Jamaica Kincaid's
The Autobiography of My Mother
--Margaria Fichtner

An exile imprisoned by her past.
All novelists are exiles in this world, isolated by their solitary visions of the human experience and the peculiar demands of their craft. Even their most inspired work culminates in displacement, loss and abandonment. No writer can really begin a new book until he has gathered up all the false starts, anxieties, pride and shame that went into the last one, dumped everything into the dustbin, slammed the lid down tight and walked away.

"This most simple of movements, the turning of your back, is among the most difficult to make," writes Jamaica Kincaid in this eagerly awaited and entirely gratifying new novel, "but once it has been made you cannot imagine it was hard to accomplish."

Yet for Kincaid -- who turned her back on her native Antigua at 17 but whose fiction remains defined by her childhood yearnings for her mother's love, her postcolonial birthright of poverty and political corruption and her status as a citizen of no place and everywhere -- there are no clean breaks, no new beginnings. Kincaid now lives and writes in Vermont, but in her exile world there are no amicable divorces from the people and places of past.

"I've never really written about anyone except myself and my mother," Kincaid once told an interviewer. And since her first novel, the celebrated coming-of-age tale Annie John was published in 1985, no rigid boundaries have separated the imagined from the remembered in her work. The West Indies curls like a vine around her words and spirit. Her sentences throb with its rhythm, mysterious and reassuring as a heartbeat. Little collisions of myth, metaphor, memoir, fact, fantasy and truth illuminate her prose in the same odd, slightly off-balance way that the noon sunlight shimmers across the surface of some languid, tropical sea.

" ... this is how you set a table for tea; ... 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 ...."

Sublime pleasure
Now, with this new novel (Kindcaid's third after 1990's Lucy, which it is tempting to subtitle Annie John II), we are rewarded with that most sublime of pleasures, an ambitious, profound and courageous work by an author at the top of her form.

Kincaid presents The Autobiography of My Mother as the memoir of 70-year-old Xuela Claudette Richardson, who has spent her whole life on the island of Dominica, 150 miles southeast of Antigua but far less removed from its own slavery days and the other lingering shames that scar its past.

Like Kincaid, Xuela has spent her life obsessed by conquest and colonialism, class and culture, the clouded process of identity and the travails of stumbling toward adulthood bereft of the soft, sweet cushion of maternal love.

"My mother died the moment I was born," the book begins, "and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind."

With her mother present only in dreams ("She wore a long white gown, the hem of it falling just above her heels, and that was all of her that was ever exposed ...") and her father's attention was deflected by a new wife and the petty cruelties and corruptions of his career as a minor government official, Xuela learns to lean on the only person available: herself.

"I came to love myself in defiance, out of despair," she tells us, "because there was nothing else. Such a love will do, but it will only do, it is not the best kind; it has the taste of something left out on a shelf too long that has turned rancid, and when eaten makes the stomach turn. It will do, it will do, but only because there is nothing else to take its place; it is not to be recommended."

When Xuela is 15, her father takes her to Roseau, Dominica's capital ("it was no such thing as a city; it was an outpost ... for people for whom things had gone wrong ..."), to attend school and live with his friend, Jacques LaBatte, "a man of no principles," and Labatte's wife. Xuela's affair with LaBatte leads to pregnancy and abortion, pivotal events that form the central motif to the rest of her life. Though Xuela freely indulges her passions and eventually even marries a white doctor of whom she grows somewhat fond, her womb is a wasteland, "shriveled like an old piece of vegetable matter ...." She is an anomaly, an insult to all of nature, the link between motherlessness and childlessness:

"In me is the voice I never heard, the face I never saw, the being I came from," Xuela says when she is old. "In me are the voices that should have come out of me, the faces I never allowed to form, the eyes I never allowed to see me."

From first page to last, Kincaid relates Xuela's remarkable story with a richness and lyricism that can be almost heartbreaking. Some passages read like word pictures; others read like psalms:

"I could hear someone singing, a woman -- it was an English woman; she was singing a sad song, a sad lullaby, but she herself was not sad, people who are sad do not sing at all. My room was lit by a small blue lamp whose base was made of porcelain with two flowers with multi-colored petals painted on it -- parrot tulips, Philip had told me they were called -- and it gave off a light that made the room seem not romantic, not wicked, not warm, none of those things; it only gave light, not much light, because it was a small lamp ...."

Xuela is not particularly warm or wicked either, but in telling her story, Kincaid has created something wonderful and shed a great deal of light indeed.