Interview with Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother

My Brother's keeper. By: DeLombard, Jeannine, Lambda Book Report, 10489487, May98, Vol. 6, Issue 10
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
Section: Featured Books
AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMAICA KINCAID
Jamaica Kincaid, the critically acclaimed author of Annie John and Autobiography of My Mother, has written a new book, the National Book Award-naominated, My Brother. Set primarily in her birthplace, Antigua, My Brother is a startlingly frank meditation on sexuality, death, and family that was provoked by her youngest brother's infection with HIV and subsequent death of AIDS.
Jeannine DeLombard: In your book you discuss your efforts to prolong your brothers life through medicine imported from the United States. You also describe how he went on to have unprotected sex afterward. How did it make you feel when you realized that your actions may have allowed him to infect others with HIV?
Jamaica Kincaid: Oh, I felt like an accomplice! It was something that I hadn't thought that would happen; I didn't think that the behavior he exhibited was possible. I felt like I was an accomplice to something criminal, and I debated what to do. I did wonder whether I was assisting something murderous. But then, what happened is, I think he really lost sexual energy. But in any case it turns out that he wasn't really interested in the girls. But it was true that at the moment I realized [her brother could be infecting others], it was frightening to understand that I had helped someone who, in many ways, was that unfeeling about his own self because it was about his own self that he was being unfeeling first.
JD: This book is clearly about illness and dying, but it seemed to me that it also gave you a space to think about sexuality in a way you hadn't done before, at least in print.
JK: I've never been afraid of speaking frankly about sexuality. I came to see very early in my life that it was an important language for a female to be comfortable with, because it is so often used against females in a damning way. I've always felt at ease with the language of sexuality, which, strangely, is a language that people find offensive, but it's only offensive because I think they mean to use our not having public familiarity with this language as a weapon against us. I hope I've always been comfortable with sexuality; if I haven't been, it's not out of fear, it's just because it han't made any sense in the books.
JD: Do you find that by addressing homosexuality, HIV, and AIDS, that you are reaching a different, or broader, audience with this book?
JK: No, as far as I can tell. The one thing is, my audience with African Americans has grown. When I first started to write, I'd go to a reading, and it was overwhelmingly [white]... maybe I d see one face. But as Essence and places like that review my books more, I have a growing audience among African Americans.
I think if I have gay readers, I've always had them. I think the book, for whatever reason, isn't so much about [her brother's] homosexuality as about his inability to be himself, and a part of himself was that he was a man who loved men, or who desired a sexual relationship with men. That he couldn't have felt comfortable with that, even to himself, was, I think, a great part of his inability to live. It really was a suffocation. It's really more about the inability to live. Now, often the inability to live as yourself involves your sexual l don't want to say these words, they don't sound quite right: orientation, identity--but who you can find happiness with is a deep part of your life, a deep part of how you arc made up spiritually. But we all suffer that, or, I should say, we are all vulnerable to that.
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By Jeannine DeLombard
Jeannine DeLombard teaches American and African-American literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book reviews have appeared m the New York Times and the Washington Blade, as well as Lambda Book Report.