Biography of Jamaica Kincaid

Each of us researched one of the writers we were to discuss and wrote their biography, to get a sense and understanding of their writing style. Here is one example

Jamaica Kincaid

“I write about myself for the most part, and about things that have happened to me. Everything I say is true, and everything is not true. You couldn’t admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence…I aim to be true to something, but it’s not necessarily the facts.”

Jamaica Kincaid was born under the name Elaine Potter Richardson; if that doesn’t sound remotely Caribbean, well, Antigua was held by Britain until 1968. She was born in 1949, when colonial rule was still solid, and much of her writing was influenced by the way English was taught in the schools; contrary to the local habit of ambiguity, the idea was to be properly clear, because that’s how the British did it. She decided, therefore, to be fairly ambiguous, to claim ambiguity as her own, although she claims clarity as well. Kincaid’s writing was further inspired by an increasing remoteness from her mother, and her first book, Annie John, is about this sort of broken relationship and the sense of loss.

Kincaid was a gifted child with a clear talent for writing, which did not help her in a school that didn’t encourage anyone, least of all girls. There was another girl she knew who was also a brilliant writer, and became the character “Gwen” in Annie John; Kincaid got out of Antigua and the other girl didn’t. She’s a supervisor somewhere now, and the boy who beat up Kincaid for doing better than him on an exam is now in the cabinet. It’s a corrupt place, Antigua; in fact, everywhere you go in the West Indies is corrupt. Even the taxi drivers, apparently, at least according to Kincaid. And since there’s no opportunity for anyone to do anything of importance in Antigua, Kincaid left for a job and night classes in New York City.

She won a full scholarship to Franconia university but dropped out after a year, and began to write interviews for a teen girl’s magazine. This was when she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid, in order to “do things without being the same person who couldn’t do them.” Eventually she was noticed by the editor of the New Yorker, and got a staff writing position there in 1976; in 1978 she published her first short fiction in the magazine; in 184 she published her first book, At the Bottom of the River, a collection of vignettes. Annie John came in 1984.

There was a quite a bit of controversy surrounding the publication of A Small Place, given its direct accusations of the moral status of the tourist. Many reviewers said that it was too angry. But Kincaid’s work, while not always concerned about facts, strives to be emotionally honest and expose divisive issues. Thus the subject and tone of Annie John. Kincaid doesn’t remember all the details of her early life, but she remembers the increasing isolation, the crummy public schools, and the feeling of being trapped in a tourist destination, and it comes out in her work. Lyrical and dreamy prose doesn’t always mean soft; lyrics can lament and dream can become nightmare.

But Kincaid is probably happy where she is now, living in Bennington, Vermont, teaching at the local college and at Harvard.

Sources:

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/kincaidJamaica.php

http://www.missourireview.org/content/dynamic/view_text.php?text_id=1947