By Jamaica Kincaid
reviewed by K.T. Mcguire
his beautiful new novel by Jamaica Kincaid is unusual in its lyrical rendering of a cruel and barren existence. Ms. Kincaid is a skillful and sensual writer. She can brutalize the reader with naturalistic accounts of base events, or tenderly paint the secret longings of a human heart.
Kincaid's usual setting is the Caribbean, and this time the island is Dominica. But this paradise is enjoyed only by the privileged, the heirs of colonialism and those who do their bidding. To all others, the sun is an unrelenting and unpitying mistress.
The story here, as in Kincaid's other novels, "Lucy" and "Annie John," deals with the daughter of a vanquished people and the rancor that rises in her heart. In the previous novels, the mother is all powerful and the heroines have somehow fallen from grace. Their descent and self-imposed exile is precipitated by emotional abandonment. The daughters' ultimate salvation rests in their reevaluation of the mother's love and their ability to transform it into self-love. But in this book there is no such redemption.
The mother of the title dies giving birth to narrator Xuela Claudette Richardson; her life extinguished before her love can redeem. Xuela is tossed into a life lacking in love and compassion . Left in the care of her policeman father, she tells that she is placed by him "into the jaws of death on several occasions." She writes, "He suffered no consequences for his behavior; he just treated people in this way....it was well thought out, this way he had of causing suffering; he was part of a whole way of life on the island which perpetuated pain."
Xuela travels from one treacherous and loathsome situation to another. At her birth, her father places her in the care of the woman he pays to wash his clothes. She says, "Ma Eunice was not unkind; she treated me just the way she treated her own children...in a place like this, brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is something freely given." After receiving a heart wrenching letter from Xuela, her father retrieves her only to place her in danger once again. The father 's new wife is straight out of Grimm's fairy tales, "wishing me dead was an automatic response; she had never loved me, she had never wished to see me alive in the first place, and so when she saw me, looked at me and realized who I was, she could only wish me dead." The policeman next places his daughter to board with Madame and Monsieur LaBatte. "Monsieur Jacques LaBatte, Jack, as I came to call him in the bitter and sweet dark of the night. He, too, was a man of no principles, and this did not surprise or disappoint me, this did not make me like him more of less." Once again, tragedy results.
Bit by bit, Xuela, in a world where external events are out of her control becomes a narcissistic anti-heroine. In willful attempts at self-preservation, she continually defines her confusing world and then negates or destroys it. Her only power is the power to observe and reject. She notes, "Observing any human being from infancy, seeing someone come into existence...must be a wonderful thing to behold...the pleasure for observer, the beholder, is an invisible current between the two, observed and observer, beheld and beholder, and I believe that no life is complete, no life is really whole, without this invisible current, which is in many ways the definition of love. No one observed and beheld me, I observed and beheld myself; the invisible current went out and it came back to me I came to love myself in defiance, out of despair..."
Throughout the narrative of this difficult heroine, her absent mother assumes mythic and tragic proportions. We are told that Xuela's mother was one of the last of the Caribe people, "my mother's people were balanced precariously on the ledge of eternity, waiting to be swallowed up in the great yawn of nothingness..." The mother appears almost Christ-like in Xuela's dreams, "I never saw her face... I saw only the back of her feet, coming down, and always I woke up before I could see her going up again." But there is no resurrection here.
Ms. Kincaid projects an ethnically pure Caribe mother as the novel's forsaken Eden. Indeed, in the absence of her presence, the weeds of patriarchal oppression have defined and destroyed, leaving a paradise lost forever with only a legacy of bitter fruit.
Autobiography of My Mother, is a haunting parable that needs to be read more than once. In a paraphrase of Xuela's words, this account of the person who was never allowed to be, an account of the person she did not allow herself to become.
