Thursday, September 8, 2011

Bonetti Interview with Kincaid

The Missourri Review
http://www.missourireview.org/content/dynamic/view_text.php?text_id=1947


Bonetti: Ms. Kincaid, in the novel Lucy, you give Lucy Josephine Potter one of your birth names and your own birthday. How closely do the facts of Lucy's biography match your own?
Kincaid: She had to have a birth-date so why not mine? She was going to have a name that would refer to the slave part of her history, so why not my own? I write about myself for the most part, and about things that have happened to me. Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence.
Bonetti: Your father, like Lucy's, was a cabinet maker, and your own mother married a much older man with whom she had three sons several years after you were born.
Kincaid: Yes, that is true. But here's an example of something that is true and not true: in "The Long Rain" the girl has an illness--a rite of passage, I guess you might call it--when she's fourteen years old. I had an illness like that when I was seven years old, and I was writing about that illness. I root my fear of rodents in that time of my life. I used to lie on my bed and look up at the ceiling, and I saw hundreds of rats running around the ceiling. It must have been only one or two, but they seemed to go around like a merry-go-round. It must have been a hallucination. I was left alone, and like the girl I did get up and wash and powder the photographs, but some of the photographs described in the book could not have existed when I was seven years old. The confirmation photograph, for instance, did not exist. I don't aim to be factual. I aim to be true to something, but it's not necessarily the facts.
Bonetti: Where did the story of the green figs and the black snake come from?
Kincaid: That was a story my mother told me about herself, but the outcome of that story as it is in the book is not what really happened. I tried to write a story about my mother and myself, and there were incidents that I perceived as betrayal, at the time, though I don't necessarily believe that now. In my writing I suppose I'm trying to understand how I got to be the person I am. The truth is important, but it's a certain kind of truth.
Bonetti: Even though Annie John begins and ends chronologically, it's not built on a linear model. A single one-time happening recurs in several episodes, taken from different points of view, within different contexts. Did you conceive of it as a novel or as a sequence of short stories?
Kincaid: I didn't conceive of it as either one. I just write. I come to the end, I start again. I come to the end, I start again. And then sometimes I come to the end, and there is no starting again. In my mind there is no question of who will do what and when. Sometimes I've written the end of something before I've written the beginning. Whatever a novel is, I'm not it, and whatever a short story is, I'm not it. If I had to follow these forms, I couldn't write. I'm really interested in breaking the form.
Bonetti: It is interesting that a story your mother told about herself as a girl--walking home with a bunch of green figs on her head in which a snake is hiding--becomes a parable that the mother tells the daughter in Annie John, to try to induce her to confess.
Kincaid: What did I know? I was writing this story and I had a lot of information about my family and their history, and I used it in this way. My mother used to tell me a lot of things about herself. It's perhaps one of the ways in which I became a writer. Why I used that incident, I can't really say. It was conscious and it was not conscious. A psychiatrist would see that it's not an accident that I picked that particular one to speak of seduction and treachery. As we know, the serpent is associated with betrayal.
Bonetti: In Annie John, Annie is praised by her teachers, and she even holds them spellbound with her writing at one point. When you were a girl in Antigua, did you have teachers who encouraged you and thought that you were special?
Kincaid: Yes and no. I was considered a bright child. I was always first, second or third, and when I was third it was considered disappointing. But to say people encouraged me, no. No one was encouraged. Some of us might go off to the University of the West Indies to study, or to England, but then what would we do? There's nothing in Antigua. I am from a poor family, and most of the girls who went off to university were from privileged families. Only boys could go off to university if they were from my background. If I had been a boy, there's no question that I would have been singled out.
Bonetti: So it was that you were a girl, as much as anything, that narrowed your opportunities?
Kincaid: It was. I can see that now. The other day I was reading the newspaper from my home--the government is very corrupt--everybody's always got their face in the newpaper for some terrible thing--and one of the pictures was a boy I used to go to school with. He and his brother once beat me up because I came in ahead of one of them in an exam. They thought that I had cheated; if I hadn't come in ahead of them, whatever glittering prize--a book of poetry or something--would have gone to one of them.
Bonetti: You had to have cheated because you were a girl.
Kincaid: I had to have cheated. But what happened to him? He's a member of the cabinet. There's a girl that I went to school with who in fact is the "Gwen" character in Annie John. She was a brilliant, brilliant girl but nothing much happened to her. She's a supervisor somewhere. There's no question, if she and I were boys, that we would have fared much better. As it turns out, for me, it didn't matter.
Bonetti: You grew up in the British colonial tradition, reading John Milton's Paradise Lost and the Bible. Are you conscious of the ways in which that kind of literature has had an impact on your work?
Kincaid: People have told me so, and when I read it out loud, I become aware of the influence of the things I read as a child-- images from Christian mythology and Paradise Lost. All of this has left me very uncomfortable with ambiguity. My sense of the world is that things are right and wrong, and that when you're wrong, you get thrown into a dark pit and you pay forever. You try very hard not to do a wrong thing, and if you do, there's very little forgiveness. I was brought up to understand that English traditions were right and mine were wrong. Within the life of an English person there was always clarity, and within an English culture there was always clarity, but within my life and culture was ambiguity. A person who is dead in England is dead. A person where I come from who is dead might not be dead. I was taught to think of ambiguity as magic, a shadiness and an illegitimacy, not the real thing of Western civilization.
Bonetti: That's the way you were taught, and so now that's your inclination.
Kincaid: Yes, yes. The thing that I am branded with and the thing that I am denounced for, I now claim as my own. I am illegitimate, I am ambiguous. In some way I actually claim the right to ambiguity, and the right to clarity. It does me no good to say, "Well, I reject this and I reject that." I feel free to use everything, or not, as I choose. I was forced to memorize John Milton and that was a very painful thing. But I'm not going to make myself forget John Milton because it involves a painful thing. I find John Milton very beautiful, and I'm glad that I know it. I'm sorry that the circumstances of how I got to know it were so horrid, but, since I know it, I know it and I claim every right to use it.
Bonetti: One book that seems to incorporate different cultural expectations and interpretations of the same events is Lucy. In one scene Lucy tells Louis and Mariah her dream. Their response, the western white response, is to look at each other and say, "Freud lives," or words to that effect.
Kincaid: The people in Lucy's society live for dreaming. They believe that waking life is informed by dream life. Where I come from some people act only on their dreams. All their non- sleeping actions are based on what happened to them when they were asleep. Louis and Mariah were in fact saying that her perception of the world was not valid, that she needed Freud.
Bonetti: My Milton professor once described the imagery in John Milton as being "highly visual, non-visual" imagery--because of Milton's blindness. You couldn't draw a picture of what John Milton describes, yet it is highly visual. Do you feel an affinity between that notion and the style of At the Bottom of the River?
Kincaid: One of the things that inspired me to write was English poets, even though I had never seen England. It's as if I were a blind person too. When I was about ten years old I read Jane Eyre, and at one point she describes the evening as the "gloaming." She's describing something English, something I would never see until I was thirty-odd years old. I got stuck on that word, and eventually found a way to use it in At the Bottom of the River. Then I was free of it. It was important for me to have written those stories, because it freed me of an obsession with a certain kind of language. I memorized Wordsworth when I was a child, Keats, all sorts of things. It was an attempt to make me into a certain kind of person, the kind of person they had no use for, anyway. An educated black person. I got stuck with a lot of things, so I ended up using them.
Bonetti: So you see At the Bottom of the River as a kind of catharsis?
Kincaid: I would not have ever, ever been able to say, "You know, I really need to write this, I really need to get rid of these images," but that's what I was doing. A sort of desire for a perfect place, a perfect situation, comes from English Romantic poetry. It described a perfection which one longed for, and of course the perfection that one longed for was England. I longed for England myself. These things were a big influence, and it was important for me to get rid of them. Then I could actually look at the place I'm from.
Bonetti: And what did you find there?
Kincaid: In the place I'm from you don't have much room. You have the sea. If you step on the sea, you sink. The only thing the sea can do is take you away. People living on a tiny island are not expected to have deep thoughts about how they live, their right to live. You can have little conflicts, disagreements about what side of the street to walk on, but you cannot disagree that perhaps there should not be a street there. You cannot disagree about fundamental things, which is what an artist would do. All they're left with is a kind of pastoral beauty, a kind of natural beauty, and wonderful trinkets. They make nice hats. They catch fish in an an old-fashioned way. It's all aesthetic, but it has no thinking it it. They cannot think. They will not allow themselves to think. They might have to change things, and they can't bear it.
Bonetti: Was it necessary for you to leave Antigua to become a writer?
Kincaid: Oh, absolutely. It's no accident that most West Indian writers do not live in the West Indies all the time. It's the source of their art, but they can't live there. The place is full of the most sewer-like corruption you ever saw. The ones who live there become obsessed with politics, and almost always stop writing. And you can't blame them, you know. There is simply no way to stay there and write. People there don't really read. They have cable television, thanks to America. You couldn't make a living there, you couldn't be supported economically, to begin with. But you wouldn't be supported spiritually, either. These are not places that support people. I was attempting to do this thing that, as far as I know, no one in Antigua had attempted to do. Part of the reason I changed my name was so that they wouldn't know I was writing. I was afraid I would be laughed at, though it would not have stopped me. Nothing has made me not do what I wanted to do.
Bonetti: So you changed your name to disguise yourself so that you could write. How did you pick the name Jamaica Kincaid?
Kincaid: It had no significance other than it was useful, to protect me from things. It was one of those things you do in the middle of the night. In those days we used to smoke marijuana or drink. I can't remember which one we were doing. If someone should say, "Well, you know she used to smoke marijuana," they should know that I don't mind that anybody knows. I try not to have too many secrets.
Bonetti: You're not going to try to get appointed to the Supreme Court?
Kincaid: Or become Secretary of Defense. Or marry the president. My husband is not going to be the president. It was just one of many things I was doing in my life to make a break with my past.
Bonetti: Perhaps I am identifying you too strongly with your characters, but Lucy talks about the fact that she realizes she's inventing herself when she starts studying photography, and you too studied photography at a certain point after you got here.
Kincaid: I didn't have the words for it, but yes, I was inventing myself. I didn't make up a past that I didn't have. I just made my present different from my past. How did I really do that? Just a few years off the banana boat basically, and there I was doing one crazy thing after another. How was I not afraid? The crucial thing was that I would not communicate with my family. Somehow I knew that was the key to anything I wanted to make of myself. I could not be with people who knew me so well that they knew just what I was capable of. I had to be with people who thought whatever I said went.
Bonetti: Do you feel like you were running for your life in the fiction by telling the mother/daughter story from different perspectives?
Kincaid: It was the thing I knew. Quite possibly if I had had another kind of life I would not have been moved to write. That was the immediate thing, the immediate oppression, I knew. I wanted to free myself of that.
Bonetti: It must have taken a great amount of focus and self- determination to become a writer.
Kincaid: I wouldn't describe myself as someone with focus and self-determination. Those are words and descriptions I shy away from. I consider them, in fact, sort of false. I find ambition to achieve unpleasant. The ambition I have is to write well. I don't have an ambition to be successful. I have an ambition to eat, which I find quite different from an ambition to be successful, though I think in America the two are rather bonded together.
Bonetti: When you came to the United States to be a maid did you have an agenda?
Kincaid: No. I did not know what would happen to me. I was just leaving, with great bitterness in my heart--a very hard heart-- towards everybody I'd ever known, but I could not have articulated why. It's a mystery to my family why I feel this way, because they see nothing wrong with what happened to me. If I had remained a servant, I would not have been surprised. I would have been in great agony, but I would not have been surprised. I knew that I wanted something, but I did not know what. I knew I did not want convention. I wanted to risk something.
Bonetti: You've done a very American thing. Like Huck Finn, you "lit out for the territory."
Kincaid: What good luck it was that I did light out for American territory and not Britain. I do not think that I would have been allowed this act of self-invention, which is very American, in Europe--certainly not in English-speaking Europe. When I came to America, I came from a place where most of the people looked like me, so I wasn't too concerned with the color of my skin. If I'd gone to England I could only have been concerned with the color of my skin.
Bonetti: More so than here?
Kincaid: Much more so. I was not used to American racial attitudes, so whenever they were directed at me I did not recognize them, and if I didn't recognize them they were meaningless. I had no feeling about my own race. No feeling about my color. I didn't like it or not like it, I just accepted it the way I accept my eyes. I'm sure people denied me things because of the color of my skin, but I didn't know it, so I just went on. That was not my problem. I didn't know that there were very few black people writing for The New Yorker, so I wasn't troubled by that. I actually knew nothing about The New Yorker-- its history, or its prominence in American literature--when I was taken to meet the editor. I was just a fool treading where angels feared to go.
Bonetti: You wrote "The Talk of the Town" column for about four years. How did this come to be?
Kincaid: How did I come to write for The New Yorker? George Trow befriended me--I think that is how I would put it--and was very generous and kind and loving. He thought I was funny, and he would take me around to parties. I was so grateful, because I was very poor. Sometimes the only meal I ate was those little cocktail things. He would write about me in "Talk of the Town." He took me to meet Mr. Shawn, and I started to write for The New Yorker. I gave George my impressions of an event, and they appeared in the magazine just as I wrote them. That was how I discovered what my own writing was. It was just all a matter of luck, chance.
Bonetti: Were you George Trow's "sassy black friend?"
Kincaid: I was his "sassy black friend," which didn't offend me at all. I seemed to be sassy, I said these things that he thought were sassy, and I was black.
Bonetti: How do you think the writing that you did for "The Talk of the Town" prepared you for the fiction?
Kincaid: It did two things. It showed me how to write, and it allowed me to write in my own voice. The New Yorker no longer has that kind of power, but at one time it could take any individual piece of writing, no matter how eccentric the writing was, and without changing so much as a punctuation mark, the piece became the standard of The New Yorker. It had such power of personality. So there I was, writing anonymously in this strange voice, and it looked like The New Yorker. It was a wonderful thing for me because I was edited by this brilliant editor, this brilliant man, Mr. William Shawn, who became my father-in-law.
Bonetti: Later. We have to say later.
Kincaid: Yes, he was very keen on not appearing to practice nepotism. Anyway, I had this wonderful editor and what I had to do to keep him interested was write clearly and keep my personality. And I did it. I could make him understand what I had to say. I doubt very much that I would have turned out to be the writer I am without him. He often bought my bad "Talk" stories, and didn't print them, but paid me for them, just so I could have some money to live on. The New Yorker, you know, used to support writers. Sometimes it didn't work out, but some of us kept on going. I wrote many very weird "Talk" stories that appeared in The New Yorker, very experimental "Talk" stories, and it was from them that I learned how to do the stories in At the Bottom of the River. Sometimes I was doing both; I was writing weird stories and I was writing At the Bottom of the River.
Bonetti: At what point were you Jamaica Kincaid, in "Talk of the Town?"
Kincaid: By the time I made the effort to write I had changed my name, so I was never anything but Jamaica Kincaid as a writer.
Bonetti: And "my sassy black friend" before that.
Kincaid: That's true. But it would be "our sassy black friend, Jamaica Kincaid," I was always named.
Bonetti: I read that there was a bit of controversy, at least among people privately, about the Louis character in Lucy being too close to an actual writer on the staff of The New Yorker. Did that surface in a public controversy at all?
Kincaid: I must say when I read that, it was a surprise to me. If it was a controversy among my friends, they didn't tell me. Everyone likes to think that everything is really telling them something about someone, but I never write about other people. I'm not that interested in other people at all. The people that I really want to say anything about are people at home, and even so, I muddle up characters. The true characters in Lucy are the mother and Lucy. Apparently it's the stock in trade of West Indian writers to write about their childhoods. Meryl Hodge's Crick Crack Money is a wonderful book, and it's about a Caribbean childhood, too, not unlike mine. It's true that women sometimes fall victim to a kind of narcissism. Certainly it's true in the West Indies. I went to a conference of West Indian women writers, very learned, brilliant women. Many of them said, "I know I should give my paper, but I'm going to tell you about myself instead." It was at that moment I realized that my mother wasn't that unusual. I don't know if this sense of "here I am, let me tell you about me," is universal to women, but it's a very West Indian trait. Maybe it is because she's confined to home and family that there's a great love of self as an aesthetic thing among West Indian women. It must be said they're very beautiful women.
Bonetti: The critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says that you, like Toni Morrison, "never feel the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world, or a female sensibility," that you assume them both as a given.
Kincaid: That is very true. I don't really write about men unless they have something to do with a woman. I was just reading an African writer who described black people as black. I couldn't tell whether he meant it as race or skin color. I didn't understand what he meant.
Bonetti: There's also an acceptance of androgny in your books, a completely frank treatment of adolescent sexuality between girls. "Gwen and I will get married," says Annie John. There it is, and no big deal is made of it.
Kincaid: I grew up with a great acceptance of female bonding. The greatest loves that I knew, and the greatest quarrels, the greatest enmities I knew were between women. I was very interested in feelings between these people, and I just wasn't going to worry about whether they were homosexuals or not. If they are, well good for them.
Bonetti: Another thing that you do with absolute matter of factness is to take the imagery of patriarchal literature--God, we all know, is a man and so is Lucifer--and without any ado, God, by God, becomes a woman.
Kincaid: I am writing about power and powerlessness and I think that these things have no sex. They have only their nature. I have never met a man more impressive than my mother. When Ronald Reagan was announcing the invasion of Grenada, at his side was Eugenie Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominique. If you were from Mars, you would think that she was the leader of the powerful country and he was the leader of the weak country. My mother is like that--grand and impressive. I've never met any man with that sort of personal power.
Bonetti: You've talked about your mother and the stories that she tells as being a part of what makes you a writer now, and yet you've also commented that it would never occur to people like her to step back from their experience and create a work of art. Can you elaborate on that?
Kincaid: I started to write out of reasons that were I thought peculiar to me--I was lazy and I wasn't really interested in being educated in a way that would suit other people. I was interested in knowing things that pleased me. For instance, I often read books on astronomy but it doesn't interest me to go to school to study astronomy. I became a writer because I could live a life that pleased me. I liked to investigate my own life. I liked to talk about my mother, her family, my life, what happened to me, historically, in my childhood, and I could only get to them in this way. I do not know why I am able to step outside and look. I certainly don't have more courage than they do, more education, more brilliance. My mother is an extremely brilliant woman. I do not know what it is that made, in me, the desire to do this thing and to seek satisfaction for that desire.
Bonetti: Have you come to the point in your life where you're comfortable with the enriching things about you that come from your mother?
Kincaid: Absolutely. There are many things about her that I've consciously tried to adopt, that I love. Sometimes I only write in her voice. I think the voice of Lucy is very much her voice. Her voice as a piece of literature is the most fabulous thing you ever read or heard. She is a person in her own right, but careless with her gifts. That's very painful to me to watch.
Bonetti: How do you mean that?
Kincaid: I perhaps am a writer because of her, in a very specific way. For instance, I love books because of her. She gave me an Oxford dictionary for my seventh birthday. She had taught me to read when I was three-and-a-half years old. There are many things that should have allowed her to free herself from her situation, and perhaps one of them would have been to have no children at all, including me. But you see her with these marvelous gifts and sense of self--people who have less of this than her have done things, ruled the world for instance. She's in her seventies and she's quite something. If she roused herself she could do quite a bit.
Bonetti: Have you ever felt that a part of why you write is to win your mother's approval?
Kincaid: When I first started among the things I wanted to do was to say, "Aren't you sorry that no greater effort was made over my education? Or over my life?" But as I've gotten older I am fairly sure that that's not a part of my life anymore. I didn't see her for twenty years, so the desire for her approval was greater in her absence. Then as we saw each other and spoke, I realized there was a certain chasm that could not really be closed; I just grew to accept her. I also wanted my children to know my mother, because whatever my differences are with her, I wanted them to feel a part of this person, and if possible to realize that some of the dynamics in my life were related. I didn't want her to die without closing that circle.
Bonetti: If you suddenly won your mother's total and unconditional approval, would you still be writing?
Kincaid: Now you've frightened me. I think it's not possible, but I no longer really want that. We're just two grown-up people living the life we chose to live. It would be nice if she understood certain things about me. On the other hand, she's in her seventies, she needn't make any new arrangements if she doesn't want to, and perhaps, new efforts are beyond her. I really don't look for that.
Bonetti: You've taken the facts of your biography and shaped them into fictions with universal appeal. When it comes right down to the bottom line, who do you think you write for?
Kincaid: I always assume no one will read the damn thing, you know. Not my mother, the person I really write for, I suspect. My great audience is this one-half Carib Indian woman living in Antigua. I imagine she doesn't read what I write, but I'm quite surprised that people who are the exact opposite of her find anything in it. I'm really quite amazed.

American Literature Defines Autobiography and Memoir

Creative Nonfiction: Memoir and Autobiography
"Many writers hunger for open, less canonical genres as vehicles for their postmodern visions. The rise of global, multiethnic, and women's literature -- works in which writers reflect on experiences shaped by culture, color, and gender -- has endowed autobiography and memoir with special allure. While the boundaries of the terms are debated, a memoir is typically shorter or more limited in scope, while an autobiography makes some attempt at a comprehensive overview of the writer's life.
Postmodern fragmentation has rendered problematic for many writers the idea of a finished self that can be articulated successfully in one sweep. Many turn to the memoir in their struggles to ground an authentic self. What constitutes authenticity, and to what extent the writer is allowed to embroider upon his or her memories of experience in works of nonfiction, are hotly contested subjects of writers' conferences."
From "Contemporary American Literature" Chapter 10 posted December 2006 (n.p.)

AP Image
Jamaica Kincaid's writing is referred to as autobiographical work.
After an introduction about women writers from the English speaking Caribbean Jamaica Kincaid is briefly mentioned:
"Rhys's work opened the way for the angrier voice of Jamaica Kincaid (1949- ), from Antigua, whose unsparing autobiographical works include the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996)." (n.p.)

Answers dot com link to Jamaica Kincaid

A useful link at Answers dot com for information about Jamaica Kincaid

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Article on Elizabeth Bishop

Jamaica Kincaid mentions the influence of Elizabeth Bishop (her poem "The Girl"?) in the Aloud podcast by poet Elizabeth Bishop who also worked at the New Yorker with Jamaica Kincaid. (Aloud is supported by the Library Association of Los Angeles.)

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)


Monday, August 8, 2011

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)

Saturday, May 14, 2011

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)

Sunday, May 1, 2011

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.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

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

Monday, April 4, 2011

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)

Tuesday, March 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

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

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.

Monday, February 7, 2011

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.

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

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.

Mauritius: Georges by Alexander Dumas

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



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.

Monday, December 13, 2010

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."

Thursday, December 9, 2010

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
 

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

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.

Friday, December 3, 2010

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

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

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

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.

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).

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),

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
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.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

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)

Friday, November 19, 2010

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

Thursday, November 18, 2010

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."

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

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.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

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