Just Look at That Post-Colonial Shuffle!

The essay is an embrace not only of a life lived on the edge but of an anxiety—an anxiety about the post-colonial sense of self being swamped and smothered in Jamaica Kincaid, whose narrative charts an existence remarkably open to breeze, birds, and rainfall in the Caribbean, to the arrival of daylight and evening. The narrative is also strangely, unselfconsciously, enclosed even if it examines the experience of the goings-on of life, crystallizing something that is amorphous and resistant to crystallization. Kincaid performs this embrace brilliantly and passionately. Her endeavor to tell of dislocation, childhood, deracination, love, and death is not, really, a nostalgic one, in spite of all she says about loss, uprooting, and the act of returning; her elegiac notes are her most strained. The narrative has the hard-headed exuberance of a 19th-century novel even if it centers on "failure" as an integral part of modernist creativity. Like a heroine of dubious energy, Kincaid keeps inventing and reinventing herself, bruising herself as she looks for acceptance–and it is to this drive, this desire, that my essay is attuned.