An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid

An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid, Kay Bonetti

The Missouri Review, Volume 15, Number 2, 1992, pp. 123-142 (Article)

Published by University of MissouriDOI: 10.1353/mis.1992.0031

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of Virginia Libraries __ACCESS_STATEMENT__ (Viva) (30 Oct 2013 19:03 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mis/summary/v015/15.2.kincaid.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mis/summary/v015/15.2.kincaid.html

AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMAICA KINCAID

Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid was interviewed by Kay Bonetti for the AmericanAudio Prose Library in April of 1991 in Bennington, Vermont, where shelives with her husband, composer Allen Shawn, and their two children.Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richarson in 1949 in St. John's

Antigua, West Indies, the daughter of a cabinetmaker. At the age of17, she left Antigua for New York, to work as an au pair. She shortlythereafter struck out on her own, eventually finding her way onto thestaff of the New Yorker as a regular contributor to "The Talk of the Town"through her association with the writer George Trow, experience whichshe says is absolutely where she learned to write. Kincaid is the authorof four books: At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, and A SmallPlace, a book-length essay about the history and politics of Antigua. Herawards include the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the AmericanAcademy and Institute of Arts and Letters for At the Bottom of the River.Annie John was one of three finalists for the 1985 International Ritz ParisHemingway Award.

An Interview withJamaica Kincaid/ Kay Bonetti

Interviewer: Ms. Kincaid, in the novel Lucy, you give LucyJosephine 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 wasgoing to have a name that would refer to the slave part of herhistory, so why not my own? I write about myself for the mostpart, and about things that have happened to me. Everything Isay is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admitany of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence.

Interviewer: Your father, like Lucy's, was a cabinetmaker, andyour own mother married a much older man with whom she hadthree sons several years after you were born.

Kincaid: Yes, that is true. But here's an example of something thatis true and not true: in "The Long Rain" the girl has an Ulness—arite of passage, I guess you might caU it—when she's fourteen yearsold. I had an iUness Uke that when I was seven years old, and Iwas writing about that iUness. I root my fear of rodents in that timeof my Ufe. I used to Ue on my bed and look up at the ceiUng, andI saw hundreds of rats running around the ceiUng. It must havebeen only one or two, but they seemed to go around Uke a merry-go-round. It must have been a hallucination. I was left alone, andUke the girl I did get up and wash and powder the photographs,but some of the photographs described in the book could not haveexisted when I was seven years old. The confirmation photograph,for instance, did not exist. I don't aim to be factual. I aim to betrue to something, but it's not necessarily the facts.

The Missouri Review · 225

Interviewer: Where did the story of the green figs and the blacksnake 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 whatreally happened. I tried to write a story about my mother andmyself, and there were incidents that I perceived as betrayal, at thetime, though I don't necessarily beUeve that now. In my writingI suppose Tm trying to understand how I got to be the person Iam. The truth is important, but it's a certain kind of truth.

Interviewer: Even though Annie John begins and ends chronologi-cally, it's not buUt on a linear model. A single one-time happeningrecurs in several episodes, taken from different points of view,within different contexts. Did you conceive of it as a novel or asa sequence of short stories?

Kincaid: I didn't conceive of it as either one. I just write. I cometo the end, I start again. I come to the end, I start again. Andthen sometimes I come to the end, and there is no starting again.In my mind there is no question of who wUl do what and when.Sometimes I've written the end of something before I've writtenthe beginning. Whatever a novel is, Tm not it, and whatever ashort story is, Tm not it. If I had to follow these forms, I couldn'twrite. Tm reaUy interested in breaking the form.

Interviewer: It is interesting that a story your mother told aboutherself as a girl—walking home with a bunch of green figs onher head in which a snake is hiding—becomes a parable that themother teUs the daughter in Annie John, to try to induce her toconfess.

126 · The Missouri Review Jamaica Kincaid

"I was taught to think of ambiguity asmagic. "

Kincaid: What did I know? I was writing this story and I had alot of information about my famUy and their history, and I usedit in this way. My mother used to tell me a lot of things aboutherself. It's perhaps one of the ways in which I became a writer.Why I used that incident, I can't reaUy say. It was conscious andit was not conscious. A psychiatrist would see that it's not anaccident that I picked that particular one to speak of seduction andtreachery. As we know, the serpent is associated with betrayal.

Interviewer: In Annie John, Annie is praised by her teachers, andshe even holds them speUbound with her writing at one point.When you were a girl in Antigua, did you have teachers whoencouraged you and thought that you were special?

Kincaid: Yes and no. I was considered a bright chUd. I was alwaysfirst, second or third, and when I was third it was considereddisappointing. But to say people encouraged me, no. No one wasencouraged. Some of us might go off to the University of theWest Indies to study, or to England, but then what would wedo? There's nothing in Antigua. I am from a poor famUy, andmost of the girls who went off to university were from privilegedfamiUes. Only boys could go off to university if they were frommy background. If I had been a boy, there's no question that Iwould have been singled out.

Interviewer: 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 readingthe newspaper from my home—the government is very corrupt—everybody's always got their face in the newpaper for some terrible

Jamaica Kincaid The Missouri Review · 127

"Where I come from some people actonly on their dreams."

thing—and one of the pictures was a boy I used to go to schoolwith. He and his brother once beat me up because I came in aheadof one of them in an exam. They thought that I had cheated; if Ihadn't come in ahead of them, whatever gUttering prize—a bookof poetry or something—would have gone to one of them.

Interviewer: You had to have cheated because you were a girl.

Kincaid: I had to have cheated. But what happened to him? He'sa member of the cabinet. There's a girl that I went to school withwho in fact is the "Gwen" character in Annie John. She was abrilUant, briUiant girl but nothing much happened to her. She'sa supervisor somewhere. There's no question, if she and I wereboys, that we would have fared much better. As it turns out, forme, it didn't matter.

Interviewer: You grew up in the British colonial tradition, readingJohn MUton's Paradise Lost and the Bible. Are you conscious ofthe ways in which that kind of Uterature has had an impact onyour work?

Kincaid: People have told me so, and when I read it out loud, Ibecome aware of the influence of the things I read as a chUd—images from Christian mythology and Paradise Lost. AU of this hasleft me very uncomfortable with ambiguity. My sense of the worldis that things are right and wrong, and that when you're wrong,you get thrown into a dark pit and you pay forever. You tryvery hard not to do a wrong thing, and if you do, there's veryUttle forgiveness. I was brought up to understand that EngUshtraditions were right and mine were wrong. Within the Ufe of anEnglish person there was always clarity, and within an EngUsh


culture there was always clarity, but within my Ufe and culturewas ambiguity. A person who is dead in England is dead. Aperson where I come from who is dead might not be dead. Iwas taught to think of ambiguity as magic, a shadiness and anUlegitimacy, not the real thing of Western civUization.

Interviewer: That's the way you were taught, and so now that'syour incUnation.

Kincaid: Yes, yes. The thing that I am branded with and thething that I am denounced for, I now claim as my own. I amUlegitimate, I am ambiguous. In some way I actually claim theright to ambiguity, and the right to clarity. It does me no goodto say, "WeU, I reject this and I reject that." I feel free to useeverything, or not, as I choose. I was forced to memorize JohnMilton and that was a very painful thing. But Tm not going tomake myself forget John MUton because it involves a painful thing.I find John MUton very beautiful, and Tm glad that I know it.Tm sorry that the circumstances of how I got to know it were sohorrid, but, since I know it, I know it and I claim every right touse it.

Interviewer: One book that seems to incorporate different culturalexpectations and interpretations of the same events is Lwcy. In onescene Lucy teUs Louis and Mariah her dream. Their response, theWestern white response, is to look at each other and say, "FreudUves," or words to that effect.

Kincaid: The people in Lucy's society Uve for dreaming. TheybeUeve that waking life is informed by dream life. Where I comefrom some people act only on their dreams. AU their non-sleeping


actions are based on what happened to them when they wereasleep. Louis and Mariah were in fact saying that her perceptionof the world was not vaUd, that she needed Freud.

Interviewer: My MUton professor once described the imagery inJohn MUton as being "highly visual, non-visual" imagery—becauseof Milton's blindness. You couldn't draw a picture of what JohnMilton describes, yet it is highly visual. Do you feel an affinitybetween that notion and the style of At the Bottom of the River?

Kincaid: One of the things that inspired me to write was EngUshpoets, even though I had never seen England. It's as if I were ablind 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 EngUsh, something I would never seeuntil I was thirty-odd years old. I got stuck on that word, andeventuaUy found a way to use it in At the Bottom of the River. ThenI was free of it. It was important for me to have written thosestories, because it freed me of an obsession with a certain kind oflanguage. I memorized Wordsworth when I was a chUd, Keats,all sorts of things. It was an attempt to make me into a certainkind 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 Iended up using them.

Interviewer: So you see At the Bottom of the River as a kind ofcatharsis?

Kincaid: I would not have ever, ever been able to say, "Youknow, I really need to write this, I reaUy need to get rid of theseimages," but that's what I was doing. A sort of desire for a perfect


"In the place Fm from you don't havemuch room. You have the sea. If you stepon the sea, you sink. "

place, a perfect situation, comes from EngUsh Romantic poetry. Itdescribed a perfection which one longed for, and of course theperfection that one longed for was England. I longed for Englandmyself. These things were a big influence, and it was importantfor me to get rid of them. Then I could actually look at the placeTm from.

Interviewer: And what did you find there?

Kincaid: In the place Tm from you don't have much room. Youhave the sea. If you step on the sea, you sink. The only thing thesea can do is take you away. People living on a tiny island are notexpected to have deep thoughts about how they Uve, their right toUve. You can have Uttle conflicts, disagreements about what sideof the street to walk on, but you cannot disagree that perhapsthere should not be a street there. You cannot disagree aboutfundamental things, which is what an artist would do. AU they'releft with is a kind of pastoral beauty, a kind of natural beauty,and wonderful trinkets. They make nice hats. They catch fish inan old-fashioned way. It's all aesthetic, but it has no thinking itit. They cannot think. They wiU not allow themselves to think.They might have to change things, and they can't bear it.

Interviewer: Was it necessary for you to leave Antigua to becomea writer?

Kincaid: Oh, absolutely. It's no accident that most West Indianwriters do not Uve in the West Indies aU the time. It's the sourceof their art, but they can't Uve there. The place is fuU of themost sewer-like corruption you ever saw. The ones who live therebecome obsessed with politics, and almost always stop writing.


"I do not think I would have beenallowed this act of self-invention inEurope. "

And you can't blame them, you know. There is simply no wayto stay there and write. People there don't really read. They havecable television, thanks to America. You couldn't make a livingthere, you couldn't be supported economically, to begin with. Butyou wouldn't be supported spirituaUy, either. These are not placesthat support people. I was attempting to do this thing that, as faras I know, no one in Antigua had attempted to do. Part of thereason I changed my name was so that they wouldn't know I waswriting. I was afraid I would be laughed at, though it would nothave stopped me. Nothing has made me not do what I wantedto do.

Interviewer: So you changed your name to disguise yourself sothat you could write. How did you pick the name Jamaica Kincaid?Kincaid: It had no significance other than it was useful, to protectme from things. It was one of those things you do in the middleof the night. In those days we used to smoke marijuana or drink.I can't remember which one we were doing. If someone shouldsay, "Well, you know she used to smoke marijuana," they shouldknow that I don't mind that anybody knows. I try not to havetoo many secrets.

Interviewer: You're not going to try to get appointed to theSupreme Court?

Kincaid: Or become Secretary of Defense. Or marry the president.My husband is not going to be the president. It was just one ofmany things I was doing in my life to make a break with mypast.

Interviewer: Perhaps I am identifying you too strongly with your


characters, but Lucy talks about the fact that she realizes she'sinventing herself when she starts studying photography, and youtoo studied photography at a certain point after you got here.

Kincaid: I didn't have the words for it, but yes, I was inventingmyself. I didn't make up a past that I didn't have. I just mademy present different from my past. How did I reaUy do that?Just a few years off the banana boat basicaUy, and there I wasdoing one crazy thing after another. How was I not afraid? Thecrucial thing was that I would not communicate with my family.Somehow I knew that was the key to anything I wanted to makeof myself. I could not be with people who knew me so weU thatthey knew just what I was capable of. I had to be with peoplewho thought whatever I said went.

Interviewer: Do you feel Uke you were running for your Ufein the fiction by teUing the mother/daughter story from differentperspectives?

Kincaid: It was the thing I knew. Quite possibly if I had hadanother kind of life I would not have been moved to write. Thatwas the immediate thing, the immediate oppression, I knew. Iwanted to free myself of that.

Interviewer: 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 andself-determination. Those are words and descriptions I shy awayfrom. I consider them, in fact, sort of false. I find ambition toachieve 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.Interviewer: When you came to the United States to be a maiddid you have an agenda?

Kincaid: No. I did not know what would happen to me. I wasjust leaving, with great bitterness in my heart—a very hard heart—toward everybody Td ever known, but I could not have articulatedwhy. It's a mystery to my famUy why I feel this way, because theysee nothing wrong with what happened to me. If I had remaineda servant, I would not have been surprised. I would have beenin great agony, but I would not have been surprised. I knew thatI wanted something, but I did not know what. I knew I did notwant convention. I wanted to risk something.Interviewer: You've done a very American thing. Like Huck Finn,you "Ut out for the territory."

Kincaid: What good luck it was that I did Ught out for Americanterritory and not Britain. I do not think that I would have beenaUowed this act of self-invention, which is very American, inEurope—certainly not in English-speaking Europe. When I cameto America, I came from a place where most of the people lookedUke me, so I wasn't too concerned with the color of my skin. IfTd gone to England I could only have been concerned with thecolor of my skin.Interviewer: More so than here?

Kincaid: Much more so. I was not used to American racial attitudes,


"It's true that women sometimes fallvictim to a kind of narcissism."

so whenever they were directed at me I did not recognize them,and if I didn't recognize them they were meaningless. I had nofeeling about my own race. No feeUng about my color. I didn't Ukeit or not Uke it, I just accepted it the way I accept my eyes. Tmsure people denied me things because of the color of my skin, butI didn't know it, so I just went on. That was not my problem. Ididn't know that there were very few black people writing for TheNew Yorker, so I wasn't troubled by that. I actually knew nothingabout The New Yorker—its history, or its prominence in AmericanUterature—when I was taken to meet the editor. I was just a fooltreading where angels feared to go.Interviewer: You wrote "The Talk of the Town" column for aboutfour years. How did this come to be?Kincaid: How did I come to write for The New Yorker? GeorgeTrow befriended me—I think that is how I would put it—and wasvery generous and kind and loving. He thought I was funny, andhe would take me around to parties. I was so grateful, becauseI was very poor. Sometimes the only meal I ate was those littlecocktaU things. He would write about me in "Talk of the Town."He took me to meet Mr. Shawn, and I started to write for TheNew Yorker. I gave George my impressions of an event, and theyappeared in the magazine just as I wrote them. That was how Idiscovered what my own writing was. It was just aU a matter ofluck, chance.

Interviewer: Were you George Trow's "sassy black friend?"Kincaid: I was his "sassy black friend," which didn't offend meat all. I seemed to be sassy, I said these things that he thoughtwere sassy, and I was black.


"I'm not that interested in other peopleat all."

Interviewer: How do you think the writing that you did for "TheTalk of the Town" prepared you for the fiction?

Kincaid: It did two things. It showed me how to write, andit aUowed me to write in my own voice. The New Yorker nolonger has that kind of power, but at one time it could take anyindividual piece of writing, no matter how eccentric the writingwas, and without changing so much as a punctuation mark, thepiece became the standard of The New Yorker. It had such powerof personahty. So there I was, writing anonymously in this strangevoice, and it looked like The New Yorker. It was a wonderful thingfor me because I was edited by this briUiant editor, this briUiantman, Mr. WUUam Shawn, who became my father-in-law.

Interviewer: Later. We have to say later.

Kincaid: Yes, he was very keen on not appearing to practicenepotism. Anyway, I had this wonderful editor and what I hadto do to keep him interested was write clearly and keep mypersonality. And I did it. I could make him understand what Ihad to say. I doubt very much that I would have turned out tobe 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 Icould have some money to Uve on. The New Yorker, you know,used to support writers. Sometimes it didn't work out, but someof us kept on going. I wrote many very weird "Talk" stories thatappeared in The New Yorker, very experimental "Talk" stories, andit was from them that I learned how to do the stories in At theBottom of the River. Sometimes I was doing both; I was writingweird stories and I was writing At the Bottom of the River.


Interviewer: At what point were you Jamaica Kincaid, in "Talk ofthe Town?"

Kincaid: By the time I made the effort to write I had changed myname, so I was never anything but Jamaica Kincaid as a writer.

Interviewer: 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.

Interviewer: I read that there was a bit of controversy, at leastamong people privately, about the Louis character in Lucy beingtoo close to an actual writer on the staff of The New Yorker. Didthat surface in a pubUc controversy at aU?

Kincaid: I must say when I read that, it was a surprise tome. If it was a controversy among my friends, they didn't teUme. Everyone likes to think that everything is really telUng themsomething about someone, but I never write about other people.Tm not that interested in other people at all. The people that Ireally want to say anything about are people at home, and evenso, I muddle up characters. The true characters in Lucy are themother and Lucy. Apparently it's the stock in trade of West Indianwriters to write about their childhoods. Meryl Hodge's Crick CrackMoney is a wonderful book, and it's about a Caribbean childhood,too, not unlike mine. It's true that women sometimes fall victimto a kind of narcissism. Certainly it's true in the West Indies. Iwent to a conference of West Indian women writers, very learned,briUiant women. Many of them said, "I know I should give mypaper, but Tm going to teU you about myself instead." It was


at that moment I realized that my mother wasn't that unusual. Idon'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 itis because she's confined to home and family that there's a greatlove of self as an aesthetic thing among West Indian women. Itmust be said they're very beautiful women.

Interviewer: The critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., says that you, UkeToni Morrison, "never feel the necessity of claiming the existenceof a black world, or a female sensibility," that you assume themboth as a given.

Kincaid: That is very true. I don't reaUy write about men unlessthey have something to do with a woman. I was just reading anAfrican writer who described black people as black. I couldn't teUwhether he meant it as race or skin color. I didn't understandwhat he meant.

Interviewer: There's also an acceptance of androgyny in your books,a completely frank treatment of adolescent sexuality between girls."Gwen and I wUl get married," says Annie John. There it is, andno big deal is made of it.

Kincaid: I grew up with a great acceptance of female bonding. Thegreatest loves that I knew, and the greatest quarrels, the greatestenmities I knew were between women. I was very interested infeelings between these people, and I just wasn't going to worryabout whether they were homosexuals or not. If they are, wellgood for them.

Interviewer: Another thing that you do with absolute matter of

23S · The Missouri Review Jamaica Kincaid

"I became a writer because I could livea life that pleased me. "

factness is to take the imagery of patriarchal literature—God, weaU 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 thinkthat these things have no sex. They have only their nature. Ihave never met a man more impressive than my mother. WhenRonald Reagan was announcing the invasion of Grenada, at hisside was Eugenie Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominique. Ifyou were from Mars, you would think that she was the leader ofthe powerful country and he was the leader of the weak country.My mother is like that—grand and impressive. I've never met anyman with that sort of personal power.

Interviewer: You've talked about your mother and the stories thatshe teUs as being a part of what makes you a writer now, andyet you've also commented that it would never occur to peopleUke her to step back from their experience and create a work ofart. Can you elaborate on that?

Kincaid: I started to write out of reasons that were I thoughtpeculiar to me—I was lazy and I wasn't really interested in beingeducated in a way that would suit other people. I was interestedin knowing things that pleased me. For instance, I often readbooks on astronomy but it doesn't interest me to go to schoolto study astronomy. I became a writer because I could live a lifethat pleased me. I Uked to investigate my own life. I liked totalk about my mother, her family, my life, what happened to me,historically, in my childhood, and I could only get to them in thisway. I do not know why I am able to step outside and look. Icertainly don't have more courage than they do, more education,


"My great audience is this one-halfCarib Indian woman living in Antigua."

more brilüance. My mother is an extremely briUiant woman. I donot know what it is that made, in me, the desire to do this thingand to seek satisfaction for that desire.

Interviewer: Have you come to the point in your Ufe where you'recomfortable with the enriching things about you that come fromyour mother?

Kincaid: Absolutely. There are many things about her that I'veconsciously tried to adopt, that I love. Sometimes I only write inher voice. I think the voice of Lucy is very much her voice. Hervoice as a piece of Uterature is the most fabulous thing you everread or heard. She is a person in her own right, but careless withher gifts. That's very painful to me to watch.

Interviewer: How do you mean that?

Kincaid: I perhaps am a writer because of her, in a very specificway. For instance, I love books because of her. She gave me anOxford dictionary for my seventh birthday. She had taught me toread when I was three-and-a-half years old. There are many thingsthat should have allowed her to free herself from her situation,and perhaps one of them would have been to have no children ataU, including me. But you see her with these marvelous gifts andsense of self—people who have less of this than she have donethings, ruled the world for instance. She's in her seventies andshe's quite something. If she roused herself she could do quite abit.

Interviewer: Have you ever felt that a part of why you write isto win your mother's approval?


Kincaid: When I first started among the things I wanted to do wasto say, "Aren't you sorry that no greater effort was made over myeducation? Or over my life?" But as I've gotten older I am fairlysure that that's not a part of my life anymore. I didn't see her fortwenty years, so the desire for her approval was greater in herabsence. Then as we saw each other and spoke, I realized therewas a certain chasm that could not reaUy be closed; I just grewto accept her. I also wanted my children to know my mother,because whatever my differences are with her, I wanted them tofeel a part of this person, and if possible to reaUze that some ofthe dynamics in my Ufe were related. I didn't want her to diewithout closing that circle.

Interviewer: If you suddenly won your mother's total and uncon-ditional approval, would you still be writing?

Kincaid: Now you've frightened me. I think it's not possible, but Ino longer really want that. We're justtwo grown-up people Uvingthe life we chose to Uve. It would be nice if she understood certainthings about me. On the other hand, she's in her seventies, sheneedn't make any new arrangements if she doesn't want to, andperhaps, new efforts are beyond her. I reaUy don't look for that.

Interviewer: You've taken the facts of your biography and shapedthem into fictions with universal appeal. When it comes right downto the bottom Une, who do you think you write for?

Kincaid: I always assume no one wiU read the damn thing, youknow. Not my mother, the person I reaUy write for, I suspect.My great audience is this one-half Carib Indian woman Uvingin Antigua. I imagine she doesn't read what I write, but Tm


quite surprised that people who are the exact opposite of her findanything in it. Tm really quite amazed.


Date post:	12-Dec-2016
Category:	Documents
Upload:	kay
View:	212 times
Download:	0 times

An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid

Documents