My Brother (review)

missionaries. The head missionary marries her and returns to America under the guise of Christian service, but privately regards her as his sexual servant. Akiko thus trades her life ofpublic sexual slavery for one of private sexual servitude. Unable to escape her memories of the Japanese camps or adjust to American life, she wishes her husband dead. Her own comfort comes from two women who mediate the spiritual and the physical: Induk, the woman whose ghost inhabits Akiko and enables her to transcend her painful history, and Beccah, her daughter, who represents physical perfection, innocence , and unconditional love. The novel is narrated alternately by Akiko and Beccah. While readers are privy to Akiko's story, Beccah knows only that her mother is overly protective and prone to performing strange Korean rites. Readers are sympathetic to both Akiko's fierce and sometimes oppressive maternal love and to Beccah's desire for a "normal" mother. KeUer vividly Ulustrates the resulting differences between the two women. Akiko is only partiaUy grounded in the material world. She mistrusts language, for both Japanese and English represent only lies to her. The adult Beccah, on the other hand, writes obituaries at the local newspaper. She finds comfort in the world of words because it is such a departure from her childhood experiences. But Beccah cannot reconcile the life histories she edits and abridges with actual Uves. Through her characterizations of Akiko as a woman of amazing resiliency and Beccah as one with a strong, cynical sense of humor, Keller avoids overworking the pathos which accompanies such stark subject matter. Furthermore, she manages to voice larger concerns, such as the paraUel between colonization and sexual domination, without descending into didacticism. Comfort Woman is a harrowing and beautifully written novel which wUl haunt readers long after they have finished the book. (KL) My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, 198 pp., $19 Jamaica Kincaid's latest book, My Brother, is a memoir of her brother, Devon, who recently died of AIDS, as well as an investigation of life, death, love, and family. With eloquence and a natural lyricism, Kincaid relates her own conflicting feeüngs about her brother's death, and in the process redefines how she views living. For the author life is about creation, and one of the most painful realizations she arrives at in the memoir is that her brother did not create anything. She writes that nothing "came from him; not work, not children, not love for someone else." Instead of making something happen with his life, he was always waiting to see what would happen. Ironically, in passively choosing to let Ufe happen to him, death happened instead. It is another woman's memory of Kincaid's brother that finally illumines his life for her. And in learning about a completely The Missouri Review · 185 unsuspected aspect of Devon's character the author finally realizes that whUe she escaped from the stifling confines of her home, finding freedom , happiness and success in the friendher environment of the United States, Devon remained at home, his life stunted by circumstance. In a fluid stream-of-consciousness that reads much like a personal journal, Kincaid relates her own frustrations with the harsh circumstances that arose for her famUy because her mother and father "could not properly support the famUy they had made." She writes that as a girl in Antigua, she did not feel love for her brothers or even for her mother. She did not like being asked to "take care of these small chUdren who were not" hers and having to forgo things that were "essential" to her life. Once she finally made it to America, Kincaid wished to be with people who had no preconceptions about her, or what her role in Ufe should be. This freedom to become whatever she wanted is something Devon never enjoyed during his rather short lifetime. This book is highly literary, constructed in such a way that particular memories seem to foreshadow later events as in a work of fiction. Kincaid distances herself from her famUy members so completely that they appear almost as characters in a novel. Yet what gives her prose such power...