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The worlds of Jamaica Kincaid

The Worlds of Jamaica Kincaid

Memory pervades a new collection of nonfiction, and so do the ghosts of empire.

Jamaica Kincaid in Toronto.

Jamaica Kincaid really hates England, and who could blame her? In her essay “On Seeing England for the First Time,” which was published in Transition during the early 1990s, she pithily expressed her views of the country: “I find England ugly…I hate England; the weather is like a jail sentence…the food in England is like a jail sentence.”

Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974–

One might dispute some or all of these assertions, but the anger derives from a history, a long, painful, gut-wrenching series of events involving what the British Empire did to Kincaid’s ancestors: possibly capturing, if not purchasing, her African forebears, transporting them across an ocean, and forcing most of these individuals and their descendants to work in the sugarcane fields of Antigua. Even long after the country’s emancipation and independence, Britain maintained a strong political and social connection to Antigua, as it did with many of its former colonies, mainly under the banner of the Commonwealth. For anyone from Antigua, and for anyone whose ancestors were affected by the British Empire in similar ways, it is difficult to see English society and culture without some feeling of bitterness and indignation.

For Kincaid, the tentacles of British imperialism have long been a theme in her novels. In Annie John, England appears in the background of nearly every social encounter, through symbols and hymns. One notable childhood scene shows that close relationship:

We began our [Brownie] meetings with the whole troop standing in the yard of the Methodist church, forming a circle around the flagpole, our eyes following the Union Jack as it was raised up; then we swore allegiance to our country, by which was meant England.

We began our [Brownie] meetings with the whole troop standing in the yard of the Methodist church, forming a circle around the flagpole, our eyes following the Union Jack as it was raised up; then we swore allegiance to our country, by which was meant England.

In At the Bottom of the River, we get a collection of short stories in which England features as a faraway land that provides luxury items. Now, in a new collection of Kincaid’s essays and cultural writing, Putting Myself Together, much of her animus toward England can be found once more, along with many other things. As in her fiction, the themes of British imperialism, life in the Caribbean, and the long shadow of slavery and colonialism are central, but they are no longer conveyed through characters—instead, we get them directly from Kincaid herself. Yet there is much more in this collection. Her body of writing is filled with musings and missives, witticism and humor. Spanning Kincaid’s career from the early 1970s until 2020, the essays here include everything from features on celebrities to insights on her garden. Yet many of the themes circle back to the main idea of “On Seeing England for the First Time,” which serves as a sharp parable as well as a wry provocation: that when push comes to shove, you can’t escape history—it makes you.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 as Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson. The daughter of a sharp-tongued housewife and an illiterate chauffeur, she spent her first 16 years as a British colonial subject, absorbing the heavy influences of the monarchical government. Even as late as the 1950s, Antigua was still in a state of transition away from a plantation economy, where unpaid and later poorly paid Africans and their descendants worked the land to produce sugar, cotton, and harvests for the British Empire. Antiguans were free, in that they were no longer slaves, but they were not, in Kincaid’s experience, all that liberated.

“For about one hundred years after emancipation,” Kincaid notes in one essay, “Antiguans were neither slaves nor people.” Even in their alleged liberation, the Black residents of the island served the global elite. Most of the land when she was growing up, Kincaid noted, was owned by “people who had never seen Antigua.” Where did these people live? Mostly in Britain. Who were they? The descendants of slave owners. By the mid-20th century, the peaceful island had become appealing to the United States, which led to........

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