Writing Possibilities of the Past: Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter

In most of her literary works, Jamaica Kincaid is preoccupied with the traumatic history of imperialism and slavery and the continued repercussions of that history on contemporary postcolonial Caribbean society. In writing fiction, Kincaid engages this “thing that happened to me and all who look like me” that began in 1492 with the arrival of Christopher Columbus, as she explains in her essay “In History.” Her reference to “all who look like me” indicates her concern for a shared history of Caribbean people of color. Kincaid then asks about this “thing”: “Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise in details, and if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself? Why should I be obsessed with all these questions?”¹ She suggests here that the history recorded in facts and details is not able to accommodate her (and all who look like her). We can read this as History with a capital H, to use Édouard Glissant’s term: a “totality that excludes other histories that do not fit into that of the West.”² In this case, it excludes a history that Kincaid could place herself in. Glissant explains how the Caribbean is confronted by this absence of history:

The French Caribbean is a site of a history characterized by ruptures and that began with a brutal dislocation. Our historical consciousness could not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment … but came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces. This dislocation of the continuum, and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, characterize what I call a nonhistory. The negative effect of this nonhistory is therefore the erasing of the collective memory.³

In response to this nonhistory, Glissant calls on writers to “explore the obsession” of the past that has not yet emerged as a history “to show its relevance … to the immediate present.”⁴ As her own aforementioned quote shows, Kincaid is also affected by this obsession. Almost as if replying to Glissant’s call, throughout her oeuvre she continuously engages the history of slavery and colonialism as well as their perpetuating effects on people in the Caribbean. In her fictional texts she does so creatively, as in Mr. Potter (2002). Glissant points out that “[t]he problem faced by collective consciousness makes a creative approach necessary, in that the rigid demands made by the historical approach can constitute … a paralyzing handicap.”⁵ He postulates that writers “must ‘dig deep’ into [collective] memory”⁶ to fill the void that the absence of history has caused in the Caribbean. This recalls Glissant’s approach to history as he performed it in his play Monsieur Toussaint (1961). In the preface to its first edition he writes, “For those whose history has been reduced by others to darkness and despair, the recovery of the near or distant past is imperative. To renew acquaintance with one’s history, obscured or obliterated by others, is to relish fully the present, for the experience of the present, stripped of its roots in time, yields only hollow delights.”⁷ This “poetic endeavor”⁸ undertakes to uncover history meaningful to Caribbean people that is absent due to the eradicating effects of Western history. Glissant here suggests that the history that hitherto was “obscured or obliterated” could be found again to then provide a basis for present-day subjectivity. Appropriately enough, he calls the play a “prophetic vision of the past.”⁹

In Mr. Potter, Kincaid’s narrator likewise creates a “prophetic vision of the past” in that the engagement with the past provides a stepping stone into the future¹⁰ while satisfying contemporary needs. Yet instead of trying to recover or to renew her acquaintance with the past, the narrator purposefully creates it anew and corresponding to her wishes. In this novel, the narrator presents herself as the author¹¹ of the text in which she writes the life of her absentee biological father—the eponymous Mr. Roderick Potter—as well as the...