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“Apparently, I’m a very angry person. . . . I hope I never lose it,” Kincaid remarks. “If I ever find myself not getting angry, . . . I’ll go to a psychiatrist to regain my anger” (Mendelsohn). In writings that openly engage political issues, Kincaid famously vents her anger not only at the British colonialism of the Antigua she grew up in and the social and political corruption of postindependence, self-ruling Antigua in A Small Place but also at the England she visited for the first time in 1985 in “On Seeing England for the First Time.” Claiming that had she immigrated to England and not the United States she might not have become a writer or even “one-half of the person” she became, in part, because she would not have been able to express her anger in England, and finding herself unable to live in Antigua, Kincaid comes to regard America as “a wonderful place to be in exile” (Birbalsingh 139, Ferguson , “Interview” 186). The United States is “a place that has allowed me to denounce it,” she remarks. “To America’s credit, I’ve become— at least verbally—a politically conscious person” (Vorda 105). Yet while Kincaid openly expresses her political anger in A Small Place, her 1988 book is also autobiographical.1 “[M]y growing up is very much in A Small Place. Practically everything I’ve written is autobiographical, and if it isn’t I make it so” (Muirhead 45). In a similar way, she acknowledges that whenever she travels to England she confronts her “past” (Vorda 101), something that becomes evident in her 1991 essay on England. 91 5 “Imagine the Bitterness and the Shame in Me as I Tell You This” The Political Is Personal in A Small Place and “On Seeing England for the First Time” If as Kincaid becomes more politically aware, she comes to voice the commonplace critical view that her descriptions of the “mother” are also about the “Mother Country” (see, e.g., Ferguson, “Interview” 176–77), her work nevertheless stays focused on the familial, and her politics remains highly personal. In 1991, Kincaid remarked that she felt herself “intellectually going towards” viewing the mother-daughter relation as a “prototype” for the relation of the powerful and powerless and claimed that she wanted “to look at power without the dressing of” her relationship with her mother (Birbalsingh 144). And yet, as we shall see, Kincaid remains a mother-haunted woman in works such as The Autobiography of My Mother and My Brother, both written in the 1990s and both continuing to express her intense anger toward her mother, Annie Drew. Thus even as Kincaid attempts to gain a kind of rational insight into and mastery over her feelings about her mother, her anger toward her mother persists as a potent and driving force in her writings. Ridiculing the contemporary critical fascination with identity politics, Kincaid says that she finds the word “identity” to be “repellent” because it is “so limiting.” “There are so many things that make up a person and one of them is not ‘an identity.’ It sounds like something on your passport ” (Cryer). Even as Kincaid moves toward a political interpretation of her Antiguan past, she continues to emphasize the importance of the autobiographical and personal in her writing. “I personalize everything ,” she states. “I reduce everything to a domestic connection” (Perry, “Interview” 504). Despite the common politicized readings of Kincaid that focus on the cultural determinants of her writings and view the mother-daughter relation as metaphoric of the colonizer/colonized relationship, Kincaid’s writings, including her openly political works, remain highly personal. That meaning is “both cultural and personal at the same time,” as Nancy Chodorow argues (Power 4), is evident in Kincaid’s political writings. “[P]articular cultural symbols appeal to particular individuals ,” Chodorow observes, “because they can personally infuse these symbols with their own psychobiographically particularized unconscious fantasies and emotions” (Power 195). If Kincaid’s obsession with the cultural story of the victor and the vanquished grows out of her own personal-familial history as well as her upbringing in British Antigua, the voice she adopts as she denounces the British and American tourists in Antigua and the English people she sees in England is a familiar one— the contemptuous voice of the mother. And the feelings that overcome Kincaid when she returns to Antigua—feelings of loss, betrayal, resentment , profound shame, and anger—repeat the constellation of feelings she attaches to the mother...

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