See Now Then

Recent Review

 

 

 How does Jamaica Kincaid's veiled self-reference influence the reading of her new book, "See Now Then"?

All of this is relevant because Kincaid, the author of more than a dozen books, is a public literary figure. And seen through the lens of some basic but widely known facts of her life, reading "See Now Then" becomes quite a different experience.        

                                                                                      Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

Even though many of the most recent reviews of Jamaica Kincaid's See Now Then are favorable, readings of her new book are influenced by the autobiographical self-referencing as seen in the above quotation. Hector Tobar describes this reading as disturbing once he realizes the presence of similarity to the author's family,"by the time I reached that last passage, the domestic complications of See Now Then began to lose their entirely magical and allegorical qualities and feel more like the nastiness of a real marriage." His sense of the similarity between the author's life and the artistic work, causes him to conduct some research about her personal life. In his reading, knowing that the family composition and marital disagreement are close or shared with the author interrupts his ability to read the work as art (literary prose) alone. 

In fact he recommends readers who do not know about her life to avoid the details and warns them to stop reading his review because, "you would enjoy it more." The parallels that he points out between the character Mrs. Sweet and the author Kincaid are that she gardens, lives in small town New England, and the family composition are the same, which taken alone are not so significant. For him, the most impacting similarity is that as the husband and wife trade insults, the physical attributes commented upon are similar to those of the author and her ex-husband's physical appearance. He said the resemblances were disconcerting and he began to feel "voyeuristic." Later, the indications about the father's aggressive feelings toward the son and his possessiveness towards the daughter seem to "express a very personal, private hurt." Tobar concludes that the book deserves to be read as fiction, and yet he clearly cannot avoid making connections. He reads it as a veiled  memoir. Certainly, this is a favorable review and yet he concludes:"There are two ways to read Jamaica Kincaid's mesmerizing new novel, See Now Then.The first is the way any work of art should be read: by simply absorbing what's on the page. This is how I read the first two-thirds of See Now Then."

What is important about this review is that even though the reviewer did not know much about Jamaica Kincaid's personal life before reading her novel, he was still influenced by the presence of the autobiographical within her writing.When I heard audio recorded readings of sections of this work, I noted that the audiences laughed at what seemed to be insider jokes; for example, comments that could be about her daughter and son's behavior (but presented in this fiction) has a familiar feeling. For readers who are familiar with the author's previous works, the influence of her autobiography will likely be more forceful.

Jamaica Kincaid's "See Now Then" is Published

Anticipating Reactions to the Autobiographical in Jamaica Kincaid's See Now Then

( Elisabetta A. Villa, Getty Images / February 1, 2013 )

Jamaica Kincaid at Festival Delle Letterature Di Roma 2010

Jamaica Kincaid's new book is soon to arrive at my doorstep in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I've read and heard bits and pieces of it over the last two years. Finally, I can read it to determine how the autobiographical influences the telling of her story. The first review I encounter comments on this very same issue. How do you read this book? Is it possible to read it as fiction or does Kincaid's life come into the story so much that the autobiographical begins to tell its own story?

Notice Hector Tobar's ,( Los Angeles Times) comments:

(February 1, 2013, 4:00 a.m.)

"There are two ways to read Jamaica Kincaid's mesmerizing new novel, See Now Then. The first is the way any work of art should be read: by simply absorbing what's on the page. This is how I read the first two-thirds of See Now Then."

See Now Then
A Novel
Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 192 pp., $24

It becomes impossible to avoid the personal life story of Kincaid during his well-intended reading: READ AS ART. 

Tobar who has little knowledge about Kincaid's personal life but he becomes too tempted to verify details and consequently, does some research and reports on the findings. His research changes the reading from simply ART to Art -Influenced-Autobiography and it completely changes the meaning of her work. He writes that "All of this is relevant because Kincaid, the author of more than a dozen books, is a public literary figure. And seen through the lens of some basic but widely known facts of her life, reading "See Now Then" becomes quite a different experience." Similarities about the physical appearance of Mrs. Sweet to Kincaid and Mr. Sweet to her former husband, Allen Shawn begin to create another layer of meaning in the work- it begins to feel "uncomfortably voyeuristic"  as he reads.  I await the arrival of my copy and my own sneak peek  into Jamaica Kincaid's life.

Jamaica Kincaid Girl Audio Recording

I imagine that Jamaica Kincaid lived in a house such as the above when she was a child.

Jamaica Kincaid takes her children to the school bus in Vermont.

Jamaica Kincaid reading (photo credit and link to Girl text)

 Listen...to Jamaica Kincaid's voice...

Kincaid reads her short story "Girl"

Memoir

"If you were to write an autobiography, you would have to spend a lot of time at the courthouse, looking up the date your great-grandfather was born, what year your father bought the house on Elm Street. The research for a memoir can be done in an easy chair. Close your eyes and try to recapture the moment you bought your first car, learned you were pregnant, met the President or wobble down the street on a two-wheeler."http://www.squidoo.com/memoir-examples

Royce Carlton Caribbean novelist Jamaica Kincaid will address the Grinnell College class of 2012 at the College’s 166th Exercises of Commencement, on at 10 a.m. Monday, May 21, on Central Campus. (See previous post for YouTube/Recording)
Kincaid, known as a “significant voice in contemporary literature,” is the author of  At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, A Small Place, Lucy, Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, and other works.   Her “highly personal, stylistic, and honest writings” are considered loosely autobiographical from her upbringing in Antigua, with strong images of “tenuous mother-daughter relationships amid themes of anticolonialism.”  Kincaid was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 for her 

Jamaica Kincaid's agent for speaking engagements is Royce Carlton. This photograph is part of the publicity package. 

Jamaica Kincaid at Grinnell College

Jamaica Kincaid's Grinnell College commencement speech addresses the liberal college's mission statement:

The College aims to graduate women and men who can think clearly, who can speak and write persuasively and even eloquently, who can evaluate critically both their own and others' ideas, who can acquire new knowledge, and who are prepared in life and work to use their knowledge and their abilities to serve the common good.

Caribbean novelist Jamaica Kincaid will address the Grinnell College class of 2012 at the College’s 166th Exercises of Commencement, on at 10 a.m. Monday, May 21, on Central Campus.

Jamaica Kincaid's New Novel Resease

Article from Fall Fiction:

It has been 10 years since Jamaica Kincaid’s last novel, but on September 4, 2012, she’ll be back with a slender book about a family in crisis, See Now Then (FSG).

Kincaid, who was born in Antigua, makes several nods to literary history in this family drama: The Sweets live in the Shirley Jackson house in Vermont, for one. This mismatched couple has two children, Heracles and Persephone, who are the main observers of their parents’ crumbling marriage.

Known for her penetrating portrayals of the human mind and heart, here the former New Yorker writer “evokes the bitterness of love gone sour and turned to contempt, the intensity of the bonds between parents and children, and the profound unknowability of all individuals,” says the publisher. We’re eager to get a peek at this one come September.

Aloud Program Podcast features Jamaica Kincaid

Aloud
presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Title: Jamaica Kincaid, "See, Now, Then"
Participants: Jamaica Kincaid
In conversation with Brighde Mullins
Program Date: 4/26/2011
Program length: 01:18:03
Media Type: MP3

Jamaica Kincaid and Lyrics

Monday, October 10, 2011
Performance by composer Su Lian Tan based Jamaica Kincaid's text: "a rare and wonderful opportunity to hear a recent work by composer Su Lian Tan, based on a text by Jamaica Kincaid."



"Jamaica’s Songs, commissioned by Middlebury College, was premiered in 2000 as part of the College’s bicentennial celebrations. Many musicians who have performed this cycle, as well as audience members, find a great solace in its expression. They have remarked, and often, that they find in these songs a channel for mixed emotions regarding their mothers, almost a way out of them. Strong negative feelings as well as longing and pure childlike love emanate from the text by Jamaica Kincaid. She wrote these songs for me the year her mother died and I felt it very necessary to help in her process of healing. My heart went out to her, as heard sometimes in the instrumental writing, this most gifted and powerful of writers. I have meandered in Jamaica’s garden in Vermont with pleasure, as I have found the courage to grow in her company."
-Su Lian Tan (The Fortnightly newsletter.)

Jamaica Kincaid and visual image

Jamaica Kincaid shares that her autobiographically based novel, Annie John was inspired by seeing a postcard painting "Kept In" by Edward Lamson Henry's (1889),which recalled strong memories of her childhood in Antigua.

Washington College/April 11, 2009

Jamaica Kincaid Talk

Jamaica Kincaid reading:

A reading by Jamaica Kincaid from Heyman Center for the Humanities on Vimeo.

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"I took a creative writing class with her. She is a wonderful, at times nutty woman. Her lectures (often meandering stories with value) are wholly worthwhile. If you aren't drawn to writing or intent on developing your own voice, this isn't the class for you."

Jamaica Kincaid Event

An Evening with Jamaica Kincaid (Blog Repost)

University of Southern California

Monday, March 19, 2012 : 7:00pm to 9:00pm

University Park Campus
University Club
Banquet Room

Free

RSVP

Join the Master of Professional Writing Program for an evening of readings and conversation with Jamaica Kincaid, the award-winning author of Annie John and Lucy.

JAMAICA KINCAID-- novelist, essayist, travel writer, memoirist

Jamaica Kincaid is the author of a dozen books of literary nonfiction and fiction, including: Mr. Potter; My Brother; Autobiography of My Mother; Lucy; Annie John; and At The Bottom of the River. Her forthcoming novel See Now Then will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2012. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Hebrew, and many other languages. Her influence as a writer is of extraordinary breadth and reach. “Kincaid is probably the most important West Indian woman writing today,” according to Frank Birbalisingh (Contemporary African American Novelists). Kincaid grew up in Antigua and came of age as writer in New York. Themes of gender, colonialism, and class all inform her writing. Her work is highly lyrical as well as sharp and un-sentimental, a combination that has made her one of the most interesting writers of our time. Kincaid’s honors include memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix Femina Etranger (France) along with eleven honorary degrees. For over twenty years Kincaid was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where her legendary short prose texts for “The Talk of The Town” later appeared as the collected volume Talk Stories. Kincaid is currently on leave from Harvard University, where she has taught since 1992 in African American Studies and in the Department of English. She is currently the Josephine Olp Weeks Chair and Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.

mpw@dornsife.usc.edu

 

http://www.facebook.com/events/349902208376843/

Jamaica Kincaid Interview

DNA photo

Considering the abuse you faced in your childhood, how important is conflict in the life of a writer?
I don’t know what’s important. I think each individual must have something that’s important to them. Perhaps the absence of conflict makes one a writer. Perhaps if I hadn’t had conflict in my life, I might have been a better writer, I don’t know. But my childhood in Antigua has influenced my work.


Do you regret never having had a formal education?
If I had had a formal education, I wouldn’t have been a writer at all. I might have become a scholar. If I had a proper training, a doctorate, say, I wouldn’t have become an artist.


Have you come to terms with the abuse you faced as a child and all the opportunities you were denied?
No. I still think, naturally, that I would want to be a scholar. But I love my life. I don’t have any problems with it. I don’t want to be anything else because I am what I am. But I still wish I had gone to college and sat around and studied Shakespeare and written some little thing about Shakespeare that no one would read. I love scholars. I think it’s the most wonderful thing — to be someone who studies a text and writes obscure things about it.


Do you consider yourself a pessimist or a realist?
I think I consider myself a pessimist. Which isn’t to say that I give up, but I think ‘Oh, it won’t work out’, but then I do it anyway. I don’t know if that’s a pessimist, but I feel I am a pessimist. It doesn’t stop me, but I am a pessimist. I didn’t think I would have success as a writer, but it didn’t stop me.


Does being pessimistic help you as a writer? How important is it to be happy?
I don’t know that there are any happy writers. But I don’t know that there is any happy person either. A happy person, to me, would seem to have the unique ability to shut out unpleasantness of life. I think happiness is something you run into from time to time. That’s why people take drugs and such. Happiness is not a natural state. If it were a natural state, there would be no word for it. You’d just sort of bump into it in the dark.


You said that you start writing stories knowing how they will end and that life is like that. When you moved to America, did you know how your story would end?
No. I thought I would be a miserable person for the rest of my life. I was very miserable when I first got to America because I was sent away from my home, my family. I was all alone. I didn’t know it would be possible to have the life I have, which is a relatively good life.


What do you like doing more? Writing or gardening?
I love reading more than I like writing. Most of all I love to read, and when I’ve satisfied my reading impulse, then I write. Writing is the second thing that I like to do best. Gardening is a form of reading. So is actually cooking.


What would you be if you weren’t a writer?
Probably someone who’s mad, standing in the corner of the street hectoring passersby to do the right thing. I’d probably be a mad prophet that nobody listens to.


There are no happy writers: Novelist Jamaica Kincaid
Published: Tuesday, Jan 24, 2012, 11:00 IST
By Geetanjali Jhala | Place: Jaipur | Agency: DNA

Poet Influenced by Jamaica Kincaid

Photo by Annie Adams

Interview with Poet Dan Chiasson in BU Today (complete interview):At Harvard, it was Jamaica Kincaid, my dear friend and our older son’s godmother, who most inspired me to be a writer: her uncompromising idea that writers tell the truth, plain and simple, along with her wild mind and sense of humor.

Jamaica Kincaid in India

The year was 1973. 24-year old Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson was in the midst of a personal conflict. Fearing her family’s disapproval of her desire to become a writer, she decided to acquire a new identity. Elaine renamed herself Jamaica Kincaid.

Through her stories since then, Kincaid, now 63, has given the world a window to look at many conflicts in the lives of people. Inadvertently, her writings have also thrown an oblique light on her native Antigua, which isn’t a conflict zone like West Asia but has fostered many instances of discrimination. It was the result of one such oppression – by her family incidentally, that packed her off to the US as a servant – which prompted Elaine to fly away to freedom, and to change her name.

From an article by Archana Khare Ghose for The Times of India
Re-posted in Repeating Islands blog

Sharon Watts Portrait of Jamaica Kincaid

Sharon Watts WordPress blog

Jamaica Kincaid and Identity

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?

Autobiography and Persona

Posted on July 29, 2010 by cynthiapittmann

Persona: The parts of our personality that are visibly manifested. (Carl Jung)
Reading about self and autobiography, it is likely that you will come across the idea of persona and authenticity. Persona can be thought of as the public self, the part that is visible because it is shared. If the self that is shared closely matches the self as it is experienced by the sharer (the autobiographer), then it tends toward being authentic. If the self that is shared through an autobiographer’s persona does not match the private experience, then it is inauthentic. Some could say it is false, however, there is some doubt about whether the authentic or core self exists.
The experience of real, as in “this is who I am”, changes over time and may seem real to the author at the time of writing. Additonaly, the author may decide that it is acceptable to shift the facts and compromise aspects of internal meaning, in order to communicate “better.” Still many memoirist realize that if “better” means that the writing is shaped in a consistant way,  a logical coherent presentation of a life, it’s likely that the story will be inauthentic. Most lives are  not consistant as people hold opposing ideas; which are ideas that conflict with each other in a non-unified self.
Thomas Larson, author of The Memoir and the Memoirist separates the meaning of persona by classifying autobiography and memoir in different categories of life-writing. “Autobiography is written by the public person who tells the birth-to-death story of her persona. By contrast, the memoir allows the authentic self to lift the mask and tell the story of how mask and self have been intertwined.”(129) Larson’s theoretical frame of reference is Jungian, and he believes that a core self exists and can be made visible through analysis and self-reflection, which may include life writing.  In his view, “The memoir’s aim is to beget the authentic self to come forward, to assume the mantle; expose the inauthentic,” and this can be done through the attempt at honest writing.
Jamaica Kincaid is a writer whose persona shifts, and her inconsistencies are part of the creative process of her shared life experience. She does not cultivate personality coherence, and resists being labeled and conveniently categorized. Would she be considered inauthentic by Larson? As long as Kincaid continually revises her identity, shifting and processing what feels real at the moment, it would have to be authentic. However, that does not mean that others who read her would notice (or want to notice) some of the inconsistencies. It is inconvenient to have to adapt the categories; feminist, African American, and Caribbean, to include someone with so many consistency-breaks in her persona. Kincaid does not want to police herself, in part, because she writes about power dynamics. And these encompass groups of experiences that are authentically true for many people.
Jana Evans Braziel, author of Caribbean Genesis, suggests that Kincaid is resisting a literal reading of her work by her conflicting statements about meaning and intention. She writes, “Kincaid’s project is undeniably about autobiography, but not one that can be unambiguously read, consumed, known mastered, and not necessarily her own, though autobiographical elements clearly enter into and find creative and imaginative representations in her writings.” (7)
Kincaid writes autobiographically, no doubt, but I don’t think that she intends to dramatically shift the truth for the sake of the narrative. Her writing comes from a creative truth that has a kind of emotional authenticity. Braziel quotes  Kincaid in My Brother, where she has a conversation with Devon about an incident that happened during her childhood. (Kincaid had written that her mother tried to abort her son.) In the quote, Braziel leaves out the part where Kincaid admits that both she and her brother know that she is lying about her work being fiction. She says that they decide not to talk about what is true. I think it’s pretty clear that she is admitting that the child who survived an abortion attempt was her brother.
People are authentic in many ways, and though it may seem counter-intuitive, one way that the persona is authentic is by showing inconsistencies.

An Interview (and incident) with Jamaica Kincaid

“Around Noon” at Ideas Center Radio 90.3   WCPN.org
In this interview Jamaica Kincaid talks about gardens and clarifies that
Antigua doesn’t have gardens as you think. There are the botanical gardens that have plants that are not from Antigua and represent the spread of Empire,  and then there were the gardens similar to her mother’s which were grown to for food, medicines and sometimes because they were attractive.
The Garden of Eden
In the Bible it says that first there was the Tree of Life and there was the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Life, represents what is grown for survival and this is what people of Antigua grew. Knowledge comes after, and that is more like the botanical gardens, where people have the luxury to grow for beauty and uniqueness.
She remembers being taught and made to memorize the poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, by William Wordsworth in school. (She mentions that she wrote about this in one of her books (Lucy)) When she came across these flowers in Central Park in New York, she wanted to crush them all. “I hated them,” she says. Without knowing it, she understood that the flowers were representative of dominance and the spread of the Imperial project. She says that now she has planted 10,000 daffodils in her Vermont garden “in honor of Wordsworth”, and that she has “a daffodil tea party” every spring.
Living half of her time in California she has developed a fascination with the San Andres Fault in California. The natural environment interest her and she reiterates that
gardens for people with a lot of money. And that she was requested to speak at a botanical society that was full of “amusingly silly people” and that one, Mr Frank Cabot asked her to speak in Charleston, North Carolina. Upon her arrival there she saw a stature celebrating the vice president of Monroe, she found the statue and what it represented about slavery offensive. There was a talk about a garden that people who were going off to be incinerated made, a beautiful garden, and Kincaid felt that there was this up close history that people were ignoring. That the people there celebrating gardens did not make the connection between the history of the nearby plantation, Middleton, and the political violation. Mr. Cabot said he was sorry that he have invited her to speak because she introduced a political element to the organization’s talk. Kincaid told him that just outside was a pile of rubble that Sherman (the Union general) had brought down, as an aside she said, “I like Sherman very much.” She thought about the beautiful butterfly shaped garden and the rice field that was cultivated by slaves. She said that Mr. Middleton who owned the plantation where they were celebrating the after party was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independance. Kincaid was trying to communicate that there was no separation between the gardens and politics that “politics is not removed from gardening.”
She brought the topic back to contemporary times and mentioned the wind farms that are important to provide natural clean energy would also “make a number of birds extinct.” Her point being that though “the greenness of the earth is important…” it comes at a costs. She said, “I think that we Americans are not used to thinking that things costs something. We don’t think it comes at a cost at all.”
I thought the interview caught Kincaid at a period of transition in her thought and life. She uses the the pronoun “we” when referring to herself, which signifies a joining into this national group. She is moving her life over to California and is beginning to concern herself with the preoccupations of that part of the world, for example, the way the earth moves is fascinating to her and the transfer of her insight about the environment is broadening. She is accepting a position at Claremont College, a liberal arts college, and will begin to make her concerns felt there.