In the essays of Jamaica Kincaid, the obsessions and fascinations of a singular writer

Boston Globe

6 days ago

Kincaid was also writing for The Village Voice, Ms., and Rolling Stone, where she published essays like 1977's 'Jamaica Kincaid's New York' and 'Antigua Crossings: A Deep and Blue Passage on the Caribbean Sea' in 1978. These essays demonstrate, on one hand, that very early in her career, she'd identified the elemental music of her unique prose style (Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s introduction explains that Kincaid writes with 'a driving, unremitting eye — though never without humor') and, on the other hand, that in her Caribbean familial story she'd located the limestone foundation on which to build her future efforts in fiction and nonfiction. Kincaid had already begun cultivating an array of overlapping, perennial obsessions: matriarchal power and mothers (specifically her own), banishment and excommunication from family structures, the British empire, colonial literary education, Antigua, and travel.
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Several times in 'Putting Myself Together' Kincaid details the scene of her original subjection: when she was nine, her mother shipped her off to Dominica to live with her maternal grandmother and aunt. In the 2000 essay 'Islander Once, Now a Voyager,' Kincaid re-enters that wound: 'The first time I traveled anywhere, I was not yet a writer, but I can now see that I must have been in the process of becoming one. I was nine years old and had been the only child in my family until then, when, suddenly it seemed to me, my first brother was born. My mother no longer paid any attention to me; she seemed to care only about my new brother. One day, I was asked to hold him and he fell out of my arms. My mother said that I had dropped him, and as a punishment, she sent me off to live with her sister and her parents, all of whom she hated.'
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Writing in the introduction to her 1996 edition of 'The Best American Essays,' Kincaid recalled that her early teachers taught her that the essay's formal principles require writers to make statements, build upon those statements, and sum up their building. '[H]ow dry, how impossible,' she writes of such formulae, and then of her realization that 'this definition was meant to be a restriction, and it worked very well; for how could I express any truth about myself or anything I might know in the form of state, build, and sum up when everything about me and everything I knew existed in a state of rage, rage, and more rage. I came into being in the colonial situation. It does not lend itself to any literary situation that is in existence. Not to me, anyway.' Kincaid iterates certain anecdotes and histories, both intimate and colonial, because her conception of the essay form demands a kind of elliptical experimentation, recycling expulsions, eras, poems, slavers, sailors, and crimes to reveal new layers of insight and truth.
Though Kincaid is most frequently identified as an accomplished novelist — '
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In 'Putting Myself Together,' Kincaid's meditative essayettes and longform personal essays about gardens and gardening for Architectural Digest, The Paris Review, and Book Post, a Substack magazine, enhance her catalog significantly. In some of these she pivots from writing about 'myself, my mother, the place where I had grown up, myself and my mother again,' and enters the garden as a reader, taking up gardening catalogs and tomes about 'landscape design and also from accounts of Explorers and Conquerors.' The garden becomes 'an essential part of that thing called history' from Columbus to Thomas Jefferson to the Bloomsbury Group.
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Yet, the garden holds all the world's concerns and all of Kincaid's obsessions, so, eventually, her ending returns to reading, her mother, and writing. Though arranged chronologically, the new book is a finely made garden: teeming, various, surprising. And she leaves readers desiring more. 'Putting Myself Together' 'will have some satisfaction — not complete satisfaction, only some satisfaction,' as she writes in her introduction to 'My Favorite Plant.' 'A garden,' she continues, 'no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden — Paradise — but after a while the owner and the occupants wanted more.'
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Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974-
By Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $30
Walton Muyumba teaches literature at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of '
.'