Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother

6. “I Would Bear Children, but I Would Never Bea Mother to Them”: Writing Back to the Contemptuous Mother in The Autobiography of My Mother

An unremittingly bleak and bitter novel permeated with feelings of despair, contempt, and rage, Kincaid’s 1996 novel The Autobiography of My Mother is at once a continuation of and a departure from her autobiographical-fictional project, her attempt to use fiction to write herself a life and make sense of her troubled relationship with her mother. A book that, like Annie John and Lucy, Kincaid says she “couldn’t help but write,” The Autobiography of My Mother “took a long time to finish,” and “[t]here was a lot of it” she did not understand (Garner). When Kincaid completed the novel after working on it for some five years, she did not think people would like it. “But if I’d thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more,” she insists (Jacobs). In part, Kincaid had a conscious political agenda in telling the story of her seventy-year-old narrator, Xuela, whose mother died the moment she was born. Explaining that Xuela’s life can be read as a metaphor for the African diaspora, Kincaid remarks, “At the moment African people came into this world, Africa died for them. . . . The birth of one is the death of the other” (Lee). But for Kincaid The Autobiography of My Mother also has a very personal meaning, and, indeed, she said that after writing the novel she felt that she had made “sense” of her own childhood (Jacobs). “You know, I didn ’t just fall out of the sky,” she remarks. “I come with all these human attachments so they come into it. But I am really always writing about myself. Especially when I write something as explicitly not about myself 115 6 “I Would Bear Children, but I Would Never Be a Mother to Them” Writing Back to the Contemptuous Mother in The Autobiography of My Mother as The Autobiography of My Mother, which was not really about my mother but about a woman who could be my mother and so therefore could be me” (Brady). Continuing to investigate the formative influence of her childhood relationship with her powerful and destructive mother in The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid incorporates family stories into her narrative . Like Kincaid’s mother, Annie Drew, Kincaid’s narrator, Xuela Claudette Richardson, is from Dominica and is part Carib Indian, African, and Scots, and she bears Kincaid’s mother’s family name, Richardson.1 Kincaid also incorporates into the life of her character obeah stories told to her by her mother: Annie Drew’s story about the jablesse that took the form of a monkey and attacked her by throwing a stone at her; about the death of her brother from an obeah spell that caused a worm to come out of his leg just as he died; and about the drowning of a boy lured into a flooded river by a jablesse, which appeared as a beautiful beckoning woman bathing in a deep part of the river.2 If Kincaid is intent on examining her matrilineal roots as she includes family stories and looks back to her mother’s Carib Indian origins in The Autobiography of My Mother, she also is driven by the daughterly imperative to assert herself and assume power by talking back—or, more accurately, writing back—to her powerful and powerfully destructive mother. Indeed, what lies at the center of the book, as Kincaid has remarked, is the narrator’s decision not to be a mother, which, in turn, is drawn from Kincaid’s and her brothers’ view of their mother. For even though all of Annie Drew’s children are “quite happy to have been born,” they are also “quite sure” that she should not have been a mother. “I feel comfortable saying that publicly, I think. I try not to corner my mother anymore. Because I have at my disposal a way of articulating things about her that she can’t respond to. But I feel comfortable saying that the core of the book—and the book is not autobiographical except in this one way—derives from the observation that my own mother should not have had children” (Garner). If in The Autobiography of My Mother Kincaid expresses her anger against her mother in telling the story of her destructive mother character, she also, in her account of the childhood of her character, presents Xuela as a daughter-victim, emphasizing Xuela’s obsession with her idealized but dead mother...