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Paradise Lost
A motherless child rages in Jamaica Kincaid's searing 'Autobiography'
Reviewed by Tai Moses
In her new novel, The Autobiography of My Mother, Antiguan-born author Jamaica Kincaid returns to the subjects that have obsessed her since her first book, the short-story collection At the Bottom of the River (1984). Using the tale of a young West Indian woman's coming of age, Kincaid explores the complex realm of mother-daughter relations and themes of identity and language, conquest and colonialism.
The novel is set on tiny Dominica, the poorest of the Caribbean islands, and casts a long unvarnished glance backward at the life of its protagonist, 70-year-old Xuela Claudette Richardson. Containing not a line of dialogue, the novel is told entirely from within Xuela's consciousness. It is her soliloquy--no other points of view are allowed to intrude. She is a tyrant, but a mesmerizing one, whose pessimistic observations and bitter judgments are swept along in a stream of breathtaking language that does not resonate so much as vibrate.
Xuela is that figure of myth and legend, the motherless child. The novel begins with the line, "My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind." The loss of her mother is the central motif and preoccupation of Xuela's life--and the novel's defining metaphor.
Xuela's observations are acute and unflinching. As a child she is fascinated by the sufferings of others, and equally fascinated by her own suffering. In her fierce refusal to submit to authority, she is not unlike the title character of Kincaid's favorite novel, Jane Eyre. Both girls are solitary and powerless, at the mercy of cruel, uncaring adults. Xuela's oft-repeated avowal "I was not afraid" echoes Jane Eyre's defiant "I resisted all the way." There, however, their similarities end, for while Jane goes on to find love, Xuela perfects the sting of her hatred.
Xuela's father is a corrupt provincial policeman; her stepmother is intent on destroying the little girl who is a reminder of the beloved first wife. At 14, Xuela has an abortion after an affair with her father's friend and decides then that she will never bear children. "I had never had a mother, I had just recently refused to become one, and I knew then that this refusal would be complete."
In a prose barren of adjectives and adverbs, sensuous in its nakedness, the author weaves a mythic and disturbing tale. Kincaid's fiction is a continuous autobiographical saga, a fluid narrative that seamlessly traverses the vaporous border between memory and imagination. The "Mother" of the title is the mother character from Kincaid's previous novels, Annie John and Lucy; she is also the woman Kincaid's mother might have been, had she never borne children.
It is a curious act for a novelist: to invent a character whose existence negates that of her creator. Indeed, everything about Xuela is a negation--from childhood to maturity, her entire attitude toward life is to reject it. Xuela is a true antiheroine, scornful, disaffected and entirely unlovable.
With the bitterness of the orphan and the rage of the dispossessed, Xuela is Kincaid's flesh-and-bone symbol for the incalculable, tragic effects of colonial rule upon Dominican culture, for the dependence of the West Indies on the British "motherland." Xuela is Dominica--an orphaned country in shambles, its people enslaved and conquered, its past a graveyard. Here, Kincaid is saying, are the consequences of extinguishing a person's--and a people's--history.
When Kincaid describes the poverty and slums of Roseau, Dominica's capital city, she is also depicting the proud ruin of a human being. For Xuela, it is a look in the mirror; to her, Roseau is beautiful, because "whatever I was told to hate, I loved most."
The Autobiography of My Mother demonstrates why Kincaid is one of our great prose stylists; her writing has a deceptive simplicity that can reveal startling truths: an unexpected glimpse of a rusting shipwreck beneath jewel-clear waters.
There is a musical quality to her prose, an incantatory heartbeat of sound in which the repetition of images and words creates the illusion of the spoken voice. In her hands, the formidable and tangled landscape of Dominica is the identical twin to Xuela's tortuous psyche: "Around each bend was the familiar dark green of the trees that grew with a ferociousness that no hand had yet attempted to restrain, a green so unrelenting that it attained great beauty and great ugliness and yet great humility all at once; it was itself: nothing could be added to it; nothing could be taken away from it."
The plot is rife with mythic elements and archetypes--a dead, cherished mother; a distant, aloof father. Xuela has a wicked stepmother who tries to kill her with the gift of a poisoned necklace. She has a jealous half-sister who despises her.
Kincaid, of course, is too astute a writer to embrace the fairy-tale form without adding some twists of her own. Xuela is no virtuous Cinderella, nor does she need a fairy godmother protector. She graciously accepts the deadly necklace and puts it around the neck of the family dog, killing it. When her sister becomes an invalid after a bicycle accident, Xuela seduces her sister's lover, not out of spite or lust, but idle curiosity--not even "a curiosity of any intensity."
It is difficult to summon much compassion for such a character. Her refusal to compromise is admirable; her self-absorption is trying. Xuela has no soul; she is all will. She has exiled herself from the emotions of the human race and holds her losses paramount. Yet she is far from wretched. She wears red high heels; other women go barefoot. She sleeps with their husbands. She marries a man she does not love--an English doctor who adores her--and mocks him. She is a pitiless, inhuman creature who flaunts the scars of her past like gaudy jewelry.
Kincaid's previous heroines were made up of equal parts humor and scorn. One misses the bittersweet, ironical voice of 19-year-old Antiguan expatriate Lucy, and the willful, passionate cadences of young Annie John. Kincaid has not blessed Xuela with even their rebellious charms.
Many readers will be dismayed by this character's intractability; she is so freighted with symbolism that she lacks recognizable human traits. Some of the more memorable heroines in literature are also the most badly behaved--Henry James' brilliant manipulatrix Madame Merle; Edith Wharton's rapaciously greedy Undine Spragg--but they are also given human flaws and weaknesses that render them sympathetic despite their amoral acts. Even Medea, destroyer of her own offspring, is capable of eliciting our pity.
Kincaid, however, purposely avoids the territory of empathy, leaving Xuela to sound her angry, plaintive note over and over: "My mother died at the moment I was born." Neither the sufferings Xuela endures nor the betrayals she inflicts have profound consequences here. There is no redemption for the character; no catharsis for the reader. We long for mercy, release; none is offered. We are left reeling in a dazzling storm of language.
The Autobiography of My Mother is a strange and extraordinary accomplishment, a relentlessly bleak but beautifully composed novel, punitive and hypnotic. Every word, image and sentiment is deliberate. Kincaid means to make us uneasy--it is the hallmark of her art.
Throughout, the novel maintains a tone of sustained, reflective coldness that expresses the author's ambivalence toward the "false paradise" of her homeland and the treacheries of maternal love: "To this day [my mother] will appear in my dreams from time to time but never again to sing or utter a sound of any kind--only as before, coming down a ladder, her heels visible and the white hem of her garment above them."
The critic William Gass, pondering the anguished task of writing about his own difficult parent, wrote, "Putting one's mother into words. ... It may have been easier to put her in her grave." In this eloquent, brilliant, uncomfortable book, perhaps Jamaica Kincaid has succeeded in doing both.
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The Autobiography of My Mother
By Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 228 pages; $20 cloth.