Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (review)

Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion, by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 200 pp. ISBN 0-313-30295-2 cloth.

Toni Cade Bambara's "Sort of Preface" to Gorilla, My Love (New York: Random, 1972) problematizes "autobiographical fiction" in the vernacular. She says it does no good "cause the minute the book hits the stands here comes your mama screamin how could you"; and your best friend "says that seeing as how you have plundered her soul and walked off with a piece of her flesh, the least you can do is spin off half the royalties her way." But while Bambara blasts this genre, for its social politics of narcissism, Kincaid works it. She makes a living out of it with her "critics," overwhelmingly, indulging her.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion does not diverge from conventional readings of this "controversial" figure. The best example of such conformity concerns Nancy Chodorow, whose The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979) is said to be "extremely useful in helping us understand Kincaid's depiction of the tensions between mother and daughter as stemming from the clash between the mother's desire to mold the daughter into a copy of herself" (82). The canonical nature of this reference notwithstanding, mother's desire is not what drives the cross-text of Kincaid.

At the Bottom of the River (New York: Farrar, 1982) reads: "Now I am a girl, but one day I will marry a woman . . . and every night, over and over, she will tell me something that begins, 'Before you were born'" (11-12). The mother who knows these stories in Annie John (NY: Farrar, 1985) devastates her now pubescent daughter by ending their highly erotic bond and enforcing adolescent independence instead. Annie John, after much disavowal and many displacements involving schoolgirl loves, can only take solace in the belles lettres of colonial schooling. Denial of heartbreak still proves futile, in the end, as daughter flees mother and "motherland" alike through migration. In fact, Lucy (New York: Farrar, 1990) will later concede: "[F]or ten of my twenty years, half of my life, I had been mourning the end of a love affair, perhaps the only true love in my whole life I would ever know" (132).

How Kincaid "criticism" gets hegemonic "object relations" out of this far from "hetero-erotic" material may boggle the mind. With all the mother-blame of this Western psychoanalysis, nowhere is the mother-tense and matrilineal call of Audre Lorde's Zami (Watertown: Persephone, 1982). Casting Kincaid as a US "American" writer, or ex-Caribbean with color, Paravisini-Gebert basically follows the rules spelled out in the "Series Foreword" by Kathleen Klein: Here "best-selling writers," scoring "high cash advances" and often "movie deals," are studied in chapters on biography, literary history, and genre, and most major works (ix-xi). Paravisini-Gebert skips an urgent interrogation of genre, however, providing more biography ("From Elaine Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid") instead. Yet most of the interpretation, biographical and literary critical, is "autobiography," as fixed by Kincaid herself in interviews and "fiction." So the reader is repeatedly told what a "rebel" the author is and was growing up while the writer ignores her continued absorption by an anglophile empire. Case in point can be A Small Place (New York: Farrar, 1988) where neocolonial corruption is best captured, for Kincaid, by the decay of the colonial library and the creole speech of Black Antiguan youth. Over and again, Paravisini-Gebert takes Kincaid at her own word.

By contrast, John Henrik Clarke examines the early career of James Baldwin in Addison Gayle, Jr.'s Black Expression (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969). Clarke notes the absence of the word "struggle" from that Baldwin's lexicon as well as how his "masochistic" "cult of white followers" always produces "tears" but never "action" (353). Baldwin would himself reflect on his role as "the Great Black Hope of the...