Jamaica Kincaid

Early life

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John's, Antigua, in 1949. She grew up in relative poverty with her mother, a literate, cultured woman and home-maker, and her stepfather, a carpenter. She was very close to her mother until the first of her three brothers were born in quick succession when she was nine years old. After their births, Kincaid felt that she was neglected by her mother, who thereafter focused primarily on the needs of her younger brothers. Kincaid later recalled, “our family money remained the same, but there were more people to feed and to clothe, and so everything got sort of shortened, not only material things but emotional things. The good emotional things, I got a short end of that. But then I got more of things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect.” In a New York Times interview, Kincaid also said that “The way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me.”

Kincaid was educated in the British colonial education system, as Antigua did not gain its independence from England until 1981. Although she was intelligent and frequently tested at the top of her class, her mother removed Kincaid from school at age sixteen to help support the family when her third and last brother was born because her stepfather was ill and could not provide for the family any more. In 1966, her mother sent her to Scarsdale, an upper-class suburb of New York City, when she was only seventeen to work as an au pair. However, after this move, Kincaid refused to send money home. Additionally, "she left no forwarding address and was cut off from her family until her return to Antigua 20 years later.”

Family

In 1979, Kincaid married the composer and Bennington College professor, Allen Shawn, son of The New Yorker's longtime editor William Shawn and brother of actor Wallace Shawn. They divorced in 2002. They have two children: a son, Harold who is the music producer/songwriter Levelsoundz, and a daughter, the singer/songwriter Annie Rosamond. Kincaid is the President of the Levelsoundz fan club, which is the official fan club for her son Harold Shawn.

Kincaid is a keen gardener who has written extensively on the subject. She is also a convert to Judaism.

Career overview

While working as an au pair, Kincaid enrolled in evening classes at a community college. After three years, she resigned from her job to attend Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship. However, Kincaid dropped out of school after one year and returned to New York. In New York City, she started writing for a teenage girls' magazine and changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973 when her writing was first published. She described changing her name as "a way for [her] to do things without being the same person who couldn't do them—the same person who had all these weights". On her choice of first and last name, Kincaid explained that Jamaica is an English corruption of what Columbus called Xaymaca as well as it is the part of the world that she is from and Kincaid appeared to go well with Jamaica. Kincaid became a writer for The Village Voice and Ingénue. Kincaid's short fiction appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, where her novel Lucy was originally serialized. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both praised and criticized for its subject matter because her writing largely draws upon her own life and her tone is often perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that many writers also draw upon personal experience, and thus to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not valid criticism.

The New Yorker

As a result of her budding writing career and friendship with George W. S. Trow, who wrote many pieces for The New Yorker column "The Talk of the Town", Kincaid became acquainted with The New Yorker's legendary editor, William Shawn, who was impressed with Kincaid's writing. He employed her as a staff writer in 1976 and then eventually as a featured columnist for "Talk of the Town", which lasted nine years. William Shawn's tutelage legitimized Kincaid as a writer and proved pivotal to her development of voice. In all, she was a staff writer for The New Yorker for twenty years. She resigned from The New Yorker in 1996 when the editor Tina Brown chose actress Roseanne Barr to guest-edit an issue as an original feminist voice. Even though circulation rose under Brown, Kincaid was critical of Brown's direction in making the magazine less literary and more celebrity-oriented.

Kincaid recalls that when she was a writer for The New Yorker, she would often be questioned, particularly by women, on how she was able to obtain her position. Kincaid felt that these questions were posed to her because she was a young black woman "from nowhere...I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for The New Yorker, I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people."

Talk Stories was later published in 2001 as a collection of “77 short pieces Kincaid wrote for The New Yorker's ‘Talk of the Town’ column between 1974 and 1983”.

Writing

Her novels are loosely autobiographical, though Kincaid has warned against interpreting their autobiographical elements too literally: "Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence." Her work often prioritizes "impressions and feelings over plot development" and features conflict with both a strong maternal figure and colonial and neocolonial influences. Excerpts from her non-fiction book A Small Place were used as part of the narrative for Stephanie Black's 2001 documentary, Life and Debt.

One of Kincaid's contributions according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., African-American literary critic, scholar, writer, and public intellectual, is that:

She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both. I think it's a distinct departure that she's making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does. So that we can get beyond the large theme of racism and get to the deeper themes of how black people love and cry and live and die. Which, after all, is what art is all about.

Themes

Her writing explores such themes as colonialism and colonial legacy, postcolonialism and neo-colonialism, gender and sexuality, renaming, mother-daughter relationships, British and American imperialism, colonial education, writing, racism, class, power, and adolescence. In her most recent novel, See Now Then, Kincaid also first explores the theme of time.

Tone and style

Her writing has been criticized. As works such as At the Bottom of the River and The Autobiography of My Mother use Antiguan cultural practices, some critics say these works employ “magical realism”. “The author claims, however, that [her work] is ‘magic’ and ‘real,’ but not necessarily [works] of ‘magical realism.’” Other critics claim that her style is “modernist” because much of her fiction is "culturally specific and experimental". It has also been praised for its keen observation of character, curtness, wit, and lyrical quality. Derek Walcott, 1992 Nobel laureate, described Kincaid's writing: "As she writes a sentence, psychologically, its temperature is that it heads toward its own contradiction. It's as if the sentence is discovering itself, discovering how it feels. And that is astonishing, because it's one thing to be able to write a good declarative sentence; it's another thing to catch the temperature of the narrator, the narrator's feeling. And that's universal, and not provincial in any way". Susan Sontag has also commended Kincaid's writing for its "emotional truthfulness," poignancy, and complexity.

Influences

Kincaid's writing is largely influenced by her life circumstances even though she discourages readers from taking her fiction too literally. To do so, according to the writer Michael Arlen, is to be "disrespectful of a fiction writer's ability to create fictional characters". Arlen, who would become a colleague at The New Yorker, is whom Kincaid worked for as an au pair and the figure whom the father in Lucy is based on. Despite her caution to readers, Kincaid has also said that: "I would never say I wouldn't write about an experience I've had."

Criticism

Writing in Salon.com, Peter Kurth called Kincaid's work My Brother the most overrated book of 1997.

Reviewing her latest novel, See Now Then in The New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “bipolar," “half séance, half ambush” and “the kind of lumpy exorcism that many writers would have composed and then allowed to remain unpublished. It picks up no moral weight as it rolls along. It asks little of us, and gives little in return.”

List of works

Interviews

Awards and honors