Jamaica Kincaid's ex-husband Allen Shawn writes another memoir: Twin: Overcoming Remoteness
Positive book review by Michael Roth (President, Wesleyan University) February 6, 2011
Huffington Post
Excerpts from article:
It was only in recent years, as he prepared his subtly powerful and personal study of phobia, Wish I Could be There, that Shawn came to realize just how important Mary has been for him. Before that, all he felt "was a kind of blank place inside, where memories and feelings should have been." With Twin he tries to fill in that blank space, or at least to explore its contours.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shawn writes beautifully, with an elegance, candor and tact that are remarkable. He is personal without ever being gossipy, and so this is not the book for those who want more dish concerning the decades-long secret relationship of his late father, New Yorker editor William Shawn, with staff writer Lillian Ross, or about the author's own 20-plus-year marriage to writer Jamaica Kincaid. His father's relationship is discussed because it now seems key to understanding the "religion of denial" in the Shawn household, but his own marriage and divorce are off-limits. Whether this is discretion or simply a continuation of the family tradition of avoidance is impossible to say.
Cynthia Pittmann's PhD dissertation research blog on everything related to the writer Jamaica Kincaid and autobiography - including internet exchanges, posts, videos and comments about the author and issues related to autobiography.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Friday, February 4, 2011
Kincaid's Positive Reception
Article PDF links and Kincaid biography
Also excerpt from A Small Place
Brandis University article quote: The Justice.org The Independent Student Newspaper of Brandeis University
Kincaid said she feels a sense of narcissism and vanity about writing and reading her work to an audience, but added she takes more pride in growing a difficult flower than in her novels once they have been published. She showed her modesty and humor when talking about how all of her work is autobiographical, even if it's fiction, by saying, "It's not clear I'm really a writer. I aspire to be one," which elicited a chuckle from the audience.
Kincaid's new novel about Mr. Sweet...Is it autobiographical? Quote from Brandeis article 2006
After an introduction from Prof. Faith Smith, who chairs the Afro- and African-American Studies department, Kincaid, 57, surprised the crowd-so familiar with her bold, often angry prose-with a soft-spoken, British-Caribbean voice that was so hushed that the audience was inspired to stop eating their provided refreshments and listen. Standing tall with a head of neat corn-rows and a raindrop-shaped face, Kincaid gave a casual introduction to her new novel. The story deals with the Sweet family, who live in a small house in a small village, beginning with the birth of a son. Kincaid described the structure as involving a narrator who sometimes sees the future, sometimes sees the past and sometimes sees reflections of the past in the future; a format she said "sounds confusing, but makes sense to me." In the first pages of her work, through the eyes of the narrator, Mrs. Sweet is seen reflecting on both the destiny of her baby Heracles and on birth in general, which she describes as "a person forcing themselves out into a new set of experiences."
Article by Kate Willard at the Justice.org Brandeis University October 10, 2006
The long url:
http://media.www.thejustice.org/media/storage/paper573/news/2006/10/10/Arts/Assertive.Attitude.And.Literature.Comes.To.Brandeis-2341120.shtml?norewrite200611091452&sourcedomain=www.thejusticeonline.com
Also excerpt from A Small Place
Brandis University article quote: The Justice.org The Independent Student Newspaper of Brandeis University
Kincaid said she feels a sense of narcissism and vanity about writing and reading her work to an audience, but added she takes more pride in growing a difficult flower than in her novels once they have been published. She showed her modesty and humor when talking about how all of her work is autobiographical, even if it's fiction, by saying, "It's not clear I'm really a writer. I aspire to be one," which elicited a chuckle from the audience.
Kincaid's new novel about Mr. Sweet...Is it autobiographical? Quote from Brandeis article 2006
After an introduction from Prof. Faith Smith, who chairs the Afro- and African-American Studies department, Kincaid, 57, surprised the crowd-so familiar with her bold, often angry prose-with a soft-spoken, British-Caribbean voice that was so hushed that the audience was inspired to stop eating their provided refreshments and listen. Standing tall with a head of neat corn-rows and a raindrop-shaped face, Kincaid gave a casual introduction to her new novel. The story deals with the Sweet family, who live in a small house in a small village, beginning with the birth of a son. Kincaid described the structure as involving a narrator who sometimes sees the future, sometimes sees the past and sometimes sees reflections of the past in the future; a format she said "sounds confusing, but makes sense to me." In the first pages of her work, through the eyes of the narrator, Mrs. Sweet is seen reflecting on both the destiny of her baby Heracles and on birth in general, which she describes as "a person forcing themselves out into a new set of experiences."
Article by Kate Willard at the Justice.org Brandeis University October 10, 2006
The long url:
http://media.www.thejustice.org/media/storage/paper573/news/2006/10/10/Arts/Assertive.Attitude.And.Literature.Comes.To.Brandeis-2341120.shtml?norewrite200611091452&sourcedomain=www.thejusticeonline.com
New Play by Bess Wohl
Playwright Bess Wohl |
Pioneer Theater Company presents "IN "
Playwright Bess Wohl's other plays include Touch(ed), Fake and Cats Talk Back. Her screenplay adaptation of In was included on Hollywood's "Black List of Best Scripts." Since its premiere at Pioneer Theatre Company last season, Touch(ed) has been nominated for the American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play Award. Cats Talk Back, a comedy, won the award for Best Overall Production at the NYC International Fringe Festival. Wohl recently wrote an original drama pilot for Fox, and is currently at work on a drama about meat for HBO. Her plays have been developed at The Vineyard Theater, The Pittsburgh Public Theater, The Northlight Theater, TheaterWorks, and The Geffen Playhouse. As an actress, Wohl has appeared onstage in New York, regionally and at Williamstown Theater Festival (five summers) and in numerous films and TV shows. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, as well as a degree in English Literature, magna cum laude, from Harvard, where she studied writing with both Seamus Heaney and Jamaica Kincaid.
Labels:
Bess Wohl,
Jamaica Kincaid's students,
play
Monday, January 3, 2011
Joanne Hillhouse on Being a Caribbean Writer; Writing Off the Map
Interesting autobiographical essay by Antiguan writer, Joanne Hillhouse, about her 'becoming a writer' experience. Writing Off the Map...the title reminds me of the movie Off the Map. Hillhouse is humble and yet honest about her value as a writer, she compellingly writes about her struggle and desire to be a recognized writer.
Labels:
Caribbean Writer,
Joanne C. Hillhouse
Monday, December 13, 2010
Dominica: The Setting for Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of my Mother
Roseau, Dominica (photo credit) |
Jean Rhys' Childhood home...is in Dominica too.
We walked around the home, took photos and tried to get a sense of her life and imagined the setting for Wide Sargasso Sea.
Labels:
Autobiography of my Mother,
Dominica,
flag
Autobiographical Picasso
Trivial autobiography?
Picasso a Show Off?
Germaine Greer writes:
There is something tiresome about Picasso. Jonathan Jones put his finger on it in a piece in the Guardian last month. "Each work by Picasso is a unique piece of autobiography," he said, which signifies that each work is, no matter how dazzling, inherently trivial. To understand Picasso's works, you must regard them as "anecdotes or snapshots of a particular moment in his life". There is nothing more to most of Picasso's work than virtuosic showing off – except for Guernica. The studies for Guernica show this was one work in which Picasso forgot himself.
And what does Picasso say about himself?
Perhaps the explanation of Picasso's quixotry can be found in something he said to the writer Giovanni Papini in 1952: "Today, as you know, I am famous, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the courage to consider myself an artist in the ancient sense of the word. Great painters are people like Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya. I am only a public entertainer who has understood the times and has exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity and the greed of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than might seem, but it has the merit of being sincere."
Picasso a Show Off?
Germaine Greer writes:
There is something tiresome about Picasso. Jonathan Jones put his finger on it in a piece in the Guardian last month. "Each work by Picasso is a unique piece of autobiography," he said, which signifies that each work is, no matter how dazzling, inherently trivial. To understand Picasso's works, you must regard them as "anecdotes or snapshots of a particular moment in his life". There is nothing more to most of Picasso's work than virtuosic showing off – except for Guernica. The studies for Guernica show this was one work in which Picasso forgot himself.
And what does Picasso say about himself?
Perhaps the explanation of Picasso's quixotry can be found in something he said to the writer Giovanni Papini in 1952: "Today, as you know, I am famous, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the courage to consider myself an artist in the ancient sense of the word. Great painters are people like Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya. I am only a public entertainer who has understood the times and has exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity and the greed of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than might seem, but it has the merit of being sincere."
Labels:
Autobiography,
Germaine Greer,
Guardian,
Picasso
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Jamaica Kincaid Impacts the Jewish Community
Invisible Man, but what about the invisible woman? In this
Link to introduction
Helen Epstein- Editor's comments on Jamaica Kincaid's presentation where she selected a snapshot of her mother to display instead of a famous painting:
I was in my forties and listening to West Indian writer Jamaica
Kincaid speaking at the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, when
I suddenly perceived their absence (like Pnina Motzafi-Haller in
her essay about mizrahi women in Israel,I applied the insight of an
African-American woman to my own life).
African-American woman to my own life).
Jamaica Kincaid had done a brilliant and audacious thing: invited to choose her favorite painting at the museum and speak to a large audience about the reasons for her choice, she had beamed an old snapshot of her mother on themuseum’s large screen and talked about it.
All of us in the audience, of course, had been accustomed to viewing
the parade of art history on such a screen – from the Greeks to the
Renaissance masters to the Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists .
We were accustomed to oil portraits and elaborately framed photographs.
The effect of Kinkaid’s snapshot was shocking and
made the author’s point more forcefully than her words:
Had we ever seen the image ofan ordinary West Indian woman on the walls of a museum? Had we ever contemplated her face? Her body? Her surroundings? Her life?
How did we ascribe value to this snapshot when it was viewed in a
private photo album, in a newspaper, or here, in the context of other
portraits in the museum? We had all read or at least heard of Ralph
Ellison’s
case, what about an entire sub-culture usually hidden by the majority
African-American minority culture?
Link to introduction
Monday, December 6, 2010
Kincaid's First Book: At the Bottom of the River
Kincaid's first book editor Pat Strachen: Interview
Jamaica Kincaid. I read one little story called “Girl” in the New Yorker, found out who the agent was, made an offer, and signed up the book [...] We [Edna O'Brien] put together her collected stories and got Philip Roth to write the introduction and got a front page TBR [Times Book Review review].
Pat Strachen had the idea for a book of collected stories after reading Girl, which was published in the New Yorker. She was an assistant editor at the New Yorker, and later an editor. She approached Jamaica Kincaid with the book idea.
http://www.pw.org/content/agents_amp_editors_qampa_editor_pat_strachan?cmnt_all=1
Jamaica Kincaid. I read one little story called “Girl” in the New Yorker, found out who the agent was, made an offer, and signed up the book [...] We [Edna O'Brien] put together her collected stories and got Philip Roth to write the introduction and got a front page TBR [Times Book Review review].
Pat Strachen |
Pat Strachen had the idea for a book of collected stories after reading Girl, which was published in the New Yorker. She was an assistant editor at the New Yorker, and later an editor. She approached Jamaica Kincaid with the book idea.
http://www.pw.org/content/agents_amp_editors_qampa_editor_pat_strachan?cmnt_all=1
Labels:
At the Bottom of the River,
editor,
Pat Strachen
Reactions to "Girl"
one800Hollama |
way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming.
Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl"
Reader reaction:
"Although the mother tells her daughter that she is bent on becoming a slut I do not believe she is saying this to hurt her daughter’s feelings, the sense in which she uses this derogatory remark makes me feel that she is trying to get her ready for the world so the daughter could shield herself. I say this because although the mother tells her child that she is bent on becoming a slut, she also teaches her daughter what medicine to make and take to abort a child. In this short text, the mother giving her daughter all of these instructions gives me the impression that she may be going away or perhaps dying."
It's remarkable that this young man is defending Girl's mother. This understanding of the mother is the reaction I also get from many of my students. They refuse to believe that the mother is intending to be cruel. They think the mother is trying to pass on her wisdom and motivate her daughter to do the right thing.
Friday, December 3, 2010
What is the location of these interview comments?
Secondary source: Her Story BBC World Service
Comments:
She felt betrayed by her mother, so that even her first experience of menstruation came as a shock to her. She says that her mother had never explained to her before what was involved in becoming a woman:
First quote:
Excerpt from Annie John:
Second quote: "I write about my mother and her influence on her children and on me all the time. She's dead now and I found that even that was a source of inspiration or something.."
Annie John excerpt:
Comments:
She felt betrayed by her mother, so that even her first experience of menstruation came as a shock to her. She says that her mother had never explained to her before what was involved in becoming a woman:
First quote:
"I went to take a bath and noticed this brown rust thing in my underwear and was terrified of it and I told my mother and, I think she thought it was the best way to act, she said 'oh yes that happens'. And I felt kind of betrayed and nobody had told me that would happen to me so young. I remember I had a lot of pain during it and fainted and had to be sent home." |
Excerpt from Annie John:
Second quote: "I write about my mother and her influence on her children and on me all the time. She's dead now and I found that even that was a source of inspiration or something.."
Annie John excerpt:
Faux My Space
A My Space was created by someone has knowledge of Jamaica Kincaid. It's a spoof that characterizes her as uneducated. Listed among her friends are her daughter, husband, father-in-law, and Tom, who probably is the author of the faux My Space.
Is Jamaica Kincaid American?
Jamaica Kincaid as part of the American Cannon
"I am very grateful for this award, this medal — named in honor of a great man, white and dead at that, I’m sorry to say — in American literature. In that sentence, it is the 'American' that is important, for this novel about a girl coming of age on a small island in the Caribbean has become part of the American canon." —Jamaica Kincaid
"I am very grateful for this award, this medal — named in honor of a great man, white and dead at that, I’m sorry to say — in American literature. In that sentence, it is the 'American' that is important, for this novel about a girl coming of age on a small island in the Caribbean has become part of the American canon." —Jamaica Kincaid
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Florida Student Examines Kincaid
Thesis link Lindsey Collins
Interest in title: Ciaan Live Split: An Old Mold and Kincaid's Intervention
Interest in title: Ciaan Live Split: An Old Mold and Kincaid's Intervention
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Interview at New Yorks' Swank Royalton Hotel
Dwight Garner interviews Jamaica Kincaid http://www.salon.com/05/features/kincaid.html
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Guggenheim Fellowship Award 1985
Jamaica Kincaid won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 1985 for fiction.
Excerpt: History of the Award:
Established in 1925 by former United States Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, in memory of seventeen-year-old John Simon Guggenheim, the elder of their two sons, who died April 26, 1922, the Foundation has sought from its inception to "add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding," as the Senator explained in his initial Letter of Gift (March 26, 1925).
Excerpt: History of the Award:
Established in 1925 by former United States Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, in memory of seventeen-year-old John Simon Guggenheim, the elder of their two sons, who died April 26, 1922, the Foundation has sought from its inception to "add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding," as the Senator explained in his initial Letter of Gift (March 26, 1925).
Island in the Sun
Alec Waugh's name comes up in Jamaica Kincaid's, A Small Place.
Kincaid is refering to 1951 British Holiday Magazine
Excerpt:
The Antiguans are a fascinating mixture of imported Africa and Colonial England, and still retain fetishes of the bush. 'Is a good moon for planting Tannias' they tell you. The moon rules their lives ...their belief in Obeah...a kind of necromancy persists (259)
One of Alec's novels was adapted to film:
Island in the Sun 1957 Farley Hills, Barbados (Mansion is now burned down)
Film adaptation of Waugh's novel. Interracial and class struggle theme.
The Loom of Youth (1917) Reflections on his education and school years. His first semi-autobiographical novel wrote openly about homosexual encounters between boys and caused him to be expelled from the exclusive old boys society (The Old Shirburnian Society)
Alexander Raban Waugh (Alec Waugh) (8 July 1898 – 3 September 1981),
Kincaid is refering to 1951 British Holiday Magazine
Excerpt:
The Antiguans are a fascinating mixture of imported Africa and Colonial England, and still retain fetishes of the bush. 'Is a good moon for planting Tannias' they tell you. The moon rules their lives ...their belief in Obeah...a kind of necromancy persists (259)
One of Alec's novels was adapted to film:
Island in the Sun 1957 Farley Hills, Barbados (Mansion is now burned down)
Film adaptation of Waugh's novel. Interracial and class struggle theme.
The Loom of Youth (1917) Reflections on his education and school years. His first semi-autobiographical novel wrote openly about homosexual encounters between boys and caused him to be expelled from the exclusive old boys society (The Old Shirburnian Society)
Alec Waugh: British World Traveler and Writer |
Labels:
A Small Place,
Alec Waugh,
Jamaica Kincaid,
The Loom of Youth
Monday, November 29, 2010
Jamaica Kincaid at Literary Festival in Antigua (2006)
Wordpress blog
Photographs and captions from the above blog: Wadadli Pen
Joanne C. Hillhouse author of The Boy From Willow Bend
Photographs and captions from the above blog: Wadadli Pen
Joanne C. Hillhouse author of The Boy From Willow Bend
A reading by Jamaica Kincaid, in Antigua, as rare as...as...rain in drought season |
Antigua's youngest writer at the time, Akilah Jardine, signing copies alongside it's best known writer, Jamaica Kincaid. |
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