Jamaica Kincaid and Euma Okoro on Writing

Jamaica Kincaid and Euma Okoro on Writing

 Jamaica Kincaid and Euma Okoro on Writing, Financial Times Interview. Lilah Raptopoulos. October 2, 2022,

Jamaica Kincaid I didn’t know there were such things as careers. A lot of things you, your progress in the world just sounds so wonderful to me. I was sent away because my parents had too many children that they couldn’t afford. And so being the eldest, I was sent away to help support them. And I was very resentful of it. And after a while, I stopped sending my salary home and would shop at very expensive stores. I was the best-dressed nanny you ever saw. I went to college, dropped out, decided I wanted to be a writer because people who knew me as a child are not surprised that I became a writer because I was always pretending I was writing. Now . .. 

 Lilah Raptopoulos You mean you would say, like “this book is actually by me”?  

Jamaica Kincaid Yes, and I wouldn’t say it, but it was clear that I thought I had written it. And I was interested in your seeing yourself in the world. I never thought of seeing myself as, as I am. For instance, I was punished a lot because I was very disruptive in school and I think I was about 9, 10. I was given a copy of Jane Eyre to read and in a corner. That was my punishment and not recess. And I read it and pretended I was Charlotte Bronte. And it never occurred to me that neither Charlotte Bronte nor Jane Eyre looked like me. I just felt I was them. Racial identity didn’t come into my imagination until I went to America, because where I come from, everyone is black. So if you say, Oh, the black guy, you would say which one? Because . . .   

Lilah Raptopoulos (Laughs) Jamaica, what was it like? You know, it was the ’70s, being a woman and a black woman in an organisation that was mostly white, mostly men. What was it like? I mean, you said a lot of people didn’t agree with you or were hostile and then it didn’t bother you? 

Jamaica Kincaid Well, in the early days of being in New York, my friend, a New Yorker writer, took me to meet the editor, William Shawn, and he said, well, she could give it a try. Didn’t look as if I could possibly write for them. And I did write something about the West Indian Day carnival. And I made notes and I gave it to him, thinking he would rewrite, have someone rewrite it. Well, it appeared just the way I had written it. And I looked at it and I said, “Of course that is my voice”. And from there I just started to write. But there were no black people at The New Yorker, and there were, in the world of literary New York then there were no black people. But America, everybody tries to be white. But I’d been brought up in a British colony in which (chuckles) in those days only certain people were white. And so when I came to America and I met all these white people, there were people from Lebanon, Poland, Spain, and they said they were white. And I just thought, no your not and I just ignored them. So I have my distortion of race. I have to thank the English people. (Laughter)

 

 

Jamaica Kincaid EVENTS

An Evening with Jamaica Kincaid Thursday, July 16, 2020 - 6:00 PM

"Jamaica Kincaid is a writer and professor whose works include the novels See Now Then, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and Mr. Potter; a classic history of Antigua, A Small Place; and a memoir, My Brother. The Josephine Olp Weeks Chair and Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University, Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She lives with her family in Vermont." The New York Society Library https://youtu.be/Ca5uLZO678g

A Heap of Disturbance

My obsession with the garden and the events that take place in it began before I was familiar with that entity called consciousness. My mother taught me to read when I was very young, and she did this without telling me that there was something called the alphabet. I became familiar with words as if they were all wholly themselves, each one a world by itself, intact and self-contained, and able to be joined to other words if they wished to or if someone like me wanted them to. The book she taught me to read from was a biography of Louis Pasteur, the person she told me was responsible for her boiling the milk I drank daily, making sure that it would not infect me with something called tuberculosis. I never got tuberculosis, but I did get typhoid fever, whooping cough, measles, and persistent cases of hookworm and long worms. I was a “sickly child.” Much of the love I remember receiving from my mother came during the times I was sick. Published in The New Yorker September 7, 2020

Oasis Writing Link™: Airing Dirty Laundry

Oasis Writing Link™: Airing Dirty Laundry:



A popular post about those TMI moments that actually are an invitation for human connection. If you consider Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy or even Annie John (and My Brother), you would recognize that she provides so many of these invitations.

Jamaica Kincaid

“Sometimes extraordinary things happen to people from shitty countries, not just Norway.” Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid answers back to in the most powerful way, "I'm a person from a shitty country" in the Florida  Key West Conference. (Florida Key News linked article)

GIRL BY JAMAICA KINCAID

“Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid from Charters, Ann, Ed. The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 6th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

New Yorker credit

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum in it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you; but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school;this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don’t squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers—you might catch something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread? 

JAMAICA KINCAID'S JOURNEY