Geoff Wisner

The Autobiography of My Mother

by Jamaica Kincaid. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996. 226 pages.

What happens to a girl on the Caribbean island of Dominica whose mother dies in childbirth, whose father all but abandons her, and who decides at an early age that she will never have children of her own? Perhaps she turns out like the protagonist of The Autobiography of My Mother -- suspicious, solitary, gifted with clear but unsympathetic insight into the minds of others, and filled with a fierce cold anger against a postcolonial society in which she and others like her -- the "defeated" -- have been made to feel less than human.

The Autobiography of My Mother is a strange tale that negates itself at every turn. It presents itself as a memoir, yet it's a work of fiction. It calls itself an autobiography -- but of someone else. It concerns a mother, but one who never allows herself to bear children.

The book is a monologue told in the voice of Xuela, its narrator and main character, and that voice -- expressed in pure, stark, incantatory prose -- is what matters most. Xuela's is the urgent voice of a survivor, purged of illusions and sentimentality. She rejects the accepted view or the easy explanation almost by reflex, so that "not" and "never" are among the most common words in the book. What's left after this process of elimination has the concentration of aphorism. "The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable." "My father did not love, but he believed he could, and that must be enough, because perhaps half the world feels that way." "Romance is the refuge of the defeated..."

Xuela is the daughter of a Carib Indian woman, one of the small remnant of Caribs who still survive in Dominica, and of a light-skinned policeman, himself the son of an African woman and a Scottish rum trader. Xuela's father leaves her to be brought up by his washerwoman, depositing his child together with a bundle of soiled clothes. "He would have handled one more gently than the other, he would have given more careful instructions for the care of one over the other, he would have expected better care for one than the other, but which one I do not know, because he was a very vain man, his appearance was very important to him."

Xuela's childhood is one of Dickensian cruelty, told without the Dickensian sentimentality. Her schoolmates and teacher, who are all "of the African people," consider her a Carib and therefore even lower than themselves, because the Caribs were not only defeated but nearly exterminated. Her father's second wife, seeing in Xuela an unwelcome reminder of the other women her husband has known, and of her own failure to bear children, gives her a beautiful necklace "fashioned from dried berries and polished wood and stones and shells from the sea." A "real child," Xuela recounts, "would have been dazzled by it, would have been seduced by it, would have immediately placed it around her neck. I was not a real child." She takes the necklace away and puts it around the neck of her stepmother's guard dog, who goes mad and dies.

Sent to work for a "man of no principles" who knows her father, Xuela becomes pregnant at the age of fifteen. She ends the pregnancy with a "cupful of a thick black liquid," an act of self-assertion that causes her enormous pain and leaves her with an even greater measure of detached insight. "I was a new person then, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through." When she marries, she chooses a man -- an English doctor named Philip -- whom she doesn't love, and she thwarts every expression of his own affection for her. "He grew to live for the sound of my footsteps, so often I would walk without making a sound; he loved the sound of my voice, so for days I would not utter a word; I allowed him to touch me long after I could be moved by the touch of anyone."

When Xuela's English husband first seduces her, his body is described as that of an alien creature: "His hair was thin and yellow like an animal's that I was not familiar with; his skin was thin and pink and transparent, as if it were on its way to being skin but had not yet reached the state that real skin is; it was not the skin of anyone I have loved yet and not the skin I dreamed of...." Much later, observing his loneliness and his failure to adapt to life in a strange land, she recognizes the possibility of empathizing with him, but suppresses it firmly. "I was capable," she says, "of making his suffering real to myself, but I would not allow myself to do it."

For Xuela, descended from African slaves, from the conquered Caribs, and from the conquering British, the personal is also deeply political, and Xuela's view of the sickness in Dominican society is as scathing as her view of the cruelty and neglect she has suffered herself. Watching a congregation leave a church on Sunday, she reflects that this ritual churchgoing "signified defeat yet again, for what would the outcome have been of all the lives of the conquered if they had not come to believe in the gods of the people who had conquered them?" So complete is the colonizers' victory that they even name their plunder after themselves. "They bade each other goodbye and returned to their homes, where they would drink a cup of English tea, even though they were quite aware that no such thing as a tea tree grew in England, and later that night, before they went to bed, they would drink a cup of English cocoa, even though they were quite aware that no such thing as a cocoa tree grew in England."

In The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid has described what the experience of being a colonial "possession" has done to the soul of a people, and of a single woman. It's a hard book, and a troubling one.

From The Autobiography of My Mother:

This account of my life has been an account of my mother's life as much as it has been an account of mine, and even so, again it is an account of the life of the children I did not have, as it is their account of me. In me is the voice I never heard, the face I never saw, the being I came from. In me are the voices that should have come out of me, the faces I never allowed to form, the eyes I never allowed to see me. This account is an account of the person who was never allowed to be and an account of the person I did not allow myself to become.

Published in Boston Book Review, March 1996.



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Geoff Wisner The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996. 226 pages. What happens to a girl on the Caribbean island of Dominica whose mother dies in childbirth, whose father all but abandons her, and who decides at an early age that she will never have children of her own? Perhaps she turns out like the protagonist of The Autobiography of My Mother -- suspicious, solitary, gifted with clear but unsympathetic insight into the minds of others, and filled with a fierce cold anger against a postcolonial society in which she and others like her -- the "defeated" -- have been made to feel less than human. The Autobiography of My Mother is a strange tale that negates itself at every turn. It presents itself as a memoir, yet it's a work of fiction. It calls itself an autobiography -- but of someone else. It concerns a mother, but one who never allows herself to bear children. The book is a monologue told in the voice of Xuela, its narrator and main character, and that voice -- expressed in pure, stark, incantatory prose -- is what matters most. Xuela's is the urgent voice of a survivor, purged of illusions and sentimentality. She rejects the accepted view or the easy explanation almost by reflex, so that "not" and "never" are among the most common words in the book. What's left after this process of elimination has the concentration of aphorism. "The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable." "My father did not love, but he believed he could, and that must be enough, because perhaps half the world feels that way." "Romance is the refuge of the defeated..." Xuela is the daughter of a Carib Indian woman, one of the small remnant of Caribs who still survive in Dominica, and of a light-skinned policeman, himself the son of an African woman and a Scottish rum trader. Xuela's father leaves her to be brought up by his washerwoman, depositing his child together with a bundle of soiled clothes. "He would have handled one more gently than the other, he would have given more careful instructions for the care of one over the other, he would have expected better care for one than the other, but which one I do not know, because he was a very vain man, his appearance was very important to him." Xuela's childhood is one of Dickensian cruelty, told without the Dickensian sentimentality. Her schoolmates and teacher, who are all "of the African people," consider her a Carib and therefore even lower than themselves, because the Caribs were not only defeated but nearly exterminated. Her father's second wife, seeing in Xuela an unwelcome reminder of the other women her husband has known, and of her own failure to bear children, gives her a beautiful necklace "fashioned from dried berries and polished wood and stones and shells from the sea." A "real child," Xuela recounts, "would have been dazzled by it, would have been seduced by it, would have immediately placed it around her neck. I was not a real child." She takes the necklace away and puts it around the neck of her stepmother's guard dog, who goes mad and dies. Sent to work for a "man of no principles" who knows her father, Xuela becomes pregnant at the age of fifteen. She ends the pregnancy with a "cupful of a thick black liquid," an act of self-assertion that causes her enormous pain and leaves her with an even greater measure of detached insight. "I was a new person then, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through." When she marries, she chooses a man -- an English doctor named Philip -- whom she doesn't love, and she thwarts every expression of his own affection for her. "He grew to live for the sound of my footsteps, so often I would walk without making a sound; he loved the sound of my voice, so for days I would not utter a word; I allowed him to touch me long after I could be moved by the touch of anyone." When Xuela's English husband first seduces her, his body is described as that of an alien creature: "His hair was thin and yellow like an animal's that I was not familiar with; his skin was thin and pink and transparent, as if it were on its way to being skin but had not yet reached the state that real skin is; it was not the skin of anyone I have loved yet and not the skin I dreamed of...." Much later, observing his loneliness and his failure to adapt to life in a strange land, she recognizes the possibility of empathizing with him, but suppresses it firmly. "I was capable," she says, "of making his suffering real to myself, but I would not allow myself to do it." For Xuela, descended from African slaves, from the conquered Caribs, and from the conquering British, the personal is also deeply political, and Xuela's view of the sickness in Dominican society is as scathing as her view of the cruelty and neglect she has suffered herself. Watching a congregation leave a church on Sunday, she reflects that this ritual churchgoing "signified defeat yet again, for what would the outcome have been of all the lives of the conquered if they had not come to believe in the gods of the people who had conquered them?" So complete is the colonizers' victory that they even name their plunder after themselves. "They bade each other goodbye and returned to their homes, where they would drink a cup of English tea, even though they were quite aware that no such thing as a tea tree grew in England, and later that night, before they went to bed, they would drink a cup of English cocoa, even though they were quite aware that no such thing as a cocoa tree grew in England." In The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid has described what the experience of being a colonial "possession" has done to the soul of a people, and of a single woman. It's a hard book, and a troubling one. From The Autobiography of My Mother: This account of my life has been an account of my mother's life as much as it has been an account of mine, and even so, again it is an account of the life of the children I did not have, as it is their account of me. In me is the voice I never heard, the face I never saw, the being I came from. In me are the voices that should have come out of me, the faces I never allowed to form, the eyes I never allowed to see me. This account is an account of the person who was never allowed to be and an account of the person I did not allow myself to become. Published in Boston Book Review, March 1996.