‘Putting Myself Together' displays Jamaica Kincaid's distinct gifts

Washington Post

3 days ago

Summing up her philosophy of writing in the introduction to 'The Best American Essays 1995,' Jamaica Kincaid wrote that an essay has 'principles': 'You state, you build on your statement, you sum up.' But, she wondered, '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.'
Kincaid's life's work — not by design, but through a combination of fiery ambition and random luck — has been to create her own situation. Born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John's, Antigua, in 1949, she was sent by her mother to work as an au pair in Scarsdale, New York, at the age of 16; within a few years she quit her job, changed her name, moved to New York City and found work as a freelance writer.
Through a series of happenstances, she befriended William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, and became one of the magazine's first Black staff writers, contributing unsigned Talk of the Town pieces that grew increasingly loose and improvisational. Kincaid eventually segued into fiction — first a book of short stories, 'At the Bottom of the River,' and then the novels that established her reputation in the 1980s and '90s: 'Annie John,' 'Lucy,' 'The Autobiography of My Mother.' During those same decades, she married William Shawn's son, the composer Allen Shawn, and moved with him to Bennington, Vermont, where she's lived ever since. She has also taught for many years at Harvard.
Kincaid's genius lies in the way she explicitly, unwaveringly foregrounds the facts of her life — that she's a Black immigrant from the Caribbean who has spent her entire adult life on intimate terms with an elite and rarefied sliver of White America. On the subjects of her childhood, Black popular culture and the experience of travel, Kincaid stands within the intensity and richness of the transnational Black experience; as an observer of White people in the United States and England, she specializes in prying away the surface normality to peer closely at what is underneath.
'Diana Ross was the special one,' she wrote in the Village Voice in 1976. 'Not only was she a young woman who conveyed the innocence of a girl, but she was a black person who had mastered, without the slightest bit of self-­consciousness or embarrassment, being white. … Black people always say that they have one face for white people and when they are by themselves they are real. I have never for a moment thought that there was a Diana Ross more real than the one I could see.'
What stands out if you read many of her pieces at once — like the essays now collected in 'Putting Myself Together,' which stretch back more than 50 years — is the instantly recognizable quality of her sentences, which use repetition as a kind of accumulative force, declaring her intent to take up space on the page and in your mind. Here's a sentence about the walk to Robert Frost's house in Vermont: 'Going backward, going back along the path that has become familiar in your mind's eye, especially if it has been a recent encounter, always seems unfamiliar and so even more frightening, for it should be familiar, but the way back is a new way too and will have its own pleasures and anxieties.' Not every reader can tolerate that kind of prose, and critics have at times complained that Kincaid's work feels mannered, eccentric, even deliberately obscure. I admire it, and find it appropriate: There's a searching quality in Kincaid's writing that is commensurate with her lifelong desire to find a new form, and a new way of life, because the old ways make no sense to her.
This is not to say that 'Putting Myself Together' is a completely rewarding book. For some reason — not explained anywhere I could find — Kincaid's Talk of the Town pieces from the New Yorker, which appeared as a separate book, 'Talk Stories,' in 2001, aren't reprinted here.
Instead, 'Putting Myself Together' collects Kincaid's earliest non-New Yorker work up until 1978 and then leaps forward to 1989, when she was already a well-known novelist able to publish on any subject she wanted. It's an awkward arrangement, because the Talk of the Town pieces are such a pivotal part of the emergence of her voice and sensibility. Publishing the rest of her nonfiction this way might make 'Putting Myself Together,' which includes interviews and Kincaid's introductions to several books, among other things, seem like the outtakes and deleted tracks in a box set: for Kincaid completists only.
That's unfortunate, because only when you read 'Putting Myself Together' and 'Talk Stories' side by side can you see the complete evolution of Kincaid as an artist and a thinker. The Talk pieces are breezy and witty and acid-tongued, but what's most interesting about them is the dissonance between Kincaid's perspective and the staid personality of the magazine. It's only in longer essays that you begin to grasp her creative and intellectual range.
This is especially true on the subject of gardens and gardening, which has been the focus of her life since the late 1990s. The best piece in 'Putting Myself Together,' the one everyone must read, is the quietly incendiary 'Sowers and Reapers,' which begins with the story of how Kincaid offended Frank Cabot, the founder of the Garden Conservancy, at an event in Charleston, South Carolina, by pointing out that the famous gardens of the American South (most notably at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello) were built and maintained by enslaved people. As she writes, the smell of their flowers is 'the sweet stench that makes up so much of American history.' The essay ends with her, a Black woman, hiring White men in Vermont to build a large decorative wall for her own garden. 'How glad was my spirit,' Kincaid writes, 'when, at the end of all this, Ron Pembroke presented me with a bill, and I in turn gave him a check for the complete amount, and there was nothing between us but complete respect and admiration and no feeling of the injustice of it all.' She ends with a warning more potent now than when she wrote it in 2001: 'The garden is not a place to lose your cares; the garden is not a place of rest and repose. Even God did not find it so.'
It's this kind of meditation on the ironies and absurdities of a displaced life — a life she invented for herself, with no models — that makes Jamaica Kincaid so singularly important.
Jess Row's most recent book is the novel 'The New Earth' (2023). His new collection of short stories, 'Storyknife,' will be published in the summer of 2026.