BIBR Talks With Kincaid

BIBR talks with Jamaica Kincaid. By: McLarin, Kim, Black Issues Book Review, 15220524, Jul/Aug2002, Vol. 4, Issue 4
BIBR TALKS WITH JAMAICA KINCAID
Section: fiction reviews
Author Jamaica Kincaid's work explores issues both grand and personal: the nature of individual consciousness, the pain of family relationships, the nearness of history and the devastation of cultural domination. She has published three novels, two works of memoir, a short-story collection and a gardening book Kincaid lives in Vermont with her husband and their two children.
BIBR: Tell us about your latest book, Mr. Potter. How did the idea come to ?u?
JK: It came to me in thinking about my mother. The more I thought of her life, and how it was that I grew up without knowing this person that she loathed and who was my father, the more I wanted to write this book. Here was a person she absolutely detested. She never introduced me to him and he never had any interest in me. Although when I became a well-known ]author], he came to visit me. When he found me not interested in the idea of his being my dad, he actually disinherited me. It's in his will.
BIBR: Were you surprised that he sought you out?
JK: I was stunned. I had never met him face-to-face.
BIBR: Did his wanting to resume a relationship surprise you?
JK: Well, that's the culture. That's the way it is where I'm from. Everyone lives in the moment. If your father decides after thirty-something years of not recognizing you, to recognize you--you will, of course, forget the thirty-something years.
BIBR: Is it hard writing about your family?
JK: That depends. I don't think I could write about my children--ever. It wasn't hard for me to write about my brother, although if he were alive I would never have published that book [My Brother]. But it is not difficult for me to think about my family or write about them, because my family makes up a great deal of my literary imagination. I can write about them in works of fiction or fact.
BIBR: And you do so interchangeably. The Autobiography of My Mother, although a novel, was at Least partly' about your own mother, wasn't it?
JK: It was about mother in that it was about the life of woman of her time.
BIBR: How do you decide whether to make a project fiction or nonfiction?
JK: For Mr. Potter it had to be fiction, because for one thing, I knew nothing about this man. I had only his birth certificate, his death certificate and his father's birth certificate to go on. I didn't know anything about him except that he was a chauffeur.
BIBR: In Mr. Potter you write that you are "in love" with reading and writing, despite having a father who was illiterate. What does it mean to be in love with words?
JK: Being in love is separate from loving. There is a mysteriousness to being in love, a freshness and newness that is powerful. For me, reading and writing are always new. I can't believe I know it and am attached to it.
BIBR: Did you always want to be a writer?
JK: No, although I think I always knew I was a reader. I thought writing died at the beginning of the 20th century, because all the works I read as a child were from that time. I thought writing had gone out of fashion until I came to America and lived with a family, and the man in that family was a writer. It was then that I realized people were still writing and that I might do it.
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Interviewed by Kim McLarin