5 days ago
After 50 Years of Writing, Jamaica Kincaid Insists She's Still an Amateur
In June, I visited Jamaica Kincaid at her home in Vermont, and not long after we met, she walked me over to a bust of Thomas Jefferson looming over a shaded corner of her garden, introducing me to him like he was an old friend or a hostage. 'Very controversial, but we will explain,' she said. 'When summer is over, he spends the winter in the basement.' Then, she showed me a plant called the twin-leaf, which has one frond divided into two nearly identical leaflets. 'The two halves are not identical — is that Jefferson or no?' Kincaid asked, showing me the fraternal leaves with professorial wonder and not a small amount of delight. Its scientific name, Jeffersonia diphylla, was given to it by the botanist Benjamin Smith Barton, one of Thomas Jefferson's contemporaries, 'before anyone thought of his twin nature,' she said, of the president's duality.
Kincaid is an admirer of Jefferson's writing on horticulture, so when she discovered this plant, it appealed to her; she saw that it spoke to his fundamental contradiction as both a theorist of democratic liberty and slaver. 'One has to contemplate these histories,' Kincaid said. 'And so, I find him a good person to have a conversation with.'
At 76, Kincaid is both youthful and monumental, a down-to-earth person possessed of a towering intellect. Although she has shrunk some over the years, she still stands at nearly six feet. Her dark brown hair was parted down the center of her scalp, woven into two cute plaits, little commas curling near her shoulders. She wore a silver watch with the clock face on the inside of her wrist as a tribute to her late father. Her laugh, which I heard often, was filtered through her accent, an undulating Antiguan inflection that swayed like a gently rocked boat.
Kincaid's sprawling garden sits on a bountiful property in North Bennington, beside a house originally built and inhabited by Robert H. Woodworth, a pioneer of time-lapse photography. Here she begins developing her ideas, influenced by the cultivated wildness outside. In an essay included in her new book, 'Putting Myself Together: Writing, 1974-,' to be published on Aug. 5 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, she asserts that, rather than creating a garden in the conventional way — overdetermined by the gardener's expectations — she favors a looser approach.
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