Motherhood, memory, and the colonial wound
“My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life, there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind.” —The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid
This Sunday, we continue our series on influential Caribbean women writers with Jamaica Kincaid, whose prose is raw, direct, and unrelenting. Born in St John’s, Antigua, in 1949, Kincaid was raised under British colonial rule, a history that infused her writing with an intense, often unforgiving gaze. Leaving Antigua at 16, she moved to New York City to work as an au pair, stepping away from the familiar only to confront a stark new landscape where she began to form her voice as a writer. The following dislocations and discoveries would become central to her work, as she revisited questions of identity, loss, and the unsettling proximity of colonial pasts.
In her early works, Kincaid unveils the harsh intimacy of colonial legacies and maternal relationships. At the Bottom of the River (1983) is a series of prose and poetic narratives that plunge into a Caribbean landscape where girlhood, identity, and authority intersect. Here, Kincaid presents a world vibrating with tension as familial bonds clash with a fierce drive for independence. In Annie John (1985), the protagonist, Annie, grows up under the close watch of her mother—a bond that shapes her even as she fights against its hold. Annie’s world in Antigua is woven from both beauty and conflict, a tension Kincaid uses to confront the limits of family and the inescapable weight of colonial history.
One of her most striking works, The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), digs deeper into the brutal legacy of colonialism and the loneliness it imposes. The novel centres on Xuela Claudette Richardson, born to a Carib mother and a Scottish-African father, severed from her mother at birth and shaped by that absence. From its opening lines, the novel delivers a chilling tone: “My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind.” In these words, Kincaid sets a course for Xuela’s life, marked by an unbroken solitude and the shadow of a lost heritage.
Kincaid writes Xuela as both fierce and detached, a woman determined to resist any structure that would seek to possess her. The absence of Xuela’s mother becomes a defining presence, emblematic of the silence imposed by colonial histories and severed cultural connections. Kincaid’s narrative examines how loss, more than inheritance, shapes identity, and how, in that void, Xuela carves out a self defined by choice rather than duty. Xuela declares early on: “I shall never have a husband, I shall never have children, I shall never live with another person.” In this moment, Kincaid captures her protagonist’s defiance—her rejection of roles forced upon her.
Kincaid writes this with intensity, illustrating Xuela’s quiet refusal to perpetuate the pain she has inherited. This choice to remain untethered becomes a powerful act of self-possession, Kincaid’s way of unsettling the expectations of womanhood, especially within post-colonial societies. Kincaid’s writing in The Autobiography of My Mother reaches for a painful honesty, using Xuela’s solitude as both weapon and shield. The prose cuts through sentiment, offering the reader not comfort but the stark edge of truth. For Xuela, relationships and family are binds she chooses to avoid; her freedom is a cold and solitary one, but, in Kincaid’s hands, it also becomes a point of strength.
Her father, who embodies the legacy of colonialism, is both provider and oppressor. His Scottish-African lineage creates a mixed heritage, symbolising the fractured identity of the Caribbean itself. Kincaid presents him as a man whose disdain for Xuela’s Carib ancestry mirrors the broader dismissal of indigenous roots in a region shaped by conquest. In Lucy (1990), Kincaid explores the experience of displacement through another young woman, who, like the author, works as an au pair in New York City. Lucy’s journey of migration is filled with cultural alienation and a deep, often bitter introspection as she navigates a world that never feels her own. Kincaid’s prose here is biting, unromantic, and sharply observant as she traces Lucy’s struggle to detach herself from a past that pulls at her. Her journey isn’t one of assimilation but of survival, where memory and identity collide, leaving her to choose herself over the world around her.
The memoir My Brother (1997) brings Kincaid back to the personal, recounting the death of her younger brother from AIDS. The narrative is unflinching, confronting not only death but the complex terrain of family and memory. Through the raw and uncompromising lens of her brother’s suffering, Kincaid examines the distances between loved ones and the ways loss sharpens memory. Here, she confronts familial and cultural silences around illness and mortality, writing with a clarity that cuts to the bone. Kincaid’s work often resonates with that of Jean Rhys and Edwidge Danticat, who, like her, interrogate the displacement and alienation within Caribbean identities. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys explores the psychology of cultural dislocation, and in Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat renders the complexities of migration and loss. Kincaid’s characters, similarly, face a world fractured by colonial influence, grappling with the unsettling process of self definition in a world that refuses to acknowledge them on their terms. The Autobiography of My Mother and Kincaid’s other works stand as uncompromising meditations on autonomy, self-invention, and survival. Her writing doesn’t seek to soften or redeem; it is unapologetic, a confrontation with the realities of her characters’ existence. In Xuela’s solitude, Lucy’s alienation, and the raw pain of My Brother, Kincaid pushes readers to confront the enduring impact of a colonial past and the fierce drive to define oneself within its shadow.
Excerpt from The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“But each of these ordinary people in their ordinary ways had once been so powerful, and now they could not even be powerful enough to stop death from making its presence felt everywhere in the most ordinary way. That was all that was left to them—to live in spite of everything, to be angry, to be vexed, to fall in love, to despise, to ignore the foreigner who came among them to live, to die in an ordinary way.”
End of Excerpt Copyright © 1996 by Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid’s other notable works include Mr Potter (2002), a haunting exploration of fatherhood and absence, and See Now Then (2013), a novel examining time and memory. Through her sharp, uncompromising voice, Kincaid has established herself as a singular force in contemporary literature, capturing the depths and complexities of Caribbean identity.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian journalist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days. Author inquiries: irasroom@gmail.com Website: www.irasroom.org.