Article on reading See, Now, Then 2011

Little Star 2

ALOUD photos April 2011
Reading of selections from See, Now, Then by Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid is recognized as Mrs. Sweet (who speaks as Mrs. Hest). (article and photo credit)
The humor works because the fiction is read as true about Kincaid's life. The characters reference real people or at least real names. (All of the names are real in some way.") I think Mr. Mcgreggor might be a reference to Miss Potter's Peter Rabbit. She mentions (as Mrs.Sweet) the car that she is driving, which is a "Rabbit."

I don't think of myself as funny. It's a thrill and an honor that I've made you laugh."

She doesn't remember the first time she read this material. It was in Rome for the literary festival. 

(In a blog post published here on June 16.)

Jamaica Kincaid - Letteratura, Festival internazionale di Roma: "JAMAICA KINCAID
Author

Participates at:
15 JUNE DESTINY - Life forms: choice and chance
Read: Il Decano e Mrs. Hess - Unpublished
Of: Jamaica Kincaid"

Jamaica Kincaid's theme for her June 15th reading was Destiny- Life forms: choice and chance. She read an unpublished work: "The Dean and Mrs. Hess." 

PodCast Jamaica Kincaid 2011

Jamaica Kincaid reads from her latest novel, See, Now, Then @ this link for more details
or click on the words Podcast here for direct access the audio.

http://www.lfla.org/event-detail/571/Jamaica-Kincaid (photo credit found in article)

Jamaica Kincaid Video at MIT

"A Reading by Jamaica Kincaid" The lecture hosted by MIT Program in Women's Studies, MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Council for the Arts at MIT was held on April 4, 2007.

“I rule out the memoir. It caramelizes and beautifies things…. I wouldn’t want to know how to make a beautiful thing. Implied in memoir is forgiveness that I don’t feel. I never forgive and I never forget, and I’m never cathartic.” Jamaica Kincaid (quote from MIT World article)

Jamaica Kincaid reads Biography of a Dress (and more) at MIT

Memoir on the Influence of Indians in Trinidad and Tobago

Zobi Fredrick, who migrated first to London and then to New Jersey and now lives in Clearwater, explains the influence of Indian culture on the politics, religion and everyday life in Uprooted: From Calcutta to Trinidad, published by iUniverse, a self-publishing company.

(excerpt from South Florida Times)

Kincaid's Controversial Speech: Politics and the Garden

Jamaica Kincaid in Charleston, North Carolina

Kincaid took issue to President Monroe's VP -Daniel Tompkins and completely changes her planned speech. The organizers were angry with her" bringing politics" into the garden talk.(NPR Talk Radio)

The Author Interview

Interview
"Frankly Speaking," The Caribbean Review of Books, 2008
The best interviews naturally have an element of surprise. They are autobiography and self-delusion, literary criticism and highbrow entertainment, hero worship and exposé, journalism and creative writing, all at the same time. We expect they will offer valuable insights into a writer’s artistic process, and we hope they will also offer gossip. We want to know how our favourite books came to be — inspirations, influences, intentions — but also what our favourite writers have for breakfast, and why their marriages collapse.

And:

Experienced interview subjects (and readers) know there is an elusive relation “between authorial character, as manifested in literary works, and the personae and personalities of writers,” as the scholar John Rodden puts it in Performing the Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves (2001). As his title makes clear, Rodden argues that the literary interview is best understood as a kind of performance art. 

John Rodden 
Performing the Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves (2001)

An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid

The Missouri Review Summer 2002 25.2
Kay Bonetti

Jamaica Kincaid at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference

Jamaica Kincaid spoke recently at the North Dakota Writers Conference. You can find photos at this link
or through facebook. An attendee said Jamaica Kincaid was brilliant.

YouTube Search: Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid does not have control over her online image:
The Rome Literature Festival Trailer is the only authorized video of Jamaica Kincaid: It has 45 views:
The thousands of other views are from unauthorized sources. Jamaica Kincaid does not have an official webpage.

Rome Literature Festival Trailer
Featured work: Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy is translated along with her other work at
LETTERATURE 9° Festival Internazionale di Roma 45 Views July 7, 2010
Il decano y Mrs. Hess
________________
Un(?)authorized Published videos:

Junot Díaz and Jamaica Kincaid at the 92nd Street Y by 92nd Street Y 1848 Views November 16,2009

Anisfield-Wolf/SAGES Lecture by CASE (no name) 3127 Views October 26, 2009 

Student films and "Mockumentaries":

Student on sight? documentary for A Small Place 179 Views July 9, 2010


This Youtube is an amateur movie trailer for a nonexistent film, A small Place (lower case in video) staring Oprah Winfrey and is rated NC for "Extreme partial nudity"179 Views June 9, 2010
"This is a trailer for language arts class for the book a small place by Jamaica Kincaid"



Unknown satire (student?/secretmuffin124) featuring an actor pretending to be Jamaica Kincaid who is hosting a Badminton World Cup tournament.(racial stereotypes) 88 Views) July 10, 2010

Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" by GlamazonAR 1093 Views July 7, 2009
"Comedy Sketch"

Asian students film: "Girl" EngFilms (Audio removed by site)
2041 Views February 4, 2008

Another "Girl" student interpretation: "A recreation of the short story that piles on the stereotypes of what a woman should be." (Geno Sartori:/VeniVeniVenci/Italian) 5,350 Views February 23, 2010 

A project for a college Thinking and Writing course.
 "Girl" Asian students (Japanese/XvanrAy?) for an English Class June 6, 2010

"Girl" 2754 Views February 22, 2008
"Jamaica Kincaid is a famous writer from Antigua who wrote for the New Yorker way back when. This was a slide show based on her story "Girl" If you want to understand the slide show look up her story. It's quiet interesting."

An unprofessional video of Jamaica Kincaid seated talking into a microphone in Israel(? ) The video highlights her shoes.307 Views Estsegal1 May 3, 2010

Jamaica Kincaid hosts film: "Sugar Cane Alley"

Jamaica Kincaid in the Dakota community: A Writer's Conference

University of North Dakota on Friday and Saturday April 1st and 2nd

Excerpts:   
Final days: Friday and Saturday are the final days of the annual UND Writers Conference, including Friday night’s “Great Conversation” with author Jamaica Kincaid, at 8 p.m. at UND Chester Fritz Auditorium. All Writers Conference events are free and open to the public. A story about the Writers Conference and a schedule are published elsewhere in Friday’s Herald.

Jamaica Kincaid will take over at 6 p.m. with a showing of Sugar Cane Alley, a film about the life of a family on the Caribbean island of Martinique.  The evening and conference will close with "A Great Conversation with Jamaica Kincaid" at 8 p.m. (April 1, 2011)

Kincaid's writing featured as "Literature of Domesticity"

Kathy Goldner, founder of Out Loud Audiobooks, will give a presentation on the Literature of Domesticity
at Belfast library ME. Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 6:30 p.m. at Belfast Free Library, 106 High St.

Excerpt from article:   Goldner will feed the audience luscious tidbits from her favorite authors and explore the beautiful and moving, sensual and funny world of food, garden and knitting writing with Colette, Jamaica Kincaid, Bill Bryson, Vita Sackville-West, Angelo Pellegrini, Katherine White and others.

Goldner was taught to knit by her German grandmother, a World War II refugee and psychoanalyst who knit while listening to her patients. Returning to knitting many years later, Kathy founded Knitting Out Loud so that knitters could listen to histories and essays on their craft while knitting.

http://waldo.villagesoup.com/ae/story/domestic-lit-at-belfast-library/383448

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),

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

A reading by Jamaica Kincaid, in Antigua, as rare as...as...rain in drought season

...but, boy, are there; pictured at the first fest in 2006 are (standing) S. E. James, Marie Elena John, Rosalyn Simon, and me; and (sitting, from left) Althea Prince, Akilah Jardine, and Jamaica Kincaid

Antigua's youngest writer at the time, Akilah Jardine, signing copies alongside it's best known writer, Jamaica Kincaid.

Jamaica Kincaid and Hip Hop Culture?

Harvard Gazette

Hip Hop Harvard

Kincaid listens...

Excerpt:
I remember thinking: Why do boys dress like this?” observed panelist-critic Jamaica Kincaid, a novelist who watched the early blooming of rap while writing for the Village Voice and The New Yorker in the 1970s. But then droopy pants and backward ball caps penetrated white culture in the suburbs, she said, puzzling parents with the fact that “the children they love are influenced by people they despise.”
Kincaid grew to “adore” the authenticity of girl rappers like Lil’ Kim, a fixture in the 1990s, and at the same time she noted the present “authentic inauthenticity” of a performer like Lady Gaga. “Now white children like black children,” she said, “and are pretending to be black children.”

At 16 Kincaid Left -not sent from- Antigua

Rollins link
"Winters with the Writers" http://www.rollins.edu/winterwiththewriters/previousyears/2008-season.html
Excerpt:
Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 in St. John’s, Antigua. As an only child, Kincaid maintained a close relationship with her mother until the age of nine, when the first of her three brothers were born. At the age of 16, with a growing ambivalence for her family and a rising contempt for the subservience of the Antiguans to British colonialist rule, Kincaid left Antigua, bound for New York. After working for three years and taking night classes at a community college, Kincaid won a full scholarship to Franconia College in New Hampshire. However, after a year of feeling “too old to be a student,” Kincaid dropped out of school, returned to New York, and secured a job writing interviews for a teenage girls’ magazine.

Jamaica Kincaid Awards and Honorary Degrees

•Induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009)


•Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2004)

•Prix Femina Étranger (2000)

•Anifield-Wolf Book Award (1997)

•Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1997)

•Lila-Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Award (1994)

•Guggenheim Fellowship (1989)

•Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Fiction (1985)

•Finalist for prestigious Ritz Paris Hemingway Award (1985)

•Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1984)

•Anifield-Wolf Book Award (1977)

•Honorary Degrees from:



Middlebury College (1998)

Bard College (1997)

Amherst College (1995)

Long Island College (1991)

Williams College (1991)

Jamaica Kincaid in Rome, Italy

Excerpt:

Noted writer Jamaica Kincaid visited the American Academy for an event co-sponsored by the US Embassy Rome and its Cultural Attaché David Mees. Here Kincaid read from her 1990 novel Lucy to a capacity audience, and then answered questions on her past and current work in a rich discussion. Jamaica Kincaid was in Rome in conjunction with the city’s 9th Festival Internazionale delle Letterature, for which she read the following day at the Basilica of Maxentius in the Forum.



Introducing Kincaid, US Ambassador to Italy David H. Thorne



Above, Jamaica Kincaid in audience discussion. Below, from left, Kincaid, AAR Heiskell Arts Director Martin Brody, Alice Waters

Photo Credit and quotes from Word Press Blog

Fadiman Medal Awarded to Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid wins award on April 2010
http://culture.wnyc.org/articles/talk-me/2010/apr/30/talk-me-center-fiction-honors-jamaica-kincaid/

Exerpt:

This year's Clifton Fadiman Medal was presented to Jamaica Kincaid for her coming of age novel Annie John. The award, established by the Center for Fiction in 2000, recognizes a book worthy of "rediscovery and wider readership." Novelist Jane Smiley served as the 2010 judge and presenter of the award. Kincaid received the medal at a ceremony held at the Center for Fiction and the organization's director, Noreen Tomassi, spoke about the award and introduced the two novelists.(Jane Smiley A Thousand Acres)

Mr Potter is

Mr Potter is silenced: "Bitter Fruit" Maya Jaggi The Guardian UK

Excerpt: 
The tension between historical understanding and personal animus is never resolved. Writing becomes revenge; telling someone else's story can be a means of silencing them. At its worst, Elaine's voice is vindictive and self-aggrandising. Mordant irony no doubt drives Kincaid's description of the island's people as being of "no account". Yet rather than dignifying the lives of the "no account" people that it describes, this novel seems to bask in the author's godlike power: not so much to give life, as to withhold it. The effect, far from being humane, is sour and self-regarding.

San Francisco Chronicle: My Brother

Meredith Maran
Excerpt: 


My Brother is not, in fact, about Kincaid’s brother. It’s about life and death. It’s about how economic and emotional poverty corrode the body and the soul. It’s about the sticky tentacles that tie brothers to sisters, mothers to daughters, adults to their childhoods, people to where they come from–no matter how far they stray; no matter how desperately they try to escape.

Most of all, My Brother is about Jamaica Kincaid. Unshrouded, here, by the thin veil of fiction she’s draped around her disclosures in the past, Kincaid emerges naked–with her bold perceptions, and unappealing self-righteousness in evidence.

Anna Quindlen Reviews My Brother

Anna Quindlen, New York Times, writes that Kincaid's style is connected to the way people remember, without direct shape or form.

Excerpt:

Now that memoir is the genre du jour, it is fashionable for readers to describe the best of them as being just like novels in their sharp characterizations and larger-than-life life stories. The problem with this observation is that memory is not much like fictional narrative at all. If a novel is a line, more or less, memory is connect-the-dots. Or perhaps even that is too direct, suggesting an order to our thoughts, a clear picture at the end. Memory feels more aimless than that, sometimes gliding, sometimes lurching from past to present, fantasy to reality, place to place.

My Brother; A Book Review

Peter Kurth
Salon favorable book review.


Excerpt:
This is the enormous fly in Kincaid's literary ointment -- the fact that her mother remains unmoved, dominant, implacable and right, no matter what Kincaid says or thinks about her. She's on a self-imposed merry-go-round, whirling endlessly over ancient griefs and unhealed wounds, sitting on a battered, paint-peeled pony while her mother rides, permanently ahead of her, on a stately gilded horse. 
 ~~~~~~~~
At his funeral, when the minister preaches to her about the afterlife, she remarks that "I did not like that at all ... I did not want to be with any of these people in another world. I had had enough of them in this one; they mean everything to me and they mean nothing, and even so, I do not really know what I mean when I say this." Which is why Kincaid keeps writing about them, undoubtedly -- to find out, or find out more. The only question that remains is how much longer she can mine this particular pit.
 
SALON | Oct. 9, 1997
Peter Kurth is a writer and biographer who lives in Burlington, Vt.

Jamaica Kincaid in People Magazine

Joanne Kaufman highlights Jamaica Kincaid's ordinary life in People Magazine. 15 December 1997
One car per hour passes Kincaid's three-acre property, much of it given over to her flower, fruit and vegetable gardens. In the front yard are there-mains of a wooden Succoth booth, covered in stalks of grain and leaves, that was constructed for the Jewish festival of tabernacles. Kincaid, who was raised a Methodist and converted four years ago to Judaism, which is also the religion of her husband, is reticent on the subject of faith. "I don't know why," she says, "but I do feel that God is a private issue." She is also, typically, passionate about her belief: Somehow it doesn't come as a surprise that she is president of the local 100-plus-member Congregation Beth El. "Jamaica will show up at a business meeting in overalls with garden dirt under her nails. She is able to win the respect of CEOs and persuade them to commit time and money to the synagogue," says Beth El's rabbi, Howard Cohen. "There is something of the prophet in her writing," he adds. "She writes a lot about oppression and makes people uncomfortable, which is what the prophets did."

Covi an Italian Professor in Canada

Geovanna Covi's Essay on Jamaica Kincaid (on PDF)

 "Jamaica Kincaid's Political Place: A Review Essay," Caribana, Rome, Italy. 1990, 1, 93-103.

In Defense of Kincaid's Criticism- Haiti and Missionaries

Photo credit and location at article link.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, in The Church -Sponsored Cultural Genocide, argues that Jamaica Kincaid's concerns about conversion and cultural genocide are founded in fact, sighting that the radio stations are calling for Haitians to repent in order to avert further disaster [retribution from a displeased god].

Seriously: Conservatives against Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid's Anti-Christian, Nonsensical Remarks about Haiti and Capitalism by Charles C. Johnson.

Charles Johnson's conservative article/editorial takes Kincaid's background and sums it up as ignorance/stupidity because she is lacking in degreed education and understanding of Capitalism; and calls her a racist (white) because she criticizes the motives of Christians who are sending aid to Haiti. The reading audiences' follow up comments are harshly ignorant in tone.

Writer- writing Talk

Rollins College-American Novelist Jamaica Kincaid 2008 Selected quotes:

Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 in St. John’s, Antigua. As an only child, she maintained a close relationship with her mother until the age of nine, when the first of her three brothers was born. At the age of 16, with a growing ambivalence for her family and a rising contempt for the subservience of the Antiguans to British colonialist rule, Kincaid left Antigua, bound for New York. After working for three years and taking night classes at a community college, Kincaid won a full scholarship to Franconia College in New Hampshire. However, after a year of feeling “too old to be a student,” she dropped out of school, returned to New York and secured a job writing interviews for a teenage girls magazine.
The reading was followed by an interview with Philip Deaver, director of Winter With the Writers. During the interview, Kincaid talked about the autobiographical elements to all of her stories, how she found her voice by writing about her past and how her interests and knowledge in other areas intertwine and become part of her writing. 

She also shared, “I had to find my freedom because I was just 16 when I got to America and I was afraid and homesick, but I was determined to write. I think I found my voice through writing about my past. Everything I write is autobiographical. But I do not at all feel like I have put myself down on paper enough for anyone to really know me. I don’t even know myself well enough. I write autobiographically to explore, not to expose myself."
A visiting professor at Harvard University, where she teaches creative writing, Kincaid is at work on a new novel, See Now Then. The book is about a family in the small village of North Bennington, Vermont.

Research links of Jamaica Kincaid

Great info about JK and links to biographical details and articles can be found at this Bedford site and photo credit  here.

Flag of Antigua and Barbuda

image credit

Jamaic Kincaid Critical of US Christian Groups

Published: February 12, 2010 3:00 a.m.


Author defends Haitian religion (link to article and photo credit)

Kelly Soderlund
The Journal Gazette

Jamaica Kincaid knew she was going to annoy any Christians in the room, but she was willing to risk it.
While speaking to the media Thursday, the author and professor started reflecting on a trip to Haiti two years ago and wondered why it took an earthquake for the United States to pay attention to the impoverished nation.“I think, on the whole, church groups should be banned from these places,” said Kincaid, a native of Antigua.Many Haitians follow Voodoo as their religion. Christian groups don’t like it and are only in the country to try to spread Christianity, she said.“Their main reason for going there is to eradicate this belief,” Kincaid said.




ksoderlund@jg.net

Big Church in Antigua

St. John's Cathedral Photo credit:  http://bit.ly/cMXHDa
As mentioned in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, the Anglican church actually exists but is currently closed for renovation. The big question, "Where will the money come from?"

A quote from the article:
And the thing is – whatever memories it evokes; whatever it symbolizes, sweet or bitter; however one weighs the needs of an iconic but crumbling church against the bread and butter needs of the day – its value is undeniable. House of worship of the largest denomination in the country’s dominant religion, the Anglican Cathedral is a piece of Antigua & Barbuda history, and an architectural marvel that’s proved a popular lure to thousands upon thousands of tourists – evincing historical, cultural, religious and economic value at the same time.

I hope to see the church restored sometime soon. I remember walking around the grounds looking at gravestones, and thinking about the movement of time and historical events. I was visiting Antigua as part of a Caribbean Literature conference held at the State College. My paper was on Jamaica Kincaid and so I took particular delight in exploring the Big Church. It is a worthy structure to preserve. I’ve always wanted to return and explore the church in greater detail. The specific information in this article is also helpful in bringing to life how historical events influence people and their actions.

New York Times

Protection: Pride and Dignidad

Last night, I re-read the Jamaica Kincaid Salon interview (1995) and found the quote I was remembering but didn't know from where: "I have at my disposal a way of articulating things about her that she can't respond to." But she goes on to say that her mother shouldn't have had children and that she thinks her mother doesn't read her books." I used that Kincaid sentiment in an article I wrote and submitted for publication, but I remember not wanting to look for where it came from. I questioned the truth of the sentiment, I think. And also the idea that Kincaid's mother didn't love her and/or vise versa.

Recently, I read another article (by Maya Sela, 2010) in a newspaper that was written when she went to Israel this summer, she said that she thought her mother did read her work. She said, "She did read it. She was jealous of me. She just simply couldn't believe it." Kincaid goes on to explain the curious literary path her life took: "It really is an improbable story, my life. I mean, I grew up in this poor place, with very limited circumstances, at about 16 years of age was sent by my family to work, and instead of remaining in the position into which I was sent, I somehow worked my way out of it without any help from anyone, just luck." I think she means without family help or support because she does talk about a network of connections from Michael O'Donoghue (Saturday Night Live writer) who introduced her to George Trow (writer at The New Yorker) who then introduced her to William Shawn (editor of The New Yorker) and that these connections would be called help.

Her mother's reaction to her writing career is interesting: "[My mother] always thought that my becoming a writer was a form of putting on airs. She always thought I wanted to be something that I wasn't, that I was pretentious. She was never proud of me."

I was also strongly impacted by Kincaid's resentful comment about her mother charging people for interviews. I think Kincaid would expect that cunning from her mother, after all, it's an opportunity to earn money: "She did see my success. People would go to Antigua to interview her about me, and she would charge them [money] and would give them the impression that I didn't support her, and would say: 'Well, you have to pay me.' I never minded it because it allowed me to write more. She would say she didn't read [my work] and I thought: Good! I can say anything." That's what I read in the earlier Salon interview- that Kincaid felt that she was free to write/say anything because her mother didn't read her work. However, I thought she wasn't being completely sincere, but believing that her work was ignored by her mother, gave her the chance to express herself without reservation in the autobiographical mode. She says, "First of all, I think I'm writing very autobiographically, and my experience with the people I'm writing about - including myself - is not sentimental. It's very ... I want it to be true, to be real, and I think that romanticism interferes with what is true. And I think you should love the naked thing and then you can dress it up."

Kincaid says that the reason she changed her name (from Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid) was related to pride, "I didn't want my parents to know I was writing. I didn't know if I would succeed at it, but I wanted to be a writer. In fact, I thought I would fail at it, and if I failed under another name they wouldn't laugh at me." She also reveals that she has a Jewish name, which is "Ruth." And that even though she is divorced now, she remains in the Jewish faith.

Kincaid uses her boldness to counteract feelings of shame. She says in the Salon interview that whatever causes shame should be shown to others as a symbol of pride, "...everything that is a source of shame you should just wear brazenly." I see strength in her attitude that reminds me of the Puerto Rican concept of dignidad. She has a right to her space/place in life. And in her stubborn insistance, she forces you to take her seriously.

Blog Research

I find a lot of information about Jamaica Kincaid through internet sources, though some of it is just book sales. I have an idea about using the blog posts and commentary ‘of the people’ in my writing, but I worry about how to incorporate it in a way that it is considered appropriate. Not that I won’t try anyway, but I want it to work as research. I see it as field writing research. When I look at blogs and other informal writing, I think now these are the people who actually read Jamaica Kincaid and practice in varying degrees autobiographical writing- these are the people who are involved in the dynamics I’m writing about.

Some of these blog writings are formal as they are written by scholars, or literary type people, while others are written by students, mothers and interested readers. I’m trying to think about how to include and reference these people. I have their blog name. I have their addresses (urls). I’m just concerned that people who don’t understand what I’m doing will think the work lacks rigor, namely the dissertation reading committee and my adviser. People are not writing about blogs here in academia in Puerto Rico. It’s not a form of publishing that has caught on and/or is respected.

Many people look away when I say I write a blog, I think they think it’s equivalent to Facebook in its substance. (I think Facebook is a great way to write mini-blogs, and I know that people use it to their own purpose so I am not criticizing the forum at all. I am able to reach more people through Facebook. I love sharing my Oasis blog with them.) I have five blogs I participate in, including this one- one I author for the general public about life, art and living in PR; another I write for myself that has all of the research about Jamaica Kincaid and autobiography, and the next two blogs are in public forums where I publish so that I can connect with other writers. I started this one to learn wordpress and to have a place that was semiprivate to freely write about my writing project. As is my habit, I am thinking about how my own writing behavior is shared by others-or not. I’m thinking about the autobiographical quality of blog writing, and instant publishing. What does it do to the author? What impact does it have in any direction. Recently, I saw a movie where the main character, a newspaper writer, made disparaging comments about his younger colleague because she wrote and published in a blog. I gleaned from his comments that he thought blogs were not serious writing because they talked about non-serious topics and didn’t use the same rules for publishing or research. Blogs were kind of a tabloid newspaper in his mind. I understand his opinion but I think there are many kinds of blogs that are written by various people.

The blog writer has more control if she creates and writes in the blog, but if it’s sponsored by a newspaper or connected to an organization, it follows the rules set up by their arrangement. Blogs can be seen on a continuum in level of seriousness and quality but that is not the point. Some people just want to connect with others by sharing ideas and hearing from their readers. Others write without much exchange. Some are informal while others are informal. However, they are part of the social interplay that we all are engaged in life, only this part is done on computer instead of paper or in person. It’s an entire world of literary exchange that has merit just because it exists and is growing, Lately, I have read about some academic conferences that address the blog as a writing medium. one was a woman’s writing conference in San Diego. I also saw a requests for submissions for a publication in another woman’s book. I think the blog literary landscape is changing.

Caribbean Anthology; Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root

A New Caribbean Anthology:

Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction

Posted by NJ News on Jun 27th, 2010 and filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry from your site

Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction
The lushness of language and the landscape, wild contrasts, and pure storytelling magic abound in this anthology of Caribbean writing. Steeped in the tradition of fabulism, where the irrational and inexplicable coexist with the realities of daily life, the stories in this collection are infused with a vitality and freshness that most writing traditions have long ago lost. From spectral slaving ships to women who shed their skin at night to become owls, stories from writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Marcia Douglas, Ian MacDonald, and Kamau Brathwaite pulse with rhythms, visions, and the tortured history of this spiritually rich region of the world.

KIncaid's Impact on a Young Reader

A young writer dreams of learning to write. She describes Kincaid as the writer capable of whipping her writing into shape; in Autographs and Pen Pals
By Olena Jennings posted at 4:56 pm on June 23, 2010
I once lived for furthering my collection of autographed books. Getting a book signed meant going to hear the author read, waiting in line with other fans, and then, finally, being presented with the chance to utter words of praise. Sometimes it meant getting teary-eyed with envy, worrying over whether I would ever write anything so poignant. This happened when Amy Tan walked by in purple velvet with her lap dog trailing behind her. During middle and high school, at the height of my obsession with autographs, I spent a lot of time writing letters, poems that exhibited the same longing for impossible love, and short stories that revealed I was fixated on the same themes of displacement and loneliness that I am now.

I heard Jamaica Kincaid read twice. The first time she read at the local university from her novel Lucy. I was in seventh grade and inexperienced in matters of love. She read a passage about sucking on a boy’s tongue and I was mesmerized. She stood before a large audience and I couldn’t help but see that she was someone important. The second time I went to hear her read, I got Lucy signed by her before she spoke. My father told her that I wanted to be a writer. She didn’t say anything, only proudly signed her name. Later, during the Q & A, she asked in perfectly enunciated words, “Where is that girl who wants to be a writer?” I shyly raised my hand. She went on to recommend Gertrude Stein to me. Following the reading, I began to imagine Jamaica Kincaid as my writing teacher. With her intimidating stature, I divined she would be just as intimidating of a teacher. I thought only she would be capable of whipping my writing into shape. I wanted her to treat my writing so harshly that my only option would be improvement.

[in http://www.themillions.com/2010/06/autographs-and-pen-pals.html]

My Brother; Another Blogger's Reflection

My Brother, is a memoir that triggers profound feelings. Read about this reflection.