Sunday, November 23, 2008

Reasonably Reliable Biography



Jamaica Kincaid grew up on a small island near St. John, sometimes when I read her work I feel as though I have been to some of the places she describes; I have been to Antigua but the ambiguity I have absorbed by reading her makes me doubt myself. One of those settings is church in St. Johns where I walked around and remembered the description of a child's funeral. Kincaid observes the women wore white, grieved loudly, and she discusses the vomiting of one of the relations, who likely is the mother. That scene is described in one of the essays in A Small Place. Kincaid is so detached that it seems that she must be either angry or fearful of reabsorbing the limitations of her small -and small-minded-home island. She mentions that she was re-inventing herself as a writer in the Bonetti interview, probable she was in the process of this new self-formation at that time.

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