When people write about Jamaica Kincaid’s books, they invariably write about her actual life. I contend that this tendency to reference back to the author is part of an audience management technique that Kincaid employs. She knows that people will try to make correlations to her life, and she uses this as an in-text background strategy. She mentions private and public details that directly relate to her life. For example, her selection of character names, Annie, and Elaine or the Richardson and Potter that comes up in her books. If someone knew her personally in Antigua, I imagine that there would be even more references that are locally known.
How Kincaid presents herself and puts herself inside the fictional text is a kind of autobiography. She is creating an of identity over the course of her literary work but what kind of identity? She continually moves in an every changing identity that becomes more Antiguan then more American. I wonder how her identity will be shaped by her move from the east coast to the west coast?
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