Gaston Mclemore
AML 3041-02
Dr. Jordan
December 1, 2009

Jamaica Kincaid
“I was always being told I should be something, and then my whole upbringing was something I was not: it was English.”

The word culture is defined as the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. With that being stated it’s safe to say that Kincaid’s colonial upbringing plays an important role in her life as well as her writings. She was born in 1949 as Elaine Potter Richardson, on the island of Antigua, located in the Caribbean, and later changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid due to disapproval of her parents for writing. From 1983 to today, Kincaid is best known for her Caribbean novels, poems and short stories such as Annie John, A Small Place, At the Bottom of the River, and Girl. The major themes of her writings tend to put independence, gender relations, and colonization in a paradox, battling with the admiration yet resentment of the British colonizers. Along with this written detail of the novelist, I will be presenting a clip of Kincaid reading and discussing excerpts from, Annie John.

Annie John, a novel written by Jamaica Kincaid in 1985 depicts the growth of a girl in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean. It covers issues as diverse as mother-daughter relationships, sexism, racism, clinical depression, and education. The independence of the chapters makes their compilations seem episodic, which is to say that each chapter involves a series of episodes about certain times in a young girl’s life. During this close-reading she touches on her start in print with “Talk of the Town” column in the New Yorker, specifically the irony that her submissions in the 1970s, just preceded the period of celebrity culture. Kincaid says, “It was time when rich people in America wanted to be known for working, doing something other than being rich, and they would get jobs or something like that.” Also, she speaks on wanting to write differently from anyone else at the magazine, “a vanity or arrogance of her youth.” Her piece about a book reception for economist Milton Friedman consists entirely of an inventory of the cost of the event to her and other participants, whom Kincaid rigorously fact checked. Her hostility towards Friedman is due in part by his advisory position, in those days to “a cruel government in Chile,” and Kincaid emphasizes that she wanted to express this but “didn’t want to just say it.” When “Mr. Shaw published it, it was amazing to me”, says Kincaid firmly.

Furthermore, Kincaid talks comically about a passage called “new”, which she expresses her passion for youthfulness while reading a conversation about two women discussing the nature of men, women, and the new celebrity culture emerging. Among some of her prestige awards are the Prix Femina Etranger for her memoir, My Brother in 2000, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1989, a PEN/Faulkner Award nomination and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts for her collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983).

Although Kincaid’s woks are short in length, they have never failed to elicit respect, if at times reluctantly. She is a forthright person who speaks candidly, and left the New Yorker in 1995. Kincaid is currently a professor at Claremont Mckenna College, and up until recently a visiting professor and teacher of creative writing at Harvard University. Over a career that has spanned more than two decades has earned a reputable place in the literary world for her personal, stylistic and honest writings.

Works Cited
Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 13, Gale, 1994.
contemporary Black Biography, Volume 4, Gale, 1993.
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/460
"Jamaica Kincaid," BBC World Service, http://www.bbc.co.uk (February 11, 2003).
www.wikipedia.org/Jamaica Kincaid