"I would rather be dead": Nostalgia and Narrative in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy

Toward the end of Jamaica Kincaid's 1990 novel Lucy, the protagonist, Lucy, identifies the only things she claims as her own in the face of her chosen exile, her poverty, and her "history": "I had memory, I had anger, I had despair" (134). This announcement comes at a moment when it is especially clear that Kincaid's protagonist has chosen a particular identity for herself: that of an artist living in the metropole of New York City and that of a person who cannot go "back home." Although Lucy's emphasis on her memory, anger, and despair link her expatriation to colonial history and neocolonial alienation, I argue that the novel—like its protagonist—refuses to participate in now-familiar postcolonial plots of cultural reconnection and return. Lucy, in fact, reads as a pitched battle against the assumptions that shape many of the oppositional narratives of exile and displacement (most known through their cultural nationalist incarnations) that have become central to both postcolonial and Caribbean literary canons: namely, that the alienating experience of "exile" leads inevitably to the celebrations of "return."

This ideological narrative of return is a function of colonial history and the controversial role of homeland, of desires for origin and identity, that are especially pressing in postcolonial literary and cultural criticism, particularly in such criticism of Caribbean situations. As Michael Dash explains, "the dialectical relationship between the disorientation of exile and the plenitude of belonging can be seen as a mediative exercise, a means of imaginatively negotiating the trauma of Caribbean history" (451). However, exile has played other important roles in the development of modernist discourses, a category to which colonial discourse necessarily belongs. In the aesthetic histories of Euro-American colonial modernity, the trope of exile generates a space of colonial desire. The discursive and "real" landscape of exile serves the double function of evoking a nostalgia for "home" that highlights cultural differences in colonial terms of civilization versus native and of offering the privileged (white male) subject the freedom to roam through the distant and alienating colonial landscape (where he has many self-aggrandizing adventures). Caren Kaplan, in particular, has explicated these discursive links between nostalgia and exile, in which "manifestations of nostalgia participate in Euro-American constructions of exile: nostalgia for the past; for home; for a 'mother-tongue'" (33). By flagging the complicities between notions of exile and nostalgia and colonialist discourses of Euro-American modernity, Kaplan, among others, offers a compelling rationale for Kincaid's avoidance of such "romantic" plots of self and cultural difference.

However, Lucy does persistently and powerfully invoke the past, and large portions of the novel display an almost obsessive preoccupation with memory, as well as with anger and despair. These affective registers demonstrate that Kincaid's narrative project is rather more complex than its direct and chronologically coherent first-person narration might suggest. Although Kincaid's discourse appears virulently anti-nostalgic, her narrative practice turns on its ability to keep affect alive in expressions that are deeply linked to nostalgia, in its psychoanalytic sense of an anguished experience of loss. That is to say, in the narrator's paradoxical refusal of the past—one that is embedded in a relentless, even obsessive, invocation of it—Lucy offers an evocative model of gendered exile and narrative authority in contemporary postcolonial women's writing. This rewriting of female selfhood and the relation to "home" circles around "the past" via narratives that both embrace nostalgic affect and yet refuse the narrative trajectories that are part of our common romantic plots for women's relations to home, exile, community, and family.

Therefore, Lucy, like Kincaid's most recent novel The Autobiography of My Mother, can in fact be read as "counterpoint to . . . exhortations of the 'pleasures of exile'" (Mahlis 166). And I argue that Kincaid troubles our common understandings of the subjective transformations wrought by experiences of exile and nostalgia. In particular, Lucy's...