Allen Shawn Interview

2-17-2011 Haartz.com
http://www.haaretz.com/culture/books/questions-answers-a-conversation-with-allen-shawn-1.343963

Interview by David B. Green

Questions and Answers: A Conversation With Allen Shawn

Excerpt(s):

On Jewish influences and family decisions about religion:


When I had children with my first wife [the writer Jamaica Kincaid], I didn't want them baptized. She grew up as a Methodist. I just thought it was terribly important to acknowledge the background that they had and have had, and in the end my wife converted to Judaism. She in fact became quite an expert on the subject and was for a time the chair of the board of the local temple. And my son had a bar mitzvah and my daughter had a bat mitzvah. They learned some Hebrew. As a result, I was in a synagogue quite a bit and was terribly moved to get to know a little more about Judaism.

On the privacy and personal autobiographical element:

 Your books are indeed both very personal and also fascinating introductions to mind science and the eternal nature-nurture debate. Was it hard to strike such a balance?
 Obviously, I tried very hard to find that balance. On the one hand, I tried to "personalize" the science, and on the other, to abstract my personal experience - or universalize it. I removed almost everybody's name from the body of both books, so that the books would be about family life and about fear and about mental disability, about difficult decisions and about loss - about themes that do apply to everybody - and not so much about the Shawn family specifically. Nevertheless some people still do put the gossip factor back into the book, and that is probably inevitable.

On his parents sending his twin Mary to an institution:

 I feel tremendous sympathy for my parents, dealing with what they had to deal with. Some people try to simplify these issues, how to deal with a child who is on a different plane than the rest of the family, but it is not so simple to determine what is best for the child, and what's best for the family. It requires incredible patience for those who are with Mary day in and day out.

Allen Shawn New Book: Twin

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.

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

New Play by Bess Wohl

Playwright Bess Wohl

Bess Wohl studied writing with Jamaica Kincaid
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.

Read more: http://saltlakecity.broadwayworld.com/article/Pioneer_Theatre_Company_Presents_IN_by_Bess_Wohl_20110203#ixzz1D0lbJJMZ

Mauritius: Georges by Alexander Dumas

The Armchair Traveler 
 Forward in The Modern Library hardcover edition by Jamaica Kincaid.

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.

Dominica: The Setting for Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of my Mother

Roseau, Dominica (photo credit)

Dominica Link

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.

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."

Jamaica Kincaid in Dominica Learning about America

Transitions

Jamaica Kincaid Impacts the Jewish Community

Invisible Man, but what about the invisible woman? In this

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).

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

 

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

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

Reactions to "Girl"

one800Hollama

...and this
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.

Jamaica Kincaid

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:

"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:

	On the morning of the first day I started to menstruate, I felt strange in a new way- hot and cold at the same time, with horrible pains running up and down my legs. My mother, knowing what was the matter, brushed aside my complaints and said that it was all to be expected and I would soon get used to everything. Seeing my gloomy face, she told me in a half-joking way all about her own experience with the first step in coming of age, as she called it, which had happened when she was as old as I was. I pretended that this information made us close- as close as in the old days- but to myself I said "What a serpent!"
		Annie John, 1985

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:

	My past was my mother; I could hear her voice, and she spoke to me not in English or the patois that she sometimes spoke, or in any language that needed help from the tongue; she spoke to me in language anyone female could understand. And I was undeniably that-female. Oh, it was a laugh, for I had spent so much time saying I did not want to be like my mother that I missed the whole story: I was not like my mother- I was my mother. And I could see now why, to the feeble attempts I made to draw a line between us, her reply always was "You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me." I had, at that very moment, a collection of letters from her in my room, nineteen in all, one for every year of my life, unopened. I thought of opening the letters, not to read them but to burn them at the four corners and send them back to her unread. It was an act, I had read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another, but I could not trust myself to go too near them. I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.
		Annie John, 1985

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

Florida Student Examines Kincaid

Thesis link Lindsey Collins

Interest in title: Ciaan Live Split: An Old Mold and Kincaid's Intervention

Interview at New Yorks' Swank Royalton Hotel

Dwight Garner interviews Jamaica Kincaid http://www.salon.com/05/features/kincaid.html

Lobby of the New York Royalton Hotel

Excerpt from Webpage:
Royalton proudly re-opens its doors onto midtown Manhattan, re-thought, re-imagined, and once again, a paragon of intelligent, modern design. Royalton's legendary lobby, long an inspiration for elites of New York fashion and media, is invigorated with handcrafted African touches, graphic fabrics, original murals and the warm glow of a cast-bronze fireplace

The remodel that occurred after the interview added handcrafted African touches.

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).

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)


Alec Waugh: British World Traveler and Writer

 Alexander Raban Waugh (Alec Waugh) (8 July 1898 – 3 September 1981),