Writing the Autobiography of My Father (review)

Mr. Potter, Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, 2002. ISBN: 0374214948

A man, hungry, unable to read or write, curses God. He dies violently, still cursing, howling at history. His offspring, unacknowledged, perpetuate their father's bequest of material and mental poverty. Out of this erasure of history emerges one son who, not being able to read or write or (therefore) reflect on his own being, "has a line drawn through him." He nevertheless produces a daughter, who writes his story. By shaping him in terms of the written word, she grants him recognition, names him with a name, invites us to "Hear Mr. Potter! Touch Mr. Potter! See Mr. Potter"—reference to whom now begins every sentence of his own (unknown to him) redacted memoir.

Rendered in stunningly compelling prose, Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter recalls music and song—fugue, religious litany, (parodic) biblical enunciation of genealogies, Nordic lament, children's nursery rhyme, the Weltanschauung of T. S. Eliot's Wasteland. Mr. Potter is also elegy and revenge code; history (auto/biography) and myth; a project of identification and the deliberate negation of identity; a discourse about writing and the erasure of sentences.

The hologrammatic "portrait" that this matrix of discursive possibilities overlays is Kincaid's father, who "has been the central figure in [her] life without either of [them] knowing it." The book is the latest in the cycle of autobiographical and putatively fictional writings about Kincaid's relations with her family, writings through which Kincaid has sought to work through the problematics of a personal, literary, and historical (West Indian) identity. These texts represent a series of journeys that paradoxically end where they begin: with the conviction that a radical form of self-empowerment is necessary and capable of achievement only through the rejection of antecedents—that is to say, through the credo of a new self in imperative disjunction from the histories from which it was produced. With My Brother, the motif of the mother as the point of severance began to be mediated; with Mr. Potter, which might well have been subtitled The Autobiography of My Father, the paternal connection is examined.

The most important detail in the book is that Kincaid says she did not know her father. He visited her once, at her home in the state of Vermont, in the United States, and she did not know what to call him. Before that, she glimpsed him once when, as a small child in Antigua, she waved to him from across a street. "I said . . . through gestures only, that he was mine and I was his, that the world, in all its parts, was complicated, with plates beneath its surface shifting and colliding, vast subterranean cauldrons of steam and gases mixing and then exploding violently through the earth's crust, that the seemingly invisible spaces between two people who shared a common intimate history were impossible to destroy" (p. 125).

The horror of the encounter was not that Mr. Potter paid hostile or dismissive attention. It was that "he only rolled his shoulders . . . and looked at the spot on the street which I occupied. . . . Not only did he ignore me, he made sure that until the day he died, I did not exist at all" (p. 125). This erasure, repeated in Mr. Potter's similar treatment of the many daughters he had fathered upon the bodies of as many women, becomes not only the source of a lifelong hurt but also the ground on which Kincaid is able to create Mr. Potter, the fictional construct who is nevertheless "real." The paradox of that realness and its fictionality mirrors the complex of conundrums about life and art, identity and anonymity, things and their opposites, with which Mr. Potter is concerned.

Mr. Potter is a death song: both elegy and a chant against the dead. The elegy is sustained through the book's consistent rhythm of litany and in its ritualized apostrophes of lament. The imagined deracination of...