Kincaid’s Bite

The speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination.

—Robert Frost

Jamaica Kincaid’s voice, ever bracing and autobiographical and a descendant of Charlotte Brontë’s, has worked upon my imagination.

When she was eleven years old Kincaid read Jane Eyre and was so absorbed by the novel that she imagined she was living not in balmy Antigua but in the chilly climate of her predecessor. She “went around pretending [she] was Charlotte Brontë . . . so immersed in the fantasy that, despite her tropical surroundings, [she] was always cold.” “I would lie in my bed,” says Kincaid, “and I was so cold I’d put my feet up on the windowsill in the sun to get my feet warm. But I couldn’t get out of bed, because if I got out of bed, I wouldn’t be Charlotte Brontë.”¹

Jane was a model in “her rebelliousness,” Kincaid testifies, “and her sense of powerlessness, often in the face of other people’s will. I identified with that completely.” When pitted against insufferable foes like her Aunt Reed and her bullying cousins, Jane cannot always act, but she is compelled to speak. Punishing Jane for an altercation with John Reed, her aunt sweeps Jane into the nursery, “crushes” her on the edge of the crib, and tells her not to “utter one syllable” for the remainder of the day. The injunction to remain silent, however, only incites Jane, and she has the audacity to demand: “What would Uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive?” Confined by those who are more powerful, she must talk back: “It seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will . . . something spoke out of me over which I had no control.”²

Of her own insubordinations, Kincaid says, “I’m very bad at being a subject person”—a person at the mercy of others, controlled by their agendas, actions, desires, rules, enclosed by a wall not of one’s own construction. The concept is capacious and means not just material confinement, but the feeling of being subjected. The dynamic can accommodate many roles: the political subject in colonial Antigua, the mother who shapes the daughter’s place in culture and society, the writer who feels confined by literary forms. Kincaid has identified in herself an instinctive and long-standing urge to resist all forms of enclosure, among them imposed names, her name.³ She reads her own history within the context of captivity and conquest, specifically the colonialists’ naming of people of African origin, many of whom renamed themselves to reclaim their identity. Thus in 1973, Elaine Potter Richardson became Jamaica Kincaid.

Kincaid centers her writing in the domestic. “I am essentially a person very interested in domestic life,” she says, “and very interested in things that we think of, either in a good way or bad way, as women’s things.”⁴ Thus “Biography of a Dress,” in which Kincaid looks back in surgically precise language at the preparations her mother undertook to celebrate her second birthday. Kincaid picks up a distaff tradition by imbuing the tiny yellow dress with history and weight. What might be considered trivial and historically unimportant, the making of a dress, can carry the lives of multitudes.

In preparation for the birthday, Kincaid’s mother takes her along to a store called Harneys to buy the yellow cotton poplin needed to make the dress whose story Kincaid tells. The project of this dress bears unacknowledged tensions, desires, and dramas, and Kincaid senses her mother’s unease. Harneys is a British store selling British products—though at the time, the young girl of course knows none of the colonial history of Antigua. They are waited upon by Miss Verna, who tickles Kincaid’s cheek as she speaks to her mother. Kincaid “reaches forward as if to kiss” her, but “when her cheek met my lips I opened my mouth and bit her hard with my small child’s teeth.”⁵ Like Jane’s words uttered against Mrs. Reed, Kincaid’s bite is instinctual, defensive, angry, and a...