Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds

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CARIBBEAN GENESIS

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CARIBBEAN GENESIS Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds

JANA EVANS BRAZIEL

State University of New York Press

Published by

State University of New York Press, Albany © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Braziel, Jana Evans, 1967– Caribbean genesis : Jamaica Kincaid and the writing of new worlds / Jana Evans Braziel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7653-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kincaid, Jamaica—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR9275.A583K5644 2009 813'.54—dc22

2008005525 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Caribbean Genesis, Alterbiography, and the Writing of New Worlds

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Alterrains of “Blackness” in At the Bottom of the River

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Jablesse, Obeah, and Caribbean Cosmogonies in At the Bottom of the River

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The Diabolic as Diasporic in Annie John and Lucy

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Genre, Genealogy, and Genocide in The Autobiography of My Mother

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Death and the Biographical Autograph in My Brother

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Genre, Genealogy, and Genesis in Mr. Potter

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

. . . the fact of being is what is most private; existence is the sole thing I cannot communicate; I can tell about it, but I cannot share my existence. Solitude thus appears as the isolation which marks the very event of being. The social is beyond ontology. —Emmanuel Levinas

Books are written, inexorably, from scattered fragments of accumulated notes, solitary moments of meditation, vigorous classroom debates, overheard comments, engaged dialogic reflections, assimilated ideas, and also written against borrowed time: —books are debts owed, gifts received. I first acknowledge the work of my wonderful editors at SUNY: Larin McLaughlin; Andrew Kenyon; and Laurie Searl; as well as the two anonymous readers of the manuscript-in-process. Second, I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude to my colleagues, friends, and students, especially these: Madhu Sinha, Sarah Domet, Susan Steinkamp, Suzanne Warren, Kirk Boyle, Kate Polak, George Potter, Nic Chua, Megan Fitzpatrick, Sophia Kartsonis, Walt Bosse, Christian Moody, Soren Palmer, Brock Clarke, Lane Clarke, Stan Corkin, Dan LaBotz, Sherry Baron, Jay Twomey, Molly Gaudry, Bryan Smith, Laura Micciche, Gary Weismann, Lee Person, Jim Schiff, Joanie Mackowski, Don Bogen, John Drury, LaWanda Walters, Cynthia Ris, Lisa Beckelheimer, Julia Carlson, Sharon Dean, Jennifer Glaser, Wayne Hall, Heather Hall, Tamar Heller, Jon Kamholtz, Deb Meem, Lisa Meloncon, Maria Romagnoli, Elissa Sonnenberg, and Jenny Wohlfarth. And, for going the distance: Eliz Harmon, of course! To our professors we owe more than we can precisely calculate: I am thus immeasurably indebted to Ron Bogue, Nancy Felson, Sarah Spence, Robbie Schwartzwald, Lisa Henderson, Elizabeth Petroff, Cathy Portuges, David Lenson, and R. Radhakrishnan. Intellectually, I am also indebted to the ideas of Myriam J. A. Chancy, Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Andrea Rushing, Rowland Abiodun, Edwidge Danticat, Renée Larrier, and Alma Jean Billingslea Brown. With fullness of heart, I extend thanks to favorite friends Julie Gerk Hernandez, Susan Crutchfield, Katie LeBesco, Neil Hartlen, and Annelie

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Klein; my siblings Julie Crawford, Dawn Kyle, and Ron Evans; my children Jessi Ettelson, Madison Braziel, and Dylan Braziel; and my parents, Ron and Judy Evans. Finally, for Jim Braziel: thank you for always believing in me, always supporting me. I am grateful to you all.

Introduction

Caribbean Genesis, Alterbiography, and the Writing of New Worlds

“A Broken Plate . . .” Jamaica Kincaid (born Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua on May 25, 1949) has emerged in the last twenty years as one of the most important contemporary anglophone writers in the Americas. Writing across the diasporic interstices of the United States and the Caribbean, Kincaid maps the transnational (and trans-American) paths for examining the interrelated terrains of self, nationality, and race. Kincaid’s fictional texts, many published first in The New Yorker, include the 1983 short story collection At the Bottom of the River and the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Kincaid has also published important works of nonfiction: A Small Place (1988), on the exploitation of the Caribbean islands by colonialism and the neocolonialist abuses of the tourism industry; a memoir of her brother, My Brother (1997), following his death from AIDS; a collection of essays about gardening, colonialism, and history in the Americas, My Garden (Book) (1999); and a collection of her early writings for the “The Talk of the Town” series in The New Yorker, published as Talk Stories by Farrar, Straus, Giroux in January 2001. Most recently, Kincaid has published a fictionalized biographical novel entitled Mr. Potter (2002); a nonfiction reflection on botany through travel writing, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005); and in a forthcoming collection of essays tentativey entitled My Favorite Tool. “I began to realize,” Jamaica Kincaid noted in a 1993 interview, “how my writing and my use of images are based on my understanding of the word as good and evil as influenced by two books in the Bible, Genesis and Revelation” (Vorda, “I Come” 93); in the interview, she also intimates 1

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that “the beginning and the end are the real thing” (Vorda, “I Come” 94). Annie John and Lucy express memories of learning to read from the book of Genesis in the Bible. And as Lucy mournfully recalls after arriving in her new diasporic home to work as an au pair, after seeing a Bible on the nightstand and recalling her lost Antiguan childhood: “[W]hen we were children we would sit under my house and terrify and torment each other by reading out loud passages from the Book of Revelation, and I wonder if ever in my whole life a day would go by when these people that I had left behind, my own family, would not appear before me in one way or another” (8). These biblical resonances—Genesis, Revelations—sweep through Kincaid’s texts as the forces of creation and destruction, of genesis and genocide, and these forces enter into Kincaid’s writing of genealogy and genre, specifically those of “life” writing—or autobiography and biography. Kincaid philosophically tests the generic frames of autobiography and biography in literary texts such as the short story “Biography of a Dress” (1992); the novel The Autobiography of My Mother (1996); the memoir My Brother (1997); and most recently, the novel Mr. Potter (2002). For Kincaid, the genres of biography and autobiography are intricately woven into the parameters of memory and history, but also more indelibly, they are marked with the fractures of genesis, genealogy, and genocide in the Caribbean. In this book, I theorize the relations of genre to genealogy, focusing specifically on Kincaid’s transmutations of autobiography and biography. Through the textual and intellectual fabric of “Caribbean Genesis,” I explore Kincaid’s writing of “new worlds”; her philosophical understanding of autobiography as entangled with alterity, biography, and history; her transmutations of genre in relation to genealogy, genocide, and genesis in the Caribbean; her adaptations of biblical texts for her literary oeuvre; and her authorial deployments of the diabolic as a subversive, yet creative force in the dynamic of autocosmogenesis or autobiographical world making. Biography is, of course, by definition necessarily situated within the frame of autobiography. Having emerged alongside the genre of autobiography in the eighteenth century, biography stands between the literary expectations of autobiography and the documentary demands of reflective historiography. Feminist and literary scholars such as Liz Stanley and Laura Marcus and more recently (and in my mind, more sophisticatedly) Alison Donnell and Leigh Gilmore have explored the imbrications of biography and autobiography. According to Gilmore in The Limits of Autobiography, “Kincaid maximizes the nonmimetic capacities of autobiography through her emphasis on autobiographical extension, a self-representational practice allied with and knowable through metonymy”; in her reading of Kincaid’s literary texts as serial autobiography, Gilmore explains that “insofar as autobiography represents the real, it does so through metonymy, that is, through the claims

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of contiguity, wherein the person who writes extends the self in the writing, and puts her in another place” (101). Kincaid situates autobiography in other lives, or even in objects—a dress in “Biography of a Dress,” and the lives of Xuela Claudette Richardson in The Autobiography of My Mother, Devon Drew in My Brother, or Roderick Potter in Mr. Potter. In her most recent novel, Kincaid writes, “I see now that all change is its same self and all different selves are the same” (2002, Mr. Potter 139). These biographical, metonymic displacements push autobiography to its generic limits but also allow Kincaid to create lives—her own and others—from memory and imagination, refusing the destruction of those lives through anonymity and historical erasure. Autobiography, then, almost always exceeds the individual who writes it, exceeds the life and the subjective experiences of the writing subject; autobiography will also be about the others who surround the writing subject and whose experiences are enmeshed with those of the writer. Autobiography is inherently entangled with biography, the writing of other people’s lives. These biographical others may or may not include one’s family—one’s mother and father, siblings, spouse or partner, and child(ren)—and they are certainly not limited to genealogy and filiation; however, even when absent, genealogy is still silent and invisibly present in the autobiographical text. In Kincaid’s alterbiographic texts, she challenges the presumed insularity and discreteness of the autobiographical form, opening it to representations of alterity: through alterbiography, Kincaid powerfully writes other into self, biography into autobiography, annihilation into creation, and death into life. She thus forces us to rethink the presumed boundaries of these terrains; she does so through her transmutations of genealogy and genre. What, then, is the relation between genealogy and genre, particularly in autobiographical and biographical forms? Genealogy, as autobiography and as biography, is also embedded within history writ large: New World “Discoveries”; British maritime history and its legacies of piracy, pillaging, and ceremonious parading of one’s loot or booty (human and mineral and botanical); the Atlantic Slave Trade; chattel slavery in the Antilles; the enslaved Africans beginning a life of drudgery in this “New World”; and lost to posterity, the Caribs and other indigenous peoples of the West Indies who suffered the worst and most irrevocable form of historical “progress” (always to the gain of one group of people, but to the insurmountable and incalculable loss of another): genocide. Kincaid’s alterbiographical texts are not just about the imbrications of autobiography (or the autobiographical form) and biography (or the biographical form); nor are they just about the interweaving of autobiography with genealogy or filiation; but they are also about the inherent entanglement of autobiography with history.

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Transmuting “Genres” / Deconstructing “Race” An etymological turn is instructive here in understanding Kincaid’s constructions and deconstructions of genres—autobiography and biography. Both genre and genealogy (like genesis and genocide and many other modern English words) have their root in the Greek term genos (g°noV), which (like many Greek nouns) has a somewhat broad denotation. Its most common (or pervasively documented) meaning is “sort or kind”—from which we derive words such as generic, general, generally, and even gender, but also clearly, genre. The word ‘genos’ also denotes a family; hence, modern equivalents in English, such as genealogy, genealogical, and even more scientifically, genes, genomes, genetic, and genetics. This last meaning is also closely parallel to a third meaning denoted by ‘genos’: a race, tribe, or other group of people. This third meaning (or usage) for ‘genos’ is similar to another Greek term, ethnos, which also means a race, tribe, or group of people and from which modern English words such as ethnic and ethnicity are derived. This etymological relation or affiliation—between genre and genealogy and genocide, from the root ‘genos’—also raises the question of the racialization of genres. From these etymological insights, we must examine how language itself is part of the matrix—if not the matrix—from which ideas about genre, race, literature, and nationality emerge. Kincaid’s weaving and unraveling of genres (autobiography, biography) opens one space for doing so, and her transmutations of genre are informed by genealogy (both familial and racial, as the root ‘genos’ supports); Kincaid’s transmutations of genre also expose racial violence at the heart of history, of colonialism, of slavery, of genocide, and even of the modern nation-state (which emerged from these historical parameters, as further elaborated below). The historical nexus of race and aesthetics is at least partially grounded within Enlightenment ideals, so-called democratic philosophies (see particularly Charles W. Mills’ trenchant, pointed critiques of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and On the Citizen, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice),1 early modern anthropological classifications (from Linnaeus’ continental distinctions of racial categories to Blumenbach’s creation of notions of false and will-to-power-inflected notions of “Caucasian” and “degeneration”), as well as the historical emergence of codifying systems of literary and artistic classifications—unsurprisingly and not coincidentally concurrent with European conquest of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the enslavement of African individuals, and the forceful and exploitative colonization of subjugated indigenous peoples across the globe. These emergent systems of aesthetic classification within literature and the arts codified, naturalized, and above all universalized ideas about national genius, national literatures, and clearly delineated, generically demarcated

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categories of difference (racially, nationally, generically), especially in the writings of literary critics such as Immanuel Kant and his notion of “genius” (from genos) as well as the racialized aesthetic theories of race, Volk, and nation in the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hyppolite Taine, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and others.2 Within the complex and intricately woven historical nexus of race and aesthetics, Kant and Kantian aesthetics occupy a central, determinative location: we have, in fact, elsewhere sought to deconstruct or unravel the historical nexus of race and aesthetics in Kant, acknowledged by many as the father of both “modern moral theory and modern racial theory” (Mills, The Racial Contract 72).3 According to Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract, “Kant demarcates and theorizes a color-coded racial hierarchy of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Native Americans, differentiated by their degree of innate talent”; for Mills, the “most important moral theorist of the modern period, . . . the father of modern moral theory, . . . is also the father of the modern concept of race” (71, 70). And Kantian aesthetics cannot be analyzed apart from Kantian raciology. Kincaid not only directly engages, but also textually deconstructs the historical racialization of aesthetics, especially as inflecting genres as systems of classification, in her creative and forceful transmutations of the genres of autobiography, biography, and fiction. Indeed, Kincaid’s texts offer forceful and haunting transfigurations of autobiography and biography as genre. Kincaid, like many diasporic writers, pens texts that are alterbiographical, although some scholars have defined Kincaid’s texts as autofictional (a hybrid genre intermingling fiction and autobiography). Most of Kincaid’s texts center on the self-other(s) dyad, prominently, though not exclusively, figured through the mother-daughter relationship. The question of genre, specifically that of autobiography, in Kincaid’s writings is a vexing one: literary critics have defined her writings as short stories, serial novels, first-person fiction, and most consistently, as autobiography (and more recently, serial autobiography). Kincaid encourages the autobiographical reading, as scholars such as Alison Donnell have noted: “When asked how much of her work is autobiographical, Jamaica Kincaid’s stock response is ‘All of it, even the punctuation’ ” (123). Yet, Kincaid also frustrates an autobiographical reading of her texts. Despite her assertion that works such as Annie John and Lucy are autobiographical—“even the punctuation”—Kincaid has also denied their autobiographicality, defining these texts as fiction. When asked by Donna Perry, “Why did you choose to write fiction instead of autobiography?” Kincaid replies, “Because autobiography is the truth and fiction is, well, fiction. . . . One of the things I found when I began to write was that writing exactly what happened had a limited amount of power for me” (12). She

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further explains her approach in this interview: “I like the idea that when something happens it has a more powerful meaning than the moment in which it actually happens” (12). For Kincaid, “the point wasn’t the truth and yet the point was the truth” (12). Later in the interview, Kincaid explains, “I arrange things in a way that I can understand them, but it isn’t completely fiction; it is, in fact, not in my imagination” (140). In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Kincaid stated, “lying is the beginning of fiction,” elaborating on this idea in another interview with Allan Vorda: “The process of fiction, for me, is using reality and then reinventing reality, which is the most successful way to do what I do” (92). Xuela Claudette Richardson, the protagonist of the novel The Autobiography of My Mother, bluntly states that “life is of course not a mystery” (122) and that self-knowledge is not only possible, but total, even totalizing, and above all, inevitable. The forces defining one’s life, she implies, determine “its entire course, from the moment of birth” (122). Xuela later reverses her sentiments, lamenting the impossibility and futility of autobiographical yearning and suggesting that such knowledge is only possible for gods, not mortals. “Unless you are born a god,” Xuela muses, “your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you” (202). Not only is knowledge of one’s origin impossible, but one’s entire life, unfolding from that point toward other ends, is a “mystery”; it is unknown. Though the facts of one’s existence are true and undeniable (“you are conceived; you are born: these things are true”), one cannot know beyond these most basic facts of one’s life (“you don’t know them”). For Xuela, life and knowledge of life and self are obscured; though Xuela’s origins are lost through her own mother’s death (“[M]y mother died the moment I was born”), her words also suggest the impossibility for all to know (and write) one’s life in entirety. Though all origins are based in myth and history, Kincaid shows that some origins, some myths, some histories are more accessible than others. Autobiography, for Kincaid, is entangled with myth and history; and this aesthetic knot imbues all of Kincaid’s writings, particularly her philosophical engagements with genre. Explaining this creative process to Perry, Kincaid notes, “It’s as if you were given a broken plate and you rearranged it into a pitcher” (140). This metaphor—“broken plate . . . pitcher”—strikingly parallels Derek Walcott’s image of the shattered vase and its shards as “fragments of epic memory” in the Antilles (“The Antilles”). Kincaid, like Walcott, writes about epic and historical forces in her texts, not merely individual lives as suggested in the totalizing reduction of her writings to personal autobiography, which is not to deny that she uses the autobiographical form, and perhaps even personal or familial experience to address the epic and the historical forces of the “New World.” This process, however, is never transparent or direct: it is experience filtered through history, language, and cultural inheritance; and the worlds that she creates—or spins into being—do not mirror the

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world she apprehends, for it is never fully perceptible, and it is never totally apprehensible. “To me,” Kincaid explains, “the world is cracked, unwhole, not pure, accidental” (“To Name Is to Possess” 124). In the essay “Where to Begin?” in My Garden (Book), Kincaid notes how the Mount Hood daffodils (consistently an image of historical, cultural fracturing for the colonized subject in her writings), “start out yellow and then change—not fade, but change—to a spectacular ivory, the shade of dinnerware on a shelf, tempting a child to see just how it would look shattered into many pieces” (186). The image of the broken plate recurs in the novel The Autobiography of My Mother in Ma Eunice Paul’s shattered “plate of bone china” on which is painted a pastoral scene of the “English countryside idealized” and “underneath it was written in gold letters the one word heaven” (8, 9); the young child Xuela, who has been left in Ma Eunice’s care and who is fascinated with the china plate, accidentally breaks it and creates enormous grief for the woman. This image—the shattered plate—is not tangential, but rather crucial to understanding Kincaid’s autobiographical writings, for it is an image of the world destroyed and then remade, and it reveals the process of writing autobiographical truth from historical lies and colonial legacies. The writing of autobiography, then, is not a seamless, transparent process but rather an ambivalent venture into efforts at autogenesis and against the forces of historical genocide. Recent scholarship on Kincaid’s writing suggests this autobiographical ambivalence. Donnell muses that “readers of her work would be wellaccustomed to such statements (‘All of it, even the punctuation’) of devious simplicity and complex clarity” (123). Gilmore, writing in The Limits of Autobiography, also notes the difficulty of autobiography in Kincaid’s texts: “What and how the autobiographical signifies within and across her texts is fairly complicated. Invoking the ‘autobiographical’ as a dimension of writing raises, or ought to raise, as many questions as it seems to answer” (100). Rather than foreclosing analysis, Gilmore argues that autobiography contrarily opens analytical possibilities: “The autobiographical may, instead, function critically as an expansive, extendible system of meaning, one that enables readers to do much more than search out sources, proof, or evidence of a corresponding reality” (100). Kincaid’s texts do reveal something essential about autobiography and writing, if not necessarily about her own autobiography, and I argue that this “autobiographical” refusal (of literal reading) offers a rejoinder to the overeagerness of literary critics to read Kincaid’s life—like a fingerprint left in ink on the page—in her earlier texts Annie John and Lucy. Kincaid’s project is undeniably about autobiography, but not one that can be unambiguously read, consumed, known, mastered, and not necessarily her own, though autobiographical elements clearly enter into and find creative and imaginative representations in her writings.

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Theorizing Alterbiography Theorizing the diasporic deconstructions of autobiography in relation to alterity, I sketch out a theorization of alterbiography in large strokes in the remainder of this introductory chapter, exploring contemporary deviations in autobiographical studies and theorizing new terrains of self and others in Kincaid’s oeuvre. My theorizations of alterbiography draw from the important critiques of traditional conceptions of autobiography as articulated in the last few decades by poststructuralist, feminist, queer, African American, Latino, and postcolonial scholars. Alterbiography, then, is defined in relation to many of the terms coined for different methods of autobiographical reading and writing—autobiographics, autography, biomythography, and especially, autoethnography; however, alterbiography attempts to understand the genre of autobiography as gendered, sexuated, and above all, racialized. I begin by theorizing the genre of autobiography and briefly overviewing critical race, postcolonial, feminist, and queer critiques of the genre. I then overview traditional Western European conceptualizations of self and autobiography, before discussing recent detours from the canonical tour of this genre and theorizing alternative terrains for thinking about and understanding “life writing” as alterbiographical. Beginning with critical race, minority, migratory, postcolonial, and feminist critiques of the autobiographical genre, I define ‘alterbiography’ as alternative, destabilizing antiforms of life writing, a term I use not in its common usage as synonymous with autobiography, but as texts that alter traditional conceptualizations of its constitutive elements—bios, graphe—creatively and relationally refiguring both elements. If autobiography is about one life inscribed or written into being, alterbiographic texts are not essentially about an individual life, or even a group of individual lives, but rather—more abstractly, but with material ramifications—about the national-textual problematics of identity in diaspora. Many of Kincaid’s literary texts that I read as alterbiographical are not autobiographies proper; rather, these alterbiographical texts deconstructively critique and engage figurations of self (and selves). I am not concerned then with rereading autobiographical texts as alterbiographical. I am equally unconcerned with unraveling the woven threads of truth and fiction or autobiography and fiction within Kincaid’s literary texts, although some scholars have defined her writings as autofictional. Such a methodological problematic presumes, of course, to know the difference and operates according to the same positivist, transparent logic of autobiography that this book critiques. Instead, this book is overwhelmingly concerned with Kincaid’s literary texts as preoccupations with philosophical notions of self, others, subjectivity, and alterity and that problematize such relations within discursive, political, cultural, and material fields of relation (à la Glissant). Relations are not fixed or given but rather are translational, malleable, and

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contradictory. This critique remains, though, a deconstructive reading of autobiography as genre through a postcolonial, diasporic lens and as a formative foundational matrix in defining notions of self, citizen, and nation. Thus, I read Kincaid’s engagements with autobiography—and more visibly, alterbiographical textual impulses that attempt to erode the boundaries of genre—not as a shoring up of subjectivity and nationality but rather as contested alterrains that reveal crises of the subject/subjective and the national/diasporic as sites of belonging. In short, I explore the relations of self and national identity as historically and ideologically mapped in and through the genre of autobiography. In the last few decades as literary studies has become preoccupied with issues of the self and subjectivity, autobiography studies have grown within the larger field of literary studies. Feminist,4 queer,5 poststructuralist,6 critical race,7 minority,8 and postcolonial critics9 have critiqued “autobiography” as a masculinist, heterosexist, racialized, positivist, and Western genre. Various critiques of autobiography have sought to reconfigure the constitutive elements—autos, self; bios, life; and graphe, writing—or to reveal how these elements have been constructed according to masculinist, heterosexist, and Western conceptions of self, life, and writing. Critical deviations from traditional notions of autobiography include autogynography, autography, and autoethnography, all addressed further later. Most feminist, critical race, and postcolonial critiques of autobiography have involved reconfiguring the definitive elements—those of autos, bios, and graphia—as well as deconstructing the Western foundations of the genre itself: language as a transparent medium; the positivistic and humanistic belief in knowing and transcribing one’s life; the individual as an autonomous, self-determining, coherent, and unified subjective entity. According to Smith and Watson, since “autobiography” in the West has a particular history, what we have understood as the autobiographical “I” has been an “I” with a historical attitude—a sign of the Enlightenment subject, unified, rational, coherent, autonomous, free, but also white, male, Western. This subject has been variously called “the individual” or “the universal human subject” or “man.” Cultural attachment to this sovereign “I” signals an investment in the subject of “history” and “progress,” for this “man” is the subject who traveled across the globe, surveyed what he saw, claimed it, organized it, and thereby asserted his superiority over the less civilized “other” whom he denigrated, exploited, and “civilized” at once. (1998, 27) They further ask, “If this autobiographical ‘I’ is a Western ‘I,’ an ‘I’ of the colonizer, then what happens when the colonized subject takes up a generic practice forged in the West and complicit in the West’s romance with

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individualism? . . . Can a colonized subject speak in and through cultural formations other than those of the colonial master? Is she always already spoken for?” (28). My own book is not invested in examining the uncritical appropriation of the autobiographical form by diasporic writers but rather their alterbiographic deformations of Western literary forms. After overviewing some recent literary and critical strains of autobiographical deviation, I then discuss the alterbiographical as a diasporic deconstruction of the nationalist parameters of autobiography. Autobiographical studies have diverged in the last few decades from biographical studies grounded in life, bios. Contemporary scholars of autobiographical writing have taken a notable detour from an emphasis on biography, and some recent theorizations of autobiography—including autogynography (Stanton; Bree), autography (Perrault), autoethnography (Lionnet; Pratt; Reed-Danahay), autophylography (Olney)—have elided bios altogether, with some important exceptions, of course: Lorde’s biomythography, Derrida’s otobiography, Gilmore’s autobiographics, and Marcus’s auto/biographics. In these recent theorizations and coinages, the import and importance of bios has diminished. This elision of bios is most remarkable, though, in what its absence highlights: while omitting bios, these studies hold onto autos as a central and inalterable figuration of autobiographical texts, even as some theorists refigure, even disfigure the “self.” This erasure or elision of bios also obscures the historical and theoretical foundations of the genre that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By emphasizing alter- and alterity in autobiographical writing as a forceful displacement of autos, I do not mean to suggest diasporic deviations from autos- only or diasporic mutations of self and subjectivity. As interventions in postmodern, postcolonial, and diasporic theories, as well as those of ethnocritical and area studies, differently suggest, bios and graphe—or even the act of writing (indicated in the transitive graphein)—are no less complicated terrains, alterterrains, or no less complex, culturally defined categories of existence, thought, interaction, and writing. Bios—within Western scientific and epistemological discourses (biology, for instance) is, in fact, overdetermined by the gendered, sexuated, and racialized classifications of genos—presumed to be essential, fixed, and above all, pure (forms). Is not what we understand by bios, life already overdetermined and concretely defined by its structural opposite within Western thought, precisely what we understand by thanatos, death? The Western metaphysical tradition—from Plato’s Being/becoming dichotomy through Cartesian and Kantian objectivity (ob + jeter : to cast away from oneself)—has defined ‘bios’ as designed, as form (eternally fixed, unchanging, unfluctuating, and thus immutable) . . . do we not already smell here the corpus mortis? Do we not sense ourselves already to be in the grip-lock, death-hold, the rigor mortis, of thanatos (at least as constructed within Western metaphysics)? I

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am not suggesting that life escapes death or that death escapes life—such divisions are already premised on their opposition—I am suggesting that bios, life, and thanatos, death, do not stand in relation to one another; rather, life and death move in relations—fluid, changing, fluctuating, mutable, and metamorphic. The relations of bios~thanatos are ones that demand alter-ation in African and African diasporic texts, where life and death are defined as continuity, movement, migration, even diaspora and return. This dialectic is philosophically addressed more fully in chapter 5. Autogynography (from gyne, woman), coined by Domna Stanton and developed further by Germaine Bree, is a feminist formulation that seeks to redress masculinist exclusivity. Autography, coined by Jeanne Perreault, elides bios, life, and emphasizes the self as textually constructed, signed, or autographed; this term erroneously presumes bios, life, to be always already an essentialist or “biologistic” terrain, without examining how Western definitions of ‘bios’ inform this construction. While I appreciate (and am indebted to) Olney’s early theorizations of African autobiography, his conceptions of “pure” European autoautography and “pure” African autophylography posit static forms for autobiographical-textual incarnations, even if these forms—as in Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir and Richard Wright’s Black Boy—are hybridized. I suggest a divergence from Olney’s theorizations of African autobiography through the Greek term phylos to retheorizations of multiple alter-biographical writings through the Greek term genos. This terminological divergence, from ‘phylos’ to ‘genos,’ still keeps race as a fundamental category of analysis, but it also underscores the etymological and constitutive relations of race to genre and gender—as these terms have their linguistic roots in genos. Autoethnography, first introduced by anthropologists and later adapted by literary scholars such as Françoise Lionnet, Mary Louis Pratt, Julia Watson, and others, is a hybrid methodology that is informed by ethnography, anthropology, and autobiography studies; as a hybrid form it emphasizes the writing of the self in relation to and as a writing of the ethnos, group. The earliest references to autoethnography arise from anthropological research, and its later literary uses draw from these interventions in anthropology. Even Pratt, whose Imperial Eyes constitutes one of the most developed uses of the term in literary criticism, emphasizes ethnographic cultural production over the autoethnographic inflections in autobiography. Several literary critics, notably Lionnet, have used this term to read Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, as if this autobiographical text is especially open to ethnographic reading by virtue of its author’s training in anthropology. (Hurston studied anthropology at Columbia University with Franz Boas, who was influential in rethinking race as a cultural construct and not as a biologically determined category. One wonders also how Hurston’s ideas may have influenced the teacher Boas.) Reed-Danahay suggests autoethnography as ethnography is a form of self-cultural production. These readings, even

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CARIBBEAN GENESIS

literary ones, tend to privilege ethnography in autoethnography, while deemphasizing the autobiographical in autoethnography. Autobiography, no less than ethnography, is a multiply coded, polyvalent, and often contradictory site of textual-cultural production. A sustained critique of autos, self in autobiography, and a critical interrogation of autobiography as genre are needed to understand genre as raced, sexed, and gendered. I propose such a critique through alterbiography. Because of its interdisciplinarity—mapped across the disciplinary borders of anthropology and literary studies—autoethnography bears a critical relation to both autobiography, a literary genre, and ethnography, anthropological writing about a group of people. The intervention rethinks self in relation to community for autobiography and community in relation to self (or individuals) for ethnography. Autoethnography displaces the racialized constructions of ethnography and refigures the hierarchical relations of researching subject and object of study. This critical and theoretical intervention is an important and necessary one, but it does not go far enough in examining how the self, how subjectivity, and how genre—as Western constructions—are racialized. What these studies fail to note and what is inherently mismarked in autoethnographic theorizations are the ways in which anthropology as a discipline (imbued with scientific notions of race, ethnicity, and culture) was actually constitutive of Western notions of autobiography and subjectivity as racially pure and sexually discrete kinds or genres. Although anthropology as a discipline sought (and seeks) to understand ethnicity through cultural (variable) determinants, while biology probed (and probes) race through genetic determinants, the imbrication of ethnicity and race persists in the early anthropological racial classifications of Johann Friederich Blumenbach (eighteenth century), Comte de Gobineau (nineteenth century) and other nineteenth-century European and American thinkers. Whereas ethnicity is generally assumed to have cultural determinants, race recalcitrantly (at least in scientific, if not cultural, discourses) inheres as a category with genetic determinants (and this problematic is rooted in its etymology and in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classifications of race and literature). Also, there remains a near-intractable inscribing of race onto individuals of African descent—African, African diasporic, AfricanCaribbean, black British, African Canadian, and African American subjects who are “racially marked,” while “whiteness” has been presumed transparent, given, natural, neutral, or nothing to be seen. This generative “raceing” of Africans is no less true, although quite different in its performative instantiations, for North African or Maghrebian subjects, who are ironically designated as “Caucasian” under scientific and sociopolitical categories while unofficially (and officially, as is often the case in France and elsewhere) derided as “Arab” or “Beur” others. Yet in European colonial and American imperial discourses, blackness—historically and culturally—particularly bears the “mark of race”

INTRODUCTION

13

or the “mark of genre.”10 Distinctions between phenotype and genotype (are not the imbrications of language, linguistic, and scientific systems of racial classification also apparent in these terms?) notwithstanding, phenotype as blackness almost always becomes conflated with genotype as négroid (that is, Sub-Saharan African in origin). It is with le Noir—or “a white man’s artifact” as Fanon maintains—that “the cycle of the biological begins” (1952/1969, 14, 161). This phenotypical epidermalization is biological (configured as innate or essential, and in pre-Linnaean and pre-Darwinian terms, at least, as invariable). What is needed, then, is a retheorization of bios and autos as formative of genre, as constitutive in autobiography as genre.11 These theoretical lines of inquiry are further elaborated in the opening chapter as related to the ontological and a-ontological figurations of “blackness” in both Fanon’s and Kincaid’s philosophically imbued writings. But how is it possible to problematize and redefine bios? Am I suggesting that the interdisciplinarity of autoethnography is unproductive or even that interdisciplinarity itself is unproductive? No, quite the contrary. It is necessary to probe how the foundations of genre are produced through interdisciplinarity. Genre is entangled in interdisciplinary, interdiscursive knowledges and their constructions of race and ethnicity, as previously addressed. Informed by all of these critiques and critical terms, I also offer a new term: alterbiography. Alterbiography is not a new genre of life writing, or even a new codification of autobiography, but rather a deconstructive or degenerative force within life writing—one that erodes and contests the boundaries of genre as they are predicated on notions of genealogy, genius, and race. But why shift from autoethnography to alterbiography? Alterbiography shifts from ethnos to genos, from ethnicity to race, precisely in order to examine the ideological constructions of race, constructs that still permeate discussions of ethnicity. Alterbiography interrogates constructions of race as intertwined with those of gender and sex, and it interrogates constructions of race precisely through an interrogation of genre/genos. Alterbiography, moreover, problematizes autobiography as genre without eliding bios and replacing it with ethnos, and it problematizes autobiography as genre, while opening “life-writing” to alternative sites, or alterrains, of identity, community, history, culture, politics, and beliefs. Above all, alterbiography offers alternative ways of understanding “life-writing,” because it offers alternative ways of understanding bios, life. The Western knowledges designated under the rubrics of biography and biology are mutually implicated by the categories of race, gender, and sex—precisely through genre or genos. And alterbiography disentangles the science, or the genetic logic, of race, gender, and sex that has precluded (at its foundational matrix) alternative modes of diasporic or transnationalist belonging. My own theorizations of alterbiography problematize autos as a ground for “self,” foreground the historical interrelations of autobiography and biography as literary genres,

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CARIBBEAN GENESIS

keep bios central to life writing, while theorizing alternative ways of understanding bios, life. Alterbiography—neologistically coined by replacing autos, “self” with alter-, a prefix derived from the Greek pronoun allo-, “other” (the etymological root for English words such as alterity, alteration, alter, et cetera)—critiques autobiography and textually refigures the relational terrains of life writing in several ways. First, alterbiography reconfigures self as other, self in other, other in self, and other as self. As Rimbaud articulated at the end of the nineteenth century, every je est un autre. Although I replace autos, “self” with allo-, alter-, “other,” I do not intend an elision of self by other, or a supplanting of self by other, but rather, a redefinition of the relation of self~other in textual representations. ‘Allo-,’ within Greek and written Western languages derived from Greek, points to that which is outside itself, even as it remains within—signifier within, signifying elsewhere. My own understanding of ‘alterity’ is influenced by Levinas, and many of the theoretical terms (alter-terrains, alterrains, alter-relation, alter-biography, alter-objectivity, alter-egos) that I propose for reading Kincaid’s literary texts emerge from Levinas’s ideas about alterity.12 In this study, I thus theorize alterbiography as textual displacements and destabilizations of the transparency of language, the notion of the self as separate from and in opposition to the other (i.e., self/other), and the conception of bios, life as fixed, static, designed, or essentialist (as in biologically determined). Such biological determinants (as traditionally configured in the genres of biography and autobiography), clearly, depend on post-Enlightenment scientific discourses and philosophical definitions of bios or life grounded in Platonic metaphysics; such definitions of bios or life are not synonymous with the signifier ‘bios’ and its myriad possible points of diverse (even contradictory) signification. Second, alterbiography refuses autobiography as a singular or solipsistic genre that eclipses the self in relation to community, family, nation, or other sites of relation.(Although I admittedly find the term autoethnography useful for exploring the relation of self to community, I resist the term’s supplanting of ‘bios,’ “life” with ‘ethnos,’ “group” and thus its elision of the former term.) And although my theorizations of alterbiography are influenced by politicized readings of autoethnography, I think it is necessary, at least for reading Kincaid’s literary narratives, to reassert the importance of bios, life; to redefine the lives represented in these texts; and to refigure bios, life, through the imbricated frames of subjectivity, objectivity, and alterity. A shift toward the alterbiographical refigures “life-writing,” transforming both elements without eliding ‘bios’ with ‘ethnos’ (or gyno-, as in autogynography, or by any other term). Third, alterbiography offers alternative sites for understanding different conceptualizations of bios, “life” and bios-graphe, “life-writing.” Like autoethnography, these alternative sites (defined as alterrains) also reconfigure the

INTRODUCTION

15

relations of self and other but with the force of bios intact, if transformed. As an Antiguan American writer, Kincaid conceptualizes new terrains for thinking about life—and the philosophical and cultural meanings of life and lives—under the shadow of colonial rule; its postcolonial legacies; neocolonial, imperial, and global capital forces; and other political forms of violence. Kincaid’s alterbiographical texts are preoccupied—textually, historically, politically, spiritually, mythically, culturally, communally, and philosophically—with life. And her alterbiographical narratives generate new alterrains for considering the relations and boundaries of life/death, self/other, inside(r)/outside(r). Alterbiography, then, resists the nominal configuration of written identity under an essentialized figure—however pluralized, deconstructed, and reinscribed this figure. ‘Alterbiography,’ unlike terms such as ‘autogynography,’ resists the nominal configuration of written identity under an essentialized figure (in Stanton’s case, gyno-, or “woman”); however, pluralized, deconstructed and reinscribed, this figure of gyno-, woman remains wed to the archetypes and metaphysical constructions of woman—woman will never contain women, even if we purport to know what (and all) that women signifies, and I am certain that I do not. Also, as postcolonial and diasporic feminists have persuasively argued, this woman is positioned as universal, even as it remains coded in terms of race, sex, class, and nationality: that is, white, heterosexual, affluent (or “first world”), and Western (or “Euro-American”), not that these dominant or privileged constructions are any more self-contained, monolithic, unified, simple, or transparent than those constructions that are set in opposition to the dominant ones—black, homosexual, indigenous (or “Third World”). These oppositions—white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, affluent/indigent, “first world”/“third world,” occidental/oriental—are necessarily defined in oppositional relation, and as history demonstrates, in hierarchical relation; and these binarisms do not have “pure” material, historical, or national references. We need the permutations and pluralizations offered through notions of hybridity, métissage, queer, diasporic, and glocal (the imbrications and interpermeations of global and local) to deconstruct Manichean bilogic (Fanon, JanMohamed). Because it is adjectival, ‘alter-’ suggests the relations of race, sex and sexuality, class, nationality, diaspora without codifying these relations as essences or as concretions of the social and the self; these relations—sometimes asymmetrical and hierarchical—are not fixed or static but rather are shifting and mobile ones. Also, the adjectival ‘alter-’ suggests a “contact zone” (Pratt) for thinking and contesting the relations of race, sex and sexuality, class, nationality, diaspora, without privileging one of these epistemological and political categories over the others. Alter-, as a “contact zone” for fielding relations of alterity, also becomes a site for renegotiating asymmetrical relations of power and for alter(ing) and decentring dominant

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CARIBBEAN GENESIS

sites of relation—white, heterosexual, affluent (or “first world”) and Western (or “Euro-American”)—which are not, and never have been, as unified, monolithic, discrete or “pure” as these constructs falsely suggest. This alter(ation) or decentring of dominant positions as fragmented, contradictory, ambiguously, or blurrily bounded, and hybrid, does not suggest, however, that these domains do not totalize power relations or bestow privilege: histories of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, heterosexuality, and class demonstrate otherwise and disabuse us of such a quixotic notion. Is autobiography Western? Or are constructions of autobiography—within the history of literary criticism (à la Georges Gusdorf and others)—Western? Of course, what would autobiography be outside of these critical and scholarly constructions? And how is it possible to interrogate these questions without also probing the very definitions/constructions of genre and its classificatory modes of dissection, analysis, and categorization (as border) as Western classifications through/within its Western etymological roots and ideological evolution in the West in sciences, anthropology, and literary studies? Is it possible that genre itself—entangled as it is with concepts of ‘genealogy,’ ‘genesis,’ ‘generation,’ ‘gender,’ and ‘race,’ all etymologically rooted in the Greek term genos—is a Western construct? While alter-biographical leaves “life-writing” (or “life” and “writing,” bios + graphe) conjoined, the prefatory adjective ‘alter-’ remains both in relation and at distance, and this hyphenated prefix (dis)places the entire construct—alterbiography—through its relation to alterity. Autos-, ethnos-, bios-, phylos-, and genos- all remain rooted within a self- or cultural-reflexivity that is distinctly Western (if we believe—not that we should—those who purported to be “Western” for centuries, and not that their ideas or this construction were inherently unified, singular, or noncontradictory, to say the least). I want to evoke a quote from Derrida’s Otobiography: The Ear of the Other: “There is here a différance of autobiography, an allo- and thanatography” (19). Within Derridean critical and theoretical discourse, this quote has remained at the margins—obscure, erased, perhaps forgotten. Only the Greek word allo- (whose English parallel/form would be ‘alter-’) holds the linguistic and philosophical capacity—as an internal referent within Western linguistic and philosophical systems to signify, suggest, or point toward that which exceeds or lies outside of its systematicity, at least partially, while also remaining coded and situated within. Allo-, alter-, other. Allo-, other. Autos-, self. We remain trapped within an epistemological and ideological binarism, a distinctly Western one, and yet perhaps one deconstructive path is precisely through the other—that which is other, those other cultural forms of reflexivity that do not preclude self from other from self. An other or other modes of thought, an other or other cultural perspectives, an other or other philosophical systems of social, psychological, and ideological configurations of identities and knowledges.

INTRODUCTION

17

‘Allo-,’ within Greek and written Western languages derived from Greek, points to that which is outside itself, even as it remains within—signifier within, signifying elsewhere. My own understanding of alterity is influenced by Emmanuelle Levinas and Jacques Derrida (himself influenced by Levinas). These men—Jew/Greek, Greek/Jew—as they auto- and alter-referentially sign themselves in one philosophical exchange—write (graphein) moments of lives (bios) mapped on the borders of European imperialism: Levinas a Jewish Lithuanian in Germany and France in the interwar period; Derrida a Jewish Algerian of Sephardic descent and a French citizen between World War II and the period of the Algerian Revolution. Such cultural estrangement—as outsiders within—maps their own theoretical and philosophical writings of alterity. Although differently located (historically, culturally, nationally, linguistically, and even ethnically) from Kincaid as an African diasporic or trans-American writer, the theoretical writings of Derrida and Levinas suggest new ways for thinking about autobiography, alterity, and identity in diaspora. Following Nicholas Mirzoeff, in Diaspora and Visual Culture, I want to place African diasporic subjects and Jewish diasporic subjects in theoretical, alterbiographical conversation. As Mirzoeff writes in the introduction to the Diaspora and Visual Culture, “Africans and Jews have long looked to each other for an explanation of what it means to be in diaspora, an understanding that is now in urgent need of renewal” (2). This critique questions the relation of alterity and the “Other.” Must the Other, within hierarchical and structural relations of power inevitably remain the Other, ineluctably remain othered and marginalized? Would the Other still be other, if these structural relations were subverted and revalorized? Is it possible to rethink the boundaries of self/other and the traversals of self/other/self and other/self/other that do not exclude the transformations and transiencies of otherness? Is the “Other” recuperable as a deconstructive space for reexamining the autos-, self, within autobiographical writings as a de/colonized subjective process wherein community, nationality, and genealogy form and deform “contact zones” (Pratt 1992) for negotiating identity as relation? Because the Other suggests a reified and essentialized space that remains (perhaps ineluctably?) positioned as a subordinate term within Western binarisms of self/other; because the Other remains entangled within metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological—not to mention psychoanalytic—terrains of negativity and affirmation, I reframe alterity, following Levinasian language, as alter-. The adjectival form of ‘alter’ eludes substantive abstraction, and unlike the figuration of the Other, a nominative or subjective form, resists essentialized corporeal and genealogical inscriptions of alterity. ‘Alter-’ is descriptive, yet open, without significatory closure; the Other seems to embody alterity, while alterbiographical subjects write identity in and through alterity (not as opposed to self but within and through alterterrains, or alterrains, of nation-state, land, community,

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CARIBBEAN GENESIS

home, exile, diasporic location(s), language, family, nonfamilial relations, amorous affiliations, desirous encounters, violent erasures, historical shifts, and political contestations. In relation, specifically in relation to alter- or alterity (that which is not self—that is, le propre nom—but touches upon and defines “the proper name,” even as it too shifts and becomes other), the concept of ‘self’ is constructed, written, inscribed, erased, rewritten, and defined—however transiently. Like autobiographics (Gilmore) and autography (Perreault), my conceptualizations of the alterbiograpical understand self as a textual-material matrix. While not valorizing empiricism or positivist notions of confessed truths, I am interested in the textual imbrications, the ideological contradictions, the material permutations, and the experiential complications of narratives and theoretical inquiries, especially in relation to self/other/self or other/self/other. Alterbiography, then, has a distanced relation to self and knowledge, and even more pronouncedly, vague notions of “self-knowledge”; like the body, it is neither transparent, easily deciphered, or naturally decoded; its meanings are variable, transient, shifting, culturally embedded, historically situated. Alterbiographical texts, like bodies, are palimpsestic—written, erased, typed, retyped, edited. Graphically, they are legible semantic sites without being absolute or fixed reservoirs of meaning. Alterbiography, then, problematizes autobiography, even as it writes against this national, textual, and identitarian problematic. Unlike Perreault’s feminist conception autography whose “effect is to bring into being a ‘self,’ ” my own theorization of the alterbiographical refuses the demarcation or divisive bordering of textuality and materiality: alterrains are “borderlands” (Anzaldúa) or “contact zones” (Pratt) where texts and bodies, or texts and the real, hybridize and crosspollinate in constructing self/other/self or other/self/other—relations that are transiently bordered yet never fully divorced or separate. One cannot simply (and textually) write oneself into being. The textual I always stands in relation to the culturally constructed or interpellated I. The “text” stands (transiently positioned)—or shifts and moves (actively mobile)—in relation to the “real,” a “real” that is also written, erased, rewritten, and experienced in and through text but remains irreducible to textual production. Histories (of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, heterosexuality, and class, as well as those of families, nations, nation-states, diasporic communities, and so on) permeate and undeniably, in many ways, are constructed through and shaped by the alterrains of alterbiography, yet it would be the most egregious kind of apolitical, ahistorical, and immaterial violence to privilege textuality only and, far worse, to reduce materiality to textuality. Although my own project and its theorizations of alterbiography are influenced by politicized readings of autoethnography, I think it is necessary, at least for reading the works of Kincaid, to reassert the importance of bios,

INTRODUCTION

19

life; to redefine the lives represented in these texts; and to refigure bios, life, through the imbricated frames of subjectivity, objectivity, and alterity. A shift toward the alterbiographical refigures “life-writing,” transforming both elements without eliding bios with ethnos (or gyno-, as in autogynography, or by any other term). As a trans-American or diasporic writer, Kincaid conceptualizes new terrains for thinking about life—and the philosophical and cultural meanings of life and lives—under the shadow of colonial rule; its postcolonial legacies; neocolonial, imperial, and global capital forces; revolutionary wars; internal civil strife; border disputes; and other political forms of violence. Kincaid’s alterbiographical texts are preoccupied—textually, historically, politically, spiritually, mythically, culturally, communally, and philosophically—with lived experiences of history, day-to-day material concerns, migration, and altered forms of belonging and diasporic citizenship. Kincaid’s alterbiographical narratives generate new alterrains for considering the relations and boundaries of life/death, self/other, inside(r)/outside(r). In fact, reflections of life (and its relations and interrelations to death) is an important relational frame, or alterrain, through which notions of self (and its relations and interrelations to a community of others) are explored. Kincaid’s literary oeuvre—as an alterbiographical effort at deconstructing the historical residues of post-Enlightenment legacies, particularly as related to notions of the self, subjectivity, and autobiography—also powerfully dismantles the racialized architectonics of genres and literary classification systems and importantly exposes the poetic alterrains of meaning and identity that remain embedded within those otherwise delimiting architectural structures. Kincaid’s literary acts of Caribbean “genesis” thus create and recreate “new worlds” for dwelling and belonging, for being and becomings. Surveying the breadth of Kincaid’s writings, this book explores the author’s transmutations of genre, specifically those of autobiography, biography, and history in relation to the forces of creation and destruction in the Caribbean. I plumb Kincaid’s writing of autobiography as biography, focusing on her preoccupation with genealogy, genesis, and even genocide as frames for rethinking the boundaries of genre. In the book, I address Kincaid’s alterbiographic deformations of the generic borders of autobiography: hers is a corpus of writings that radically challenges the discreteness of myriad literary and philosophical categories. Kincaid’s literary oeuvre thus radically alters notions of subjectivity, objectivity, self, other, autobiography, biography, and writing. In the short story “Biography of a Dress,” for example, Kincaid poses the question, what is a biography? To Kincaid’s questions and her reflections on memory and biographical fiction, I add these questions: What does it mean to write a “biography of a dress”? What does it mean, for that matter, to write the “biography” of any object? The question of the biographical, and its location within the autobiographical, is revisited in Mr. Potter: the novel displaces the autobiographical “I” and its referen-

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tiality into the biographical Mr. Potter, a fictional portrait of the author’s biological father and yet a historical figuration of an African descendant of slaves in the Caribbean island of Antigua. In both of these texts, Kincaid confounds the referentiality of biographical texts and thus transmutes or alters our understanding of auto/biography. The novel The Autobiography of My Mother also alters, moves, and refigures the boundaries of genre—those of the novel and of the autobiography. Written in first-person narrative through the eyes of the motherless Xuela, Kincaid’s text is defined (most explicitly and graphically on the cover; but also in the photographic image of the woman who slowly appears and forms as the reader reads) as both an autobiography, The Autobiography of My Mother, and as a novel, as the cover states. Again, Kincaid directly engages the question of genre: what does it mean to write autobiography? To Kincaid’s question, I pose this: what does it mean, textually and ideationally, to write an “autobiography” of one’s mother or for that matter, of any one other than oneself? In Kincaid’s novel, the boundaries demarcating self/other, autobiography/novel, and truth/ fiction are refused. As a concluding note, it is also important to indicate the myriad points of philosophical “contact”—a literary vis-à-vis, or corpsà-corps—initiated in this book between Kincaid and important thinkers of the Western metaphysical tradition, as well as postcolonial thinkers who are that tradition’s Caribbean and American hemispheric interlocutors. I thus approach Kincaid not as an Antillean philosopher-queen,13 but more precisely as a philosophically engaged Caribbean literary writer who does not refuse intellectual encounter or “contact” with other important thinkers and writers, most notably Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, William Faulkner, Édouard Glissant, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Derek Walcott, but also with the continental philosophical tradition and its engaged theorists, such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Genet, Gaston Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and others. Hers is a voice that refuses silence and enters into the Caribbean “quarrel with history,” which is also a profoundly intellectual wrestling with philosophy as well. Literary critics who have not yet attended to the philosophical ideas embedded within Kincaid’s nuanced texts have not yet fully read or “encountered” the writer. This book is thus an effort toward understanding Kincaid’s intellectual contributions to the Caribbean “quarrel with history,” her wrestling with philosophy, her transmutations of genre, and her intellectual transfigurations of the ideological and discursive forms of power and power relations that have historically determined notions such as subjectivity, alterity, self, and others.

1

Alterrains of “Blackness” in At the Bottom of the River

“Darkness Was over the Surface of the Deep” In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, Let there be light and there was light and God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day and the darkness he called night. —Genesis 1:1–5

I grew up in this extraordinary light, this blinding, thick light of the sun, that seems to give off a light that makes things transparent. But the sun is almost hellish, really. Sometimes it would turn from something wonderful, the light of the sun, into a kind of hell. —Jamaica Kincaid, from Vorda, “I Come”

In the beginning: the biblical creation myth recounted in the book of Genesis imagines blackness, as darkness, with a priori, fundamental, even foundational attributes, suffusing it with dynamism, energy, and kinetic potentiality. In the biblical account of Genesis, there are three fundamental divine separations—light from darkness; sky from water; land from sea. The proclaimed separation of created light (“Let there be light,” 1:3) from darkness is primary; the separation of heavens from waters secondary; and the division of land from sea tertiary. Kincaid reminds her readers that these divisions are acts of (divine and human and ideological and mythic and historical) power; 21

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however, even within myth, there is an indivisible a priori. In Genesis, darkness is the a priori. Darkness precedes light; darkness exists prior to created light; it is a priori, before. Within biblical accounts of creation, the a priori darkness casts a fundamentally ambivalent shadow over divine creation: if it exists a priori, before creation, then it exists outside of the reach of God’s creative hand. Kincaid draws on this fundamental ambivalence—the a priori nature of darkness within the created universe—to establish darkness as a field outside of divine or human intervention, a source of energy, power, and unbound nature that precedes the created world. As such, it remains beyond creation, even as it is separated or divided from creation (“And God separated the light from the darkness,” 1:4). Mythic conceptualizations of “blackness” as genesis (or as generative) figure prominently in Kincaid’s first book, a collection of short stories entitled At the Bottom of the River, which was published in 1983.1 Composed of ten interlocking short stories, seven first published in the New Yorker, the collection astounded critics with its breathtaking lyricism, fluid images, and innovative lines of poetic prose, even as it confounded critics and readers alike with its abstract language, its abstruse and ethereal narratives, and its recesses of metamorphic meaning. Opening with the terse, dialogic story “Girl,” the collection explores the mother-daughter melodrama so often a central motif in Kincaid’s literary texts, but it also creates alternate states of existences: alternarratives in which a girl becomes a man who married “a red-skin woman with black bramblebrush hair and brown eyes” (11), in which “blue bells fall to the cool earth; dying and living in perpetuity” (19); in which a girl throws stones at a monkey who throws the stones back (44); in which a child “passing through a small beam of light . . . [becomes] transparent” (49); in which the girl’s mother grows “plates of metal-colored scales on her back” (55); and “a world in which the sun and moon shone at the same time” (77). It is the shapeshifting creatures and polyvocalic tones, the stunning metamorphoses, of the stories that fascinate and singe. And these cryptic stories seem shattered mirrors into the writer’s own imagination. This chapter explores those profound recesses of metamorphic meaning, particularly as refracted through the alterrains of blackness: Kincaid’s “blackness” figures as a cosmological a priori, never fixed but ever shifting and creating new terrains of beings and becomings. In this sense, blackness is like “darkness over the surface of the deep” as in the biblical myth from Genesis. It is primordial, yet unformed; formless, yet formable; a fecund materiality, yet also creative movement and kinetic potency. Philosophical meditations on blackness, however, are never fully distinct from racialized, ideological parameters of postcolonial states of existence. For Kincaid, blackness as a racialized category is never an essential, ahistorical, transcendant, or fixed social or political category: like philosophical notions of blackness, and Kincaid’s literary inscriptions of blackness, it too is malleable and change-

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able. These ideas have inflected Kincaid’s postcolonial literary politics and have shaped her writings of fiction, autobiography, and biography as well. Interviewed by Allan Vorda, Kincaid notes, “By Nature, I’m the sort of person who is never the same” (“I Come” 95). Speaking to Emily Ippolita, Kincaid comments again upon the malleability of subjectivity and selves but also of racialized identities: “I have quite a few people running around in me who are not only Black” (“Room” 154). In a 1993 interview with Donna Perry, Kincaid refers to At the Bottom of the River as a “very unangry, decent, civilized book,” and she adamantaly states, “I would never write like that again,” before hesitating, “I don’t think,” and then qualifying her first statement: “I might go back to it” (133). This chapter reads Kincaid’s words—in the interviews and in the text—as foils or ruses: neither are so straightforward nor simple. I return here to the stories in At the Bottom of the River, specifically the short story “Blackness,” for two interrelated reasons: one, the stories have not garnered the critical attention that their lyrical and poetic brilliance deserve; and two, in their subtle and sophisticated texture, these stories are also powerfully erosive of colonial ideals, if not explicitly, then in more intricate and nuanced ways. As Kincaid comments about the stories in At the Bottom of the River: I think when I was writing those stories I really wanted to disregard certain boundaries, certain conventions. These were stories written in my youth. (I think of the time before I had children as my youth.) These are stories in which I had endless amounts of silence and space and distance. I could play with forms and identities and do things then that I can’t do now because I don’t have the time to plumb that kind of depth. They were attempts to discard conventions, my own conventions, and conventions that exist in writing. I still try to forget everything I’ve read and just write. That was what that was about, and it really doesn’t bear close interpretation from me. The reader would have to do that. (Vorda 1993, 87) Covi’s article “Jamaica Kincaid and the Resistance to Canons” is one of the most engaging if early critical discussions of the stories in At the Bottom of the River, and she too underscores the importance of the story “Blackness” to the collection: Particularly fascinating is the story “Blackness” in which the disruption of binary opposition is devastating: everything is ambiguous, multiple, fragmented. Blackness is the night that “falls in silence” as well as the racial color that “flows through [her] veins” (BR, p. 46), but above all it is what cannot be defined—a signifier that escapes its signified by a continuous shifting, “for I see that

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I cannot see” (BR, p. 46). It is identity together with the annihilation of the self, “I am swallowed up in the blackness so that I am one with it . . .” (BR, p. 47). And the self is “powerful” at the moment when the “I” is “not at one with [it]self,” and can say, “I felt myself separate” (BR, p. 47). This story ends in a crescendo that is a celebration of the narrative “I,” but what kind of “I” is it who ends its song with the words, “I am no longer ‘I’ ” (BR, p. 52)? “Blackess” disrupts the concept of identity as One—of phallic identity. Like the ambivalence of the mother’s body that is One and Other at the same time (herself and the child she bears), this “I” can say: “the blackness cannot be separated from me but often I can stand outside it . . . blackness is visible and yet it is invisible” (BR, p. 46). It is neither the silence of the repressed Slave, nor the voice of the Master, because, like the “silent voice,” “conflict is not part of its nature” (BR, p. 52). And her child can stand in front of the mirror looking at her skin without color (BR, p. 49), while the “I” is “at last at peace,” “at last erased” (BR, p. 52), living in the oxymoron of the silent voice. (347) While Covi offers a feminist analysis of Kincaid’s “Blackness” as an epistemological category of meaning that ultimately disrupts the binary oppositions that are the metaphysical ground of phallogocentrism, the critic does not elaborate—and possibly even elides—other possible readings of the story as understood existentially, philosophically, politically, or even racially within a critical race lens. This chapter thus explores the racial and existential parameters of Kincaid’s “Blackness” by drawing parallels to Frantz Fanon’s philosophical inquiries into the racialized colonial contours of blackness in the chapter “The Fact of Blackness” from Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), as well as suggesting possible lines of intersection between Kincaid’s story and the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas on ontology and ethics, respectively. Fanon, a anticolonial scholar, analyst, and revolutionary leader, participated in the liberation struggles of the Algerian Revolution to win independence from French colonial rule. Influenced by the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan, the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger’s ontological metaphysics, and a contemporary of Emmanual Levinas, Fanon also had an extremely prolific record of intellectual, scholarly production before his life was tragically abbreviated in 1961 by leukemia at the age of thirty-six. During his short lifetime, Fanon wrote and published several groundbreaking anticolonial works, including Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (1952) (Black Skin, White Masks), L’An V de la révolution algérienne (1959) (“The Fifth Year of the Algerian Revolution,” translated into English and published under the title A Dying Colonialism), Les damnées de la terre (1961)

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(The Wretched of the Earth), his best known work of anticolonial Marxist struggle, and Pour la révolution africaine: Ecrits politiques (Toward an African Revolution: Political Essays), which was posthumously published in 1964. While Fanon challenged the colonial relations of power, his philosophical contemporary Levinas also challenged the traditional metaphysical relations of self and other in the wake of the Holocaust and the systemic regime of power manifest in the abhorrent Nazi extermination of European Jewry. A student of Heidegger before the war, Levinas radically diverged from Heideggerian teaching following World War II and the Shoah, or Holocaust. In this intellectual and political turning away from Heidegger, Levinas moved in his philosophical thought from the ontological ground of Dasein, as conceptualized in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), to an ethical ground figuring l’Autre, or alterity, as a primary beginning, or “first philosophy.” This philosophical shift from self (soi) to others (autruis) marks Levinas’ major divergence from Heidegger. For Heidegger Dasein experiences its being through contemplation of its nonbeing, the “possibility of its impossibility,” through contemplating its own death and mortality—a Sein-zum-Tode, or “being-towards-death”; in contrast, for Levinas, time is experienced in la mort de l’autre, or “the death of the other” in which the receding of the other into death—a ceasing of the other’s gesturing toward me through his or her face (visage)—is experienced as the temporal movement toward infinity that cannot be totalized by being or time. Levinas’ exploration of time, subjectivity, and ethical relationality through face-to-face, or vis-à-vis, alterity began with the publication of Le Temps et l’Autre (1947) [Time and the Other], and was extended in longer philosophical works such as Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (1961) [Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority], Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974) [Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence], Éthique et Infini (1982) [Ethics and Infinity], and Dieu, la mort, et le temps (1993) [God, Death, and Time]. Kincaid’s own ethical-textual engagements with historically-determined and ideologically coded ideas about self, others, subjectivity, objectivity, colonial and postcolonial relations, as well as metaphysical constructions of whiteness and blackness, strikingly parallel the philosophical works of Levinas and Fanon, as I argue later in my reading of the short story “Blackness.” To undertake these comparative intellectual and textual analyses, I begin by discussing Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs for the existentialist and ontological theory of racialization (or as the anticolonial critic defines it: epidermalization)2 that it articulates, and specifically, for the ways in which his theory resists race, racialization, and systems of racist and racial oppression within colonialist discourse. I also read Kincaid’s short story “Blackness” for its literary representations of blackness, theorizing her figurations of blackness directly through Fanon’s concept of ‘le Noir,’ (Black Skin, White Masks), “the black,” and more obliquely, through Luce Irigaray’s notion of

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le feminine, “the feminine.” This théorie métisse, or hybrid theoretical frame, perhaps radically, brings together Fanon’s revolutionary writings and Irigaray’s French feminist writings: Anglo-American feminist critics have, for the most part, rejected the former, and transnational feminists of color have critiqued the latter. There is a symmetry of thought, however, within these two theorists’ writings, as Irigaray’s theories have been clearly influenced by Fanon, though this fact remains unnoted in feminist scholarship about her writings. I also sketch out philosophical and textual parallels between Kincaid’s story “Blackness”—with its impersonal evocations of “there is” and “there are” that elude rigid definitions of autobiographical subjectivity and nonfiction notions of selfhood—and the Heideggerian notion of es gibt (the German equivalent of “there is”) and the Levinasian notion of il y a (which also translates into English from French as “there is”). Kincaid’s theorizations and representations of blackness—like Levinas’ Temps et l’Autre (Time and the Other) (1947), and like Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) (1952)—are decisively philosophical and political. While I secondarily discuss Kincaid’s philosophical encounters with Heidegger and Levinas in this chapter, the intellectual engagement with Fanon remains primary. Where Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” critiques the paralyzing gaze of whiteness for blackness, Kincaid’s “Blackness” eludes such paralysis and displaces the fixed sociopolitical definitions of blackness and black identities. In call-and-response fashion, Kincaid’s “Blackness” is the subversive response to Fanon’s call for black movement away from and outside of the societal strictures of racialized identity, or the “fact of blackness.” Within this chapter, I define Kincaid’s poetic movements of blackness politically and philosophically through alterity and difference as the alterrains of “blackness.”

“L’Expérience vécue du Noir” (“The Fact of Blackness”): Fanon’s Le Noir L’homme n’est pas seulement possibilité de reprise, de négation. S’il est vrai que la conscience est activité de transcendance, nous devons savoir aussi que cette transcendance est hantée par le problème de l’amour et de la compréhension. L’homme est un OUI vibrant aux harmonies cosmiques. Arraché, dispersé, confondu, condamné à voir se dissoudre les unes après les autres les vérités par lui élaborées, il doit cesser de projetter dans le monde une antinomie qui lui est coexistante. [Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding.

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Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him.] Written in 1952, Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs interrogates the position of man (l’homme) in the construction of Western discourses. The above passage—speaking of Man’s transcendent consciousness, Man’s antinomous projections onto the world that subsumes the other (l’autre) into the self (Moi/soi)—could be easily mistaken for Irigaray’s ideas about the monosexuelle relationship between “woman” (la femme) and “man” (l’homme), and clearly, Irigaray’s theory of hom(m)osexualité 4 is influenced not only by De Beauvoir, but also by Fanon’s work on “man” (l’homme) and “the black” (le Noir). Like Fanon, who states that the “le Noir n’est pas un homme” (“the black is not a man”), but rather “une zone de non-être” (“a zone of nonbeing”) (26), Irigaray argues that le féminin is a masculine construct that merely hom(m)osexually mirrors back to l’homme his own ontological “being,” whereas she reasons that “La femme, comme telle, ne serait pas. N’existerait pas, si ce n’est sur le mode du pas encore (de l’être). Et c’est dans les (encore) entres du devenir de l’être, ou des êtres, que quelque chose de son aspécificité pourrait se repérer” (207) (“Theoretically there would be no such thing as woman. She would not exist. The best that can be said is that she does not exist yet. Something of her a-specficity might be found in the betweens that occur in being, or beings” [166]).5 Similarly, both Fanon and Irigaray affiliate this negativity with a shifting ground for rethinking subjectivities, a disruptive “outside” to phallogocentric and colonial constructions. “En dehors de ce procès” (“Outside of this process”), Irigaray writes, “rien (n’)est: la femme” (“is nothing: woman”) (208). Fanon also identifies, let us recall, the ontological space of le Noir with metaphysical subversion: le Noir [est] “une région extraordinairement stérile et aride, une rampe essentiellement dépouilée, d’où un authentique surgissement peut prendre naissance” (26) (“a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born” [8]). This passage illustrates the symmetry of ontological negation as described by Fanon in le Noir and by Irigaray in la femme (or le féminin). Structurally, there is a symmetry between Fanon’s ideas on race and Irigaray’s thoughts on gender: a symmetrical relationship exists between le nègre and le Noir in Fanon and la femme and le féminin in Irigaray. Fanon’s le Noir, like Irigaray’s le féminin, offers a deconstructive strategy for reading the “blind spots” of white histories and mythologies.6 Le Noir and le féminin, in colonialist and masculinist discourses, are structured as inessential (“une zone de non-être”), like colonialist constructions of Africa as an “essential nothingness,” “the unexplored territory,” “the wide enormous blank”; in this

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sense, both are simultaneously empty and yet overdetermined categories. Within colonialist and masculinist discourses, le Noir and le féminin form “blank” slates for the inscription of myriad “natures,” of multifarious (and often contradictory) stereotypes. The constructs of le Noir and le féminin are thus palimpsests for the inscription, erasure, reinscription, and even obfuscation of “homme-blanc” definitions, and the theoretical lenses offered by Fanon and Irigaray expose these discursive forms of erasure and dispossession. Clearly, Fanon’s analysis of the racial constructions of le Noir, and Irigaray’s deconstructive analysis of gendered constructions of le féminin reveal that these ideological systems have, if not an absolute outside, at least a structural or discursive outside.7 Le Noir or le féminin are not fixed identitary categories, but rather discursive and ideological constructions—and thus empty or unoccupied, if also totalized. As such, these constructs are necessarily nonrepresentational of real subordinated people; indeed, in the case of la femme (“woman”), it is a construction that has been deployed in such a way as to violently erase “Third World” women and women of color. Kincaid’s “Blackness” parallels the theoretical lenses of Fanon and Irigaray in its deconstructive reading of traditional conceptions of blackness and its refiguring of blackness as fluid, malleable, and shifting. Kincaid’s “blackness” subverts the colonialist palimpsest that these theorists describe, as she rewrites blackness for herself. Although Fanon’s important theoretical work, particularly Black Skin, White Masks, has been sharply criticized, even rejected, by many feminist critics, Kincaid’s writings engage the revolutionary thinker, indirectly if not directly. On a more direct level, African diasporic feminists have also reinitiated important critical dialogues with Fanon’s contributions to anticolonialism and revolution. T. Dean Sharpley-Whiting’s Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms offers a necessary rejoinder to feminist (mis)readings of the revolutionary, anticolonial, and critical race theories of Fanon, focusing on the receptions of his work within postmodern academic feminist thought (what SharpleyWhiting refers to as “Euro-American lit-crit feminists”), within Algerian (or North African) feminist thought, and within radical black feminist thought. She opens with a critique of “Euro-American” feminist dismissals of Fanon’s work on the (reductive) grounds that it is misogynist and homophobic. Such (mis)readings, Sharpley-Whiting illustrates, are based on cursory readings of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, particularly the passages on Capécia; these feminist dismissals, moreover, show little or no knowledge of Capécia’s own autobiographical writings, which Fanon critiques for its interpellation of white, French ideals. Sharpley-Whiting also engages Arab feminist critiques of Fanon’s writings in A Dying Colonialism, specifically his representations of Algerian women around the issue of the veil (haïk, or hijab). Although Sharpley-Whiting contextualizes her engagement in Fanon’s involvement in the Algerian Revolution, she interrogates her analysis of Arab women and

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the veil not exclusively through the writings of Algerian feminists (such as Helie-Lucas) but equally through the writings of other North African (such as Nawal El Saadawi and Fatima Mernissi) and Middle Eastern feminists (Evelyn Accad and others). Sharpley-Whiting also addresses the radical black feminist readings of Fanon’s revolutionary thought, particularly those of Linda Jo La Rue, Frances Beale, and bell hooks. Whereas the first two groups of feminist thinkers critique Fanon for his gendered and cultural biases, the readings of Fanon by radical black feminists emphasize his censure of institutional (and national) sexism, revealing his profemale statements regarding revolution and egalitarian societies. For these radical black feminists, Fanon’s work offers a point of critique for misogyny they perceive among black nationalist leaders. For hooks, whose work (according to Sharpley-Whiting) bridges the second and third waves of feminist thought, Fanon is a thinker and a revolutionary to be engaged, not dismissed. Sharpley-Whiting furthers her own analysis of Fanonian thought precisely through hooks’ instrumental readings of Fanon as intellectual, as activist, and as revolutionary, not as (feminist) adversary. Kincaid’s writings may be brought into this conversation, if more obliquely; her story “Blackness” may be read as an aesthetic, philosophical, and political response to Fanon’s “Fact of Blackness,” and indeed, I read it as such in this chapter. It is at the site of a discursive (and embodied, in Fanon’s terms, epidermalized) site that I would like to enter my own engagement with Sharpley-Whiting’s readings of Fanon: that of the problematic of le Noir. Sharpley-Whiting writes that “ ‘Le Noir’ poses a particular problem. While it is used throughout the text to mean ‘the black man,’ as it is generally followed by ‘il,’ at times it simply means ‘the black’ ” (26fn4). Throughout Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argues that le Noir is the ontological negation of white man’s (l’homme blanc) “being.” Fanon refers to colonial interpellation in corporeal terms—the “épidermisation de cette infériorité” [“epidermalization of this inferiority”] (28). He also describes the split subjectivity as a “manichean struggle” between “black” and “white,” based largely on a visual corporification of the colonized psyche, his image: “La conscience morale implique une sorte de scission, une rupture de la conscience, avec une partie claire qui s’oppose à la partie sombre. Pour qu’il y ait morale, il faut que disparaisse de la conscience le noir, l’obscur, le nègre. Donc, un nègre à tout instant combat son image” (“Moral consciousness implies a kind of scission, a fracture of consciousness into a bright part and an opposing black part. In order to achieve morality, it is essential that the black, the dark, the Negro vanish from consciousness. Hence a Negro is forever in combat with his own image”) (194; emphasis mine). This construct is one dialectically and institutionally imposed on the “black man”—a force that negates his own being, a force that is epidermalized through the diasparities of power inherent

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in colonialist and racially hierarchized systems of hegemony and dominance. Fanon’s theory of racialization (or epidermalization) must be contextualized within the rhetoric of colonial discourse, specifically as he frames definitions of “blackness” around the ontological centers of negation/absence and affirmation/presence. Fanon’s essay discusses “blackness” and “whiteness” as racial constructs in a colonial or imperial context. Within this frame, I would like to suggest a rereading of Fanon’s statement about the “woman of color,” in which he claims, “I know nothing about her” (Black Skin, White Masks 180).7 If le Noir is configured within white-male-colonialist systems of power as the “being of non-being,” a “zone of non-being” that reflects white-male being, then perhaps Fanon’s point is that la Noire has no place at all within these systemic exclusions: she is the radically negative, the subaltern, or completely excluded. In this sense, Fanon suggests: within the white (critical) imaginary, Capécia is mask only. Fanon’s le Noir and Irigaray’s le féminin, then, function as deconstructive strategies for reading the fissures and absences within colonial, patriarchal histories; however, I resist universalizing these negative or deconstructive strategies for reading. Kincaid’s “Blackness” aesthetically, philosophically, and politically refigures black (female) becomings that resist Capécia’s (colonial) masking. Ultimately, I propose a syncretic method for reading historical erasures, while theorizing intense nomadic flight within these historical fields. It is through these overlapping frames, then, that I propose a reading of Kincaid’s cryptic and lyrical short story “Blackness” (from At the Bottom of the River), because Kincaid’s story refigures and redefines the terrains of blackness and black identities, eluding the negative ontological definitions of le Noir and le féminin while evading and annihilating the traps of “white masks.” Ironically, as Jennifer DeVere Brody notes in Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture, “The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2d ed., . . . includes the following meanings under the word black: ‘Black; . . . a word of difficult history. In OE. [Old English], found also . . . with the long vowel bla¯ce, bla¯can and thus confused with . . . blác shining, white . . . [the] two words are often distinguishable only by the context, and sometimes not by that.’ ”8 Kincaid’s narrative highlights these etymological and philosophical ambiguities in displacing the absolutism of whiteness and blackness as historically defined. I remain equally invested in understanding how Fanon’s revolutionary ideas in Peau Noire, Masques Blancs are formulated precisely through his use of style—the essay’s narrative complexity and its disruptive critiques of genre, and through such critiques of genre, his incisive critiques of race and racial constructs within colonial, imperial rhetoric and reality. Fanon’s “Fact of Blackness” textually hybridizes many forms or genres of writing: philosophical treatise; political manifesto; literary criticism; analytical psychology; and, of course, autobiographical prose. What makes Fanon’s essay so interesting—in addition, of course, to his brilliant social, political, and psychological theo-

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rizations of race—is the narrative complexity of the piece. The first half of the essay addresses the experience of the black man as a “spectacle” in white men’s eyes. In this section, Fanon describes the process of épidermalisation as a violent process that fragments the body and the psyche of the black man. Under the white man’s eyes and scrutiny, the black man feels himself to be nothing, nothingness, the negation of whiteness. As a hybrid genre, Fanon’s essay (and indeed, most of the essays comprising Black Skin, White Masks) refuses the regulatory (i.e., policed) boundaries of genre, traversing the terrains of treatise, manifesto, critique, analysis, and autobiography. The voices are multiple, intricately layered, and intertextually woven; the narrative is contradictory, multivalenced, cacophonous. The voices that we hear are Fanon’s and others; ultimately, the voices that we hear are others’ and even our own. Fanon’s pluriphonic text does not mirror the schizophrenia of a self fractured, as much as it echoes a world that is schizophrenic, fragmented, segregated, and racially divided. Within this hierarchical world view—or, to borrow the German term, as Fanon does, this Weltanschauung—racial boundaries are defined by external difference that then creates and forcibly erects an ideological system of internal (or intrinsic) difference. More on this idea will follow, but first I would like to explore the implications of Fanon’s theory of racial codifications for the defining of boundaries within genre theory. Social, political, racial segregation creates, in Fanon’s writing, the fractures of genre itself. Where genre theory usually (and insularly) demarcates the domains of genre as discrete, bound, separate, unique, Fanon exposes these boundaries and codifications as “impossible purities” (to borrow the words of Brody) grounded in hierarchical notions of difference and sameness. That this demarcation of genre and genres is also about racial difference and the demarcation of men is clear from Fanon’s text: “The white world, the only honorable one,” Fanon writes, “barred me from all participation. . . . I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged” (114–15). Fanon’s essay incorporates many voices—those dominant, those subterfuge—and it is a manifest attempt to break down barriers, boundaries, and genres: an attempt to be and to talk back. “Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres. I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them.” So begins the French poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s important essay, “The Law of Genre.” Noting the fundamental and constitutional divisiveness of genres, Derrida further notes that genres as genres are defined by difference: As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind:

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“Do,” “Do not,” says “genre,” the word “genre,” the figure, the voice, or the law of genre. And this can be said of genre in all genres, be it a question of a generic or a general determination of what one calls “nature” or physis (for example, a biological genre in the sense of gender, or the human genre, a genre of all that is in general), or be it a question of typology designated as non-natural and depending on laws or orders which were once held to be opposed to physis, according to the values associated with techne, thesis, nomos (for example, an artistic, poetic, or literary genre). (“The Law of Genre” 52) This law, however, as a law of genre, is not exclusively binding on the genre qua category of art and literature. But, paradoxically, and just as impossibly, the law of genre also has a controlling influence and is binding on that which draws the genre into engendering, generations, genealogy, and degenerescence. (“The Law of Genre” 70) The question of the literary genre is not a formal one: it covers the motif of the law in general, of generation in the natural and symbolic senses, of birth in the natural and symbolic senses, of the generation difference, sexual difference between the feminine and masculine genre/gender, of the hymen between the two, of a relationless relation between the two, of an identity and difference between the feminine and masculine. (“The Law of Genre” 70) This Derridean passage echoes one in Fanon’s “Fact of Blackness,” the factuality or absolutism of which parallels the latter’s “law.” Discussing white resistance, above all, to miscegenation (do we not already see the etymological and fundamental symmetry of race and genre in this word?) and quoting, while parodying the pseudoscience of “race” (pervasive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), Fanon writes: But on certain points the white man remained intractable. Under no conditions did he wish any intimacy between the races, for it is a truism that “crossings between widely different races can lower the physical and mental level. . . . Until we have a more definite knowledge of the effect of race-crossing we shall certainly do best to avoid crossings between widely different races.” (“The Fact of Blackness” 120) In a later passage, he further parodies the genetic biases of such racialized sciences, referring to the thickness or thinness of chromosomes supposedly linked to cannibalism (120). But the imbrications of race and genre extend

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further. Boundaries of race, genre are walls to divide, but what walls out likewise walls in. Fanon writes: “I was walled in: No exception was made for my refined manners, or my knowledge of literature, or my understanding of the quantum theory” (117; emphasis added). This “knowledge of literature,” as Fanon well knows, is also a knowledge constructed according to racial difference, according to genre. Confronted by an inebriated French man on a train who laments the loss of “French virtues” (121), Fanon sardonically adds that “it must be said in his defense that he stank of cheap wine; if he had been capable of it, he would have told me that my emancipated-slave blood could not possibly be stirred by the name of Villon or Taine” (122). The reference to Hyppolite Taine is significant: it was Taine, following Herder and other German romantics, who first theorized the importance of race and nation for art, literature, and genre. Questions of race, nation, and belonging may not be dissociated from those of aesthetics—as Fanon astutely reveals and as Kincaid also, if differently, reveals. The second half of the essay addresses the 1930s transcontinental and pan-Africanist literary movement grounded in the writings of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, Négritude, and the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Orphée Noir,” the preface to Senghor’s collection of African poetry, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (133).9 In this preface, Sartre adopts the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s notion of a dialectics of history, a three-part evolution of historical movement. In the first historical phase, a thesis is posited; in the second phase, the thesis is countered by its antithesis; and in the third phase, the diametrical elements are synthesized. Hegel’s dialectic of history has been critiqued as a theory that posits history as a teleological, evolutionary movement of time. “Teleological” means moving toward a specific end point, a telos. “Evolutionary” refers to the idea that history and thus civilizations evolve from less civilized forms to higher forms. (It is worth mentioning here that in Hegel’s schema, the less “evolved” civilizations were non-Western; and the most “evolved” civilizations were Western. In fact, for Hegel the “Orient” represented the phase of “pre-historical” and Africa the “a-historical”—a dark continent without history or civilization. I address Kincaid’s intellectual wrestling with Hegel and Hegelian notions of history more extensively in the second chapter of this book.) Specifically, Fanon critiques Sartre’s essay for the way that it reiterates the negative ontology of the black man, positing it as the antithesis to Western civilization, whiteness, and the positivity of l’homme, the French word for “man” or “human.” Sartre posits the black man again as “nothingness,” merely a minor term—or the antithesis—in a dialectical process. Now that I have spoken generally about the essay—its narratological complexity—as well as its thematic and ideological preoccupations, I want to return to Fanon’s extremely important idea about racial formation as it occurs at the interstices of language and society, of body and psyche: épidermalisation. For Fanon, épidermalisation is

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a form of triple consciousness that leads to self-dissection and ontological negation and psychological paralysis. “On that day, completely dislocated . . . ,” Fanon writes, “I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object,” yet, he laments, “All I wanted was to be a man among other men . . . I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man” (112, 113). The tripling experienced in the “historico-racial schema” distorts body and soul. Fanon writes, “My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day” (113). For Fanon, it was not yet the dawn or morning of the black man’s being and becoming, but rather the “mourning” or grief of “crushing objecthood.” “If I were asked for a definition of myself, I would say,” Fanon writes, “that I am one who waits” (120). Kincaid’s “Blackness” refigures, even disfigures, genre, opening alternative possibilities for rewriting the potential becomings of blackness and black identities through the disruptions of genre as a discrete, bound system of classification. Fanon’s essay ends on an eloquent note, one tinged with hope and possibility yet paradoxically, also despair and uncertainty. At end, Fanon witnesses the black man at a crossroads, “straddling Nothingness and Infinity” (140). If Fanon ends the chapter “The Fact of Blackness” at a point liminal to peril and possibility, Kincaid moves beyond a history of blackness defined by limit, peril, and oppression into creative presents and futures imbued with possibility and promise. Kincaid, thus, enters her voice into Caribbean contestations of historical horizons. This “quarrel with History,” as Édouard Glissant defines it, marks both an ending and a beginning—a staid past, a future becoming; or as Derek Walcott writes in the essay “The Muse of History”: “The shipwrecks of Crusoe and of the crew in The Tempest are the end of an Old Word. It should matter nothing to the New World if the Old is again determined to blow itself up, for an obsession with progress is not within the psyche of the recently enslaved. That is the bitter secret of the apple. The vision of progress is the rational madness of history seen as sequential time, of a dominated future. Its imagery is absurd” (What the Twilight Says 41).10 This Caribbean “quarrel” with History (capital H) is elaborated at greater length in chapters 2, 5, and 6. In the next section, I trace Kincaid’s revisions of blackness, being, and becoming—or her reponse to Fanon’s study of le noir in Peau Noire, Masques Blancs generally, and his call to “plow the deep silences” of blackness and to wrest “opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasure” (48). Kincaid’s short story “Blackness,” then, was written for Fanon’s “one who waits” (120).

A priori “Blackness”: Kincaid’s Lyrical “I” Kincaid’s short story “Blackness” probes blackness as both a postcolonial racialized identity category and a metaphysical definition. Kincaid’s creative

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articulations of blackness draw on biblical motifs of darkness as a priori, uncreated substance: blackness, or darkness, precedes ex nihilo creation—or the divine force and dynamism of creation—that produces something (creatures, essences, elements) from nothing: it is precursive, before, outside of time even (if one accepts the Augustinian notion of space and time as created dimensions or the material parameters of the created world that are called into being alongside and in simultaneity with that world). Blackness, as darkness, gestures toward the infinite and the eternal, even as it may only be palpably experienced and visibly descried within the parameter of space and time. Kincaid thus reverses the axiomatic, commonplace, or traditional metaphysical relations of black-white, blackness-whiteness, dark-light in which the former term—forgetful of the biblical order in Genesis—is subordinated to the latter, which has been historically valorized and privileged. Does darkness so war against light, and a priori essence mitigate against created substance, as evil with and against good? Kincaid seems to refuse this metaphysical mêlée, even as she acknowledges its historical encounters and even restages its performative battles. Drawing on Antiguan folklore and obeah, Kincaid also explores blackness as metamorphic, transformative, and aleatory. The narrative voice alternates from being to nonbeing, from self to others, from subjects to objects: like blackness, the narrating I moves through these contradictory spaces, but remains bound and irreducible to none of them. Comprised of four fragmented sections, “Blackness” explores the alterrains of identity and being, loss of identity and nonbeing, or “the small shafts that fall with desperation in between” (48). “Blackness” swirls around two intertwined centers of gravity—blackness as identity and blackness as a metaphysical category. Although I refer to each narrative heartbeat separately, the two pulses “merge and separate, merge and separate” (to evoke Kincaid’s words from another story in the collection, “My Mother”), propelling the reader through, at times synchronous—and at other moments, asynchronous—states. Through its metamorphic pulsations, “Blackness” is conceptualized as paradox—both negation and affirmation, genesis and apocalypse. Blackness vacillates across oppositional poles of being, nonbeing, and identity, masking truth with fiction and fiction with an alterreality. Kincaid’s fictional alterterrains (or alterrains) open autobiography to alterity, or otherness, and to the powerfully deconstructive movements of alterbiography. As the story begins, a soft blackness “falls in silence”; at the end of the story, silence enfolds, and ultimately erases, the self, but this erasure also, paradoxically, affirms self, and she reposes in the “silent voice” of blackness, not blackness itself. Each of the four interwoven sections in the story “Blackness” are a reflection of blackness. The opening section is a contemplative passage exploring blackness sensately, lyrically, philosophically, and corporeally. Using synaesthesia—the fusion, even confusion, and overlay—of sensory experiences, Kincaid explores blackness as an ontological and subjective

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category. Multiple senses are explored here—aurality, touch, sight—and blackness pervades all experiences. In the second section blackness delves into subterfuge terrains, territories dreamed, and landscapes imagined. In sleep and dreams, on battlefields of window frames, the girl creates worlds of difference, of “hunter and prey,” of brilliance and blindness. The third section, less directly self-reflexive than the first two sections, still swirls obliquely through self- and alterterrains as it moves from mother to daughter to mother to daughter and back again, straining the boundaries of self and other, subjects and objects, space and time. Self is defined and problematized, in alterrelation with mother, daughter, a “hunchback boy,” and even through divine apotheosis. In the fourth section of “Blackness,” Kincaid’s lyricism is hymnlike, incantatory, and the narrator sings psalms of self and silence and self-erasure. The refrain, “Living in the silent voice, I am,” blurs the boundaries of life and death, being and nonbeing, self and not-self. Moving through senses, elusive thoughts, and paradoxical states, “Blackness” defines and redefines its own contradictory terrains. Recall Kincaid’s words to Ippolita: “I have quite a few people running around in me who are not only Black” (154). How might we interpret this idea in relation to “Blackness”? Kincaid evokes in this phrase both the strictures and the open horizons of blackness as identity and as metaphysical category. And as Kincaid intimates to Allan Vorda in conversation: the parameters of identity and community as black are also universalized, resisted as marginal or marked differentially: “I come from a place where most of the people are black. Every important person in my life was a black person, or a person who was mostly black, or very deeply related to what we call a black person. So I just assume that is the norm and that it is other people who would need describing” (81–82). These comments are related, it seems, to the author’s creative literary refigurations of blackness in the short story. Blackness is both foundational and yet malleable. “Blackness” begins with synaesthetic movement, fusing the senses of sight and touch: the color or the state of blackness is experienced through touch and through sound: “How soft is the blackness as it falls. It falls in silence and yet it is deafening, for no other sound except the blackness falling can be heard” (46). Confounding “blackness” as a state of being (or nonbeing), Kincaid’s opening lines express blackness as movement: “How soft is the blackness as it falls” (46). Although blackness may traditionally, within Western frames, connote austerity or sterility, here blackness is soft. The blackness is not only synaesthetic, blurring sensory experiences; it is also paradoxic: “it falls in silence and yet it is deafening” (46). Not only does the silence deafen; it eclipses all other sounds, even through its deafening silence. Building on this synaesthetic moving image, Kincaid writes, “The blackness falls like soot from a lamp with an untrimmed wick” (46). Blackness falls, expiring “like soot” from flame, evoking ashes, dust, and

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death. Again, blackness is paradoxic: “[T]he blackness is visible and yet it is invisible, for I see that I cannot see it” (46). Only in this line does blackness become visible, invisible, and only in this line, does blackness stand in relation to an I. Evoking Fanon’s black epidermal visibility that creates black ontological invisibility (in Black Skin, White Masks), Kincaid writes, “[F]or I see that I cannot see it.” Yet the blackness moves, expands, “fills up a small room, a large field, an island, my own being” (46). Blackness is movement, force of nature, geopolitical transformation: it falls or fills; it falls as night falls over a “large field”; it expands, filling an “island” (or many islands within the Caribbean, as the Atlantic Slave Trade’s violatory expanse filled American islands with African people). In this last line, though, blackness is more intimately connected with individual identity as it falls and fills “my own being.” Still, the speaking I refuses the totalization of identity by blackness: “The blackness cannot be separated from me but often I can stand outside it.” I and “blackness” are intimately linked, and although the blackness is inseparable from the I, the I is not inextricable from the blackness. I may “stand outside of it.” As blackness moves, so the I moves, outside and even beyond. Following a series of lines imbued with repetition and difference, lines that reiterate the syntactical pattern, “The blackness is not . . . , though I . . . ,” Kincaid writes: “The blackness is not my blood, though it flows through my veins” (46). The line rejects and critiques the nineteenth-century racialized sciences that theorized racial difference as biological, as genetic, as “in the blood,” yet, she writes, “[blackness] flows through my veins.” Blackness flows through I’s veins, but not as blood; rather, it flows as being and nonbeing or as the annihilation of being, all the possible and variable meanings of blackness. I says, “The blackness enters my many-tiered spaces and soon the significant word and event recede and eventually vanish: in this way, I am annihilated and my form becomes formless and I am absorbed into a vastness of free-flowing matter” (46). The body, as form of being, and its “many-tiered spaces” are penetrated by blackness, “and soon the significant word and event recede and eventually vanish.” But what is the “significant word”? Blackness? And what is the “event”? the blackness as it “enters [her] many-tiered spaces”? And why do they “recede and eventually vanish”? The lines are ambiguous; still, Kincaid proceeds with precision and specificity: “in this way, I am annihilated and my form becomes formless” (47; emphasis added). As the “significant word” (‘blackness’?) and the “event” (“blackness enters”?) “recede and eventually vanish,” so “I [is] annihilated.” A word, an event, a vanishing—of blackness, of I. A movement from being (blackness; I) to nonbeing (vanishing; annihilation) in which “form becomes formless” (47). From being nonbeing; from form formlessness. Through this metamorphosis, the lyrical voice claims, “I am absorbed into a vastness of free-flowing matter.” This act seems to reverse creation, yet it disavows ex

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nihilo creation, returning to that from whence it proceeded, “free-floating matter,” raw materiality, blackness. This loss of form is not a loss of materiality, though, but a metamorphosis of being and incarnation and a transformative loss of individuality: “In the blackness, then, I have been erased. I can no longer say my own name. I can no longer point to myself and say ‘I.’ In the blackness my voice is silent” (47). I is without identity, without being, and without voice. And yet, I speaks, and speaks of self, even if through the loss of self, and refers to “my own name,” even as I never discloses it. Paradox. In blackness, self escapes self; I is erased; I eludes identitarian terms imposed by others and by society (recall Fanon’s le Noir) and redefines self through annihilation, erasure, and even fusion with blackness in a cycle of identity, being, nonbeing, and above all, redefinition of these terms: “First, then, I have been my individual self, carefully banishing randomness from my existence, then I am swallowed up in the blackness so that I am one with it” (47). The blackness precedes creation and persists after annihilation of form, individuated existence, and contingent forms of being: it is necessary, a priori, divine. And Kincaid’s “blackness” manifests an apophatic gesturing toward what cannot be positively defined yet also an apotheosis. As an individual self, I banishes “randomness from my existence”: I acts; I is discrete, separate, individual; I elects what shall constitute self and banishes “randomness.” Then, blackness falls, fills, “enters my many-tiered spaces” (46): I is “swallowed up in the blackness; I loses individuality, but I still exists, “one with” the blackness that has engulfed I. Kincaid seizes the language of neo-Platonic emanence and return in order to apotheosize blackness. Yet the lyrical voice of blackness also descends from ethereal heights to world-bound matter below. Moving from personality to impersonality, from individuality to blackness, I speaks of the “objective” world in the next paragraph. Kincaid underscores this shift from the personal to the impersonal with the impersonal subject-verb constructs “there is” and “there are.” The next paragraph begins with the impersonal, “there are small flashes of joy that are present,” before returning to the personal, “in my daily life” (47). These joys include “the upturned face to the open sky, the red ball tumbling from small hand to small hand, as small voices muffle laughter; the sliver of orange on the horizon, a remnant of the setting sun” (47). The spatial references are external to self—“the open sky,” “the horizon,” “the setting sun”—yet these spaces are mapped by bodily spaces—“the upturned face,” “from small hand to small hand.” The impersonal not only eclipses the personal; color also seems to eclipse blackness, yet blackness still encompasses all. Blackness is complemented by vibrant colors: the “red” of the ball, “the sliver of orange.” The references are both vast (“open sky,” “horizon”) and minute (“small hand to small hand,” “small voices”). The objects are still, as in the “upturned face” and “the sliver of orange on the horizon,” and yet motive, as with the “red

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ball tumbling” and “the sun setting.” Kincaid reiterates the “still motion” of the objects and the objective world in the line that follows: “There is the wide stillness, trembling and waiting to be violently shattered by impatient demands” (47). Evoking again the impersonal construction “there is,” the scene that Kincaid describes is one of “wide stillness” yet one that trembles and waits “to be violently shattered” (47). By whom, the reader asks? Or by what force of nature? “By impatient demands,” Kincaid writes (47). But whose? Suddenly, forcefully, subjectively, the personal emerges within the impersonal as “impatient demands” that appear and reappear as parenthetical questions: “(‘May I now have my bread without the crust?’ / ‘But I long ago stopped liking my bread without the crust!’)” (47). A child asks, impatiently demands, “May I now have my bread without the crust?” A child answers, impatiently demands, “But I long ago stopped liking my bread without the crust!” The crust, darker and harder, is removed at the “impatient demands” of the child, then refused: “But I long ago stopped liking my bread without the crust!” From the impersonal scene of “there is,” or “there are,” to the parenthetical insularity of “impatient demands,” questions and answers posed in parenthesis, Kincaid’s “Blackness” refuses the divisions of subject and object, of self and others, of interiority and exteriority, of internal and external spaces; these spaces are interpenetrating, traversing one another. The impersonality of Kincaid’s “there is” philosophically parallels and textually engages, however differently, both Heidegger’s notion of es gibt (“there is”) and Levinas’s notion of il y a (“there is”). Heidegger’s conceptualizations of Da-sein (the “there-being”) as the “being of being” and the “meaning of being” in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) is related to his impersonal notion of es gibt (or “there is”). For Heidegger, es gibt represents the manifold, plenitude of being as being-in-the-world that is intellectually and etymologically related to the notion of the gift—or the given—in German, since the impersonal phrase es gibt is derived from the verb geben, “to give.” Es gibt, in Heideggerian thought, thus represents the primordial “generosity” in and of ontological existence. (Heidegger explicitly theorizes the valences of es gibt in sections 2, 44, and 63 in Sein und Zeit.) In contrast with this positive philosophical valence of the there is in Heidegger’s ontological thought as the “joy of what exists, the abundance,” Levinas describes the there is (from the French phrase il y a), in a conversation with interlocutor Philippe Nemo, as “something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise. It is something one can also feel when one thinks that even if there were nothing, the fact that ‘there is’ is undeniable. Not that there is this or that; but the very scene of being is open: there is. In the absolute emptiness that one can imagine before creation—‘there is’ ” (Levinas, “The ‘There Is,’ ” Ethics and Infinity 47). Nemo, in drawing a direct contrast with

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Heideggerian conceptualizations of es gibt as foundational generosity, presses Levinas on this philosophical contradistinction, asking, “For you, on the other hand, there is no generosity in the ‘there is’?” to which the philosopher evocatively and metaphorically replies: I insist in fact on the impersonality of the “there is,” as “it rains,” or “it’s night.” And there is neither joy nor abundance: it is a noise returning every negation of this noise. Neither nothingness nor being. I sometimes use the expression: the excluded middle. One can say of this “there is” which persists that it is an event of being. One can neither say that it is nothingness, even though there is nothing: Existence and Existents tries to describe this horrible thing, and moreover describes it as horror and panic. [. . .] Which nevertheless is not an anxiety. . . . Other experiences, all close to the “there is,” are described in this book, notably that of insomnia. In insomnia one can and one cannot say that there is an “I” which cannot manage to fall asleep. The impossibility of escaping wakefulness is something “objective,” independent of my initiative. This impersonality absorbs my consciousness; consciousness is depersonalized. I do not stay awake: “it” stays awake. Perhaps death is an absolute negation where “the music ends” (however, one knows nothing about it). But in the maddening experience of the “there is,” one has the impression of a total impossibility of escaping it, of “stopping the music.” (“The ‘There Is,’ ” Ethics and Infinity 47–49) The ‘there is,’ for Levinas, is thus a form of material detatchment (similar to that of Simone Weil’s notions of solitude), a dissolution of being without the escape of being into nonbeing or nothingness and an impersonal anonymity of consciousness and experience that is not yet indifference. If for Weil, though, solitude is the monastic, even saintly or hagiographic escape from the evil of the social, for Levinas, the ethical and thus social relationship12 with l’autre, alterity, or with l’autrui, the other breaks with and evades the horror of solitude experienced in the annihilating moments of il y a, the ‘there is. ’Like Maurice Blanchot, Levinas regards the il y a as a “clamor” or “murmur” that “is no longer being, . . . and no longer something, . . . neither being nor nothingness” (“The ‘There Is’ ” 50). For Levinas, then, the tertium quid (“third substance”) or tiers exclus (“excluded middle”) is that which remains inassimilable to and outside of the dichotomized poles, being and nonbeing, or nothingness: it is an otherwise than being, essentially that unknowable and incalculable domain that death brings and that is experienced temporally as the “to come” (à-venir) that is the unknown future (avenir) of death.

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(Levinasian thought on death as bound to the visage de l’autre, “face of the other,” and the mort de l’autre, “death of the other,” are further explored in chapter 5, which analyzes Kincaid’s philosophical-textual reflections on death as a “biographical autograph” in My Brother.) Ambivalently traversing the philosophical poles between the there is as Heideggerian generosity or given ontological plentiude and as Levinasian “excluded middle” to being and nothingness, Kincaid’s philosophical-textual invokings of “there is” and “there are” position “blackness” as an intermediary, metamorphic, and unfixed point of departure. In Kincaid’s story “Blackness,” even subjective-objective feelings traverse internal and external spaces, moving in the liminal alterrains between the inside and the outside, between interiority and exteriority, between the false boundaries or divisions often erected between self and others. She writes that “all manner of feelings are locked up within my human breast and all manner of events summon them out” (47). Even self and body are not contained or delimited by the boundaries of inside and outside, subject and object, self and other. I exclaims, “How frightened I became once more on looking down to see an oddly shaped, ash-colored object that I did not recognize at once to be a small part of my own foot” (47). “Oddly shaped” and “ash-colored,” the object appears to be foreign, even dead; the “ash” color, of course, recalls the “blackness [that] falls like soot from a lamp” (46). I does “not recognize at once” that the object is actually “a small part of [my] own foot” (47). The realization or recognition, though, is not frightening (as the experience of its foreignness was); rather, it is empowering: “and how powerful I then found that moment, so that I was not at one with myself and I felt myself separate, like a brittle substance dashed and shattered, each separate part without knowledge of the separate parts” (47–48). Autobiographical rupture is once more figured as a “broken plate” (as theorized in the introduction to this book), a “shattered” and “brittle substance,” the shards of which become “separate parts” in new creative arrangements and rearrangements. I experiences the body in fragments, separate, unaware of its parts, so I clings “fast to a common and familiar object (my lamp, as it stood unlit on the clean surface of my mantel-pience)” (48). The lamp, defined as “a common and familiar object,” one among the many objects comprising the contiguous spaces of “body” and “not-body,” is remarkably “unlit.” This “common and familiar object,” the unlit lamp, evokes the blackness that “falls like soot from a lamp” (46). The soot and the lamp form a continuum between being and nonbeing, self and not-self, self and others, subject and objects (some of which are simultaneously, paradoxically, self and not-self): I asks, “What is my nature?” I’s answer evokes Fanon’s affirmative cry of le Noir, and yet it also transcends the paralysis and liminality that frustrates the latter’s flight. I states: “For in isolation I am all purpose and industry and determination and prudence, as if I were the single survivor of a species whose evolutionary

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history can be traced to the most ancient of ancients; in isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasure” (48). This cry embraces, in anti-Hegelian fashion, the history and evolution, if also near extermination of an African blackness, claiming herself as a “survivor of a species” that can be traced to the “most ancients of ancients.” Her virtues oppose Hegel’s negative portrayals of blackness; she is “purpose and industry and determination and prudence”; and though alone, perhaps because alone, she “plow[s] the deep silences,” seeking the treasures buried within. Fanon’s le Noir cries: I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands. My cry grew more violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro . . . [. . .] I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit. I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple. Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep. (138, 140) Fanon’s le Noir feels himself this survivor, one who will reconstruct the machinery of his own black becomings or beginnings but must do so through “the intuitive lianas of my hands.” Though le Noir possesses soul, infinity, being “without limit,” he knows that the world (as constructed by philosophical masters such as Hegel in his Philosophy of History) has historically forced him to adopt the “humility of the cripple.” He desires flight but remains paralyzed, wings clipped; at the end, he laments that that he straddles “Nothingness and Infinity” and weeps for his own paralysis. Despite this potential foreclosure of possibilities, he holds the “absolute intensity of beginning.” Kincaid’s I departs from le Noir’s point of “absolute intensity,” this beginning for the becomings of blackness. Like Fanon’s le Noir, who must build again after being “broken to pieces,” Kincaid’s I constructs and reconstructs, creates and recreates herself from the “separate parts” or broken remains after “a brittle substance [is] dashed and shattered.” A symmetry also exists between I’s rhapsody and le Noir’s “song of self,” the one fulfilling the other’s desired flight. (The last line of Fanon’s quote, “straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep,” is paralleled in Xuela’s opening words in The Autobiography of My Mother: “[F]or my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back always a bleak, black wind” [3].)

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I asks a second question, but this time, one that seems less self-reflexive but perhaps only seemingly less self-reflexive: “In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory?” (48). The “shallow glimmering space”—however external to self—acts as a mirror, reflecting self and its [the self’s, as well as that of the “shallow glimmering space”] “glimmering glory” (48). Almost without pause or caesura, “the stark, stony mountainous surface is turned to green, rolling meadow, and a spring of clear water, its origins a mystery, its purpose and beauty constant” (48). Is the “shallow glimmering space,” the reflecting surface, that of “the stark, stony mountainous surface?” This surface—stark, stony—metamorphoses into verdant pastures, clear springs, and yet “its purpose and beauty [remain] constant” (48). The passage closely parallels a comment that Kincaid makes in an interview with Vorda about all turning to rocks or stones at “the end of the world” (93). This “constant” beauty “draws all manner of troubled existence seeking solace” (48). The lyrical I moves—almost magnetically, as if by “elective affinity” (Goethe)—between dynamic creation and solitary confinement. In these passages, self and earthly scenery reflect difference; the heart, though, is “buried as deeply as ever in the human breast, its four chambers exposed to love and joy and pain and the small shafts that fall with desperation in between” (48). The four chambers of the heart experience elemental passions—“love and joy and pain” (48). And Kincaid reminds her readers that the universe, matter, all creation, and even human emotion are elemental: earth, air, fire, and water. The earthly scenery—of stark mountains and “rolling meadows”—draws “troubled existence” into transformative development: self and not-self intertwined. In the second section of “Blackness,” the narrative focus shifts from the self and her objective-subjective worlds to an I who observes and dreams and speaks of all that is seen and all that is unseen. As the section opens, I sits “at a narrow table . . . head, heavy with sleep” (48). I gives way to sleep, and sleep gives way to dream, evoking Hamlet’s “to sleep, perchance to dream”: “I dreamed of bands of men who walked aimlessly, their guns and cannons slackened at their sides, the chambers emptied of bullets and shells” (48). The “chambers emptied of bullets and shells” recalls the “four chambers” of the heart “exposed to love and joy and pain and the small shafts that fall with desperation in between” (48), from the final lines of the first section. Houses: hearts: arms: creation and division and destruction, as if “beyond good and evil” (Nietzsche). Here again, the “chambers” (of the heart, of the “guns and cannons,” even of the girl’s house where I lives) “merge and separate,” forming dwelling spaces inhabited by I as self and I as others, as subject and as objects, and then deforming such spaces through separation. The “bands of men” about which I dreams fight “in a field” and walk “up the path” leading to the house with its chambers; these spatial markers are also punctuated by the movements of temporality in the reiterated words,

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“from time to time and from time to time.” In I’s dream, the men “fought in a field from time to time and from time to time they grew tired of it” (48–49). This temporal cadence kept by the steps of the marching men mark time “between the sun and the earth.” If war and destruction temporally divide, there persists another sense of time that is elemental, creative, asynchronous, even unbroken, or diachronic that moves beyond and exceeds the measurements of time as movement and as subjective meter. Kincaid’s alterior notions of time and temporality bear a striking philosophical resemblance to those of Levinas. In Levinasian thought, temps is the alterontological question, the ineradicable, irreducible, and diachronic transcendence of l’Autre (“the other”) that actually defines être (“being”) and calls it into being as such. As Levinas intimates: the relationship with time is one of alterity, and the relationship with the other is one experienced in time, “as if time were transcendence, the opening par excellence onto the Other [l’autre] and onto the other [l’autrui]” (“The Solitude of Being” 56).13 This oneiric vision, the “bands of men,” also blinds. The march and its cadence bring an end to day and to daylight. The march brings night and darkness: “They walked up the path that led to my house and as they walked they passed between the sun and the earth; as they passed between the sun and the earth they blotted out the daylight and night fell immediately and permanently” (49). The coming of night, with its immediate and permanent darkness, or the “fall of blackness,” prohibits seeing. I’s eye and its perception of sight are blocked by the “bands of men.” I states, over and over that “no longer could I see . . . ; no longer could I see.” In one of many of Kincaid’s incantatory catalogs in At the Bottom of the River, the narrating I says: “No longer could I see the blooming trefoils, . . . the domesticated animals feeding in the pasture; . . . the beasts, hunter and prey, . . . the smith moving cautiously in a swirl of hot sparks.” Again and again, “no longer could I see . . . ; no longer could I see” (49). The reference to the smith, of course, recalls Achilles’ shield fired in Haiphaestos’s fire from The Iliad, fired “in a swirl of hot sparks or bent over anvil and bellows” (49). Kincaid, Homer, the blind bards, weave rhapsodies of muses (“Sing, O Muse”) about warriors in battle, whether dreamt or mythic. “The bands of men,” Kincaid writes, “marched through my house in silence” (49). I finds herself, yet again, in the blackness; in the silence; in the chambers of the house, of the heart, of “guns and cannons”; at (aesthetic) war. The “bands of men” are clearly destructive forces whose breath scorches flowers and whose “bare hands” destroy “the marble columns” of the house, but their destruction is not without end: “They left my house, in silence again, and they walked across a field, opposite to the way they had come, still passing between the sun and the earth” (49). They come and go in uniformity, yet they depart. I remains. The final line of the section reads, “I stood at a window and

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watched their backs until they were just a small spot on the horizon” (49). Sight returns, and I watches “their backs,” watches as they diminish, becoming merely “a small spot on the horizon.” Sight returns; dream and reality merge. If David Spurr has identified surveillance as one of the mechanisms of colonialist discourse and both “hypervisibility” and paradoxically “invisibility” as tropes within the “rhetoric of empire,” then Kincaid deliberately reverses the colonialist relations of power: the I surveys; the soldiers disappear under her gaze.13 From sitting “at a narrow table . . . head, heavy with sleep,” to standing “at a window”; from dreaming to watching—I’s dream fuses with her wakeful reality, just as the “four chambers” of her heart have fused with the chambers of “guns and cannons” and those of the house where she stands “at a window” and watches the “bands of men” depart and then vanish, body, house, armament “passing between the sun and the earth,” yet standing “at a window.” I address the postcolonial problematics of vision, or the scopic regimes of power, as part of colonialist discourse and visibility/invisibility as part of what Spurr identifies as the “rhetoric of empire,” more extensively in chapter 2. In this puzzling passage about soldiers, weapons, time, and beauty, Kincaid is both directly and indirectly engaging, I contend, with Kantian aesthetics as predicated on violence and division. An intellectual détour through the racialized terrains of Kantian aesthetics, particularly the philosopher’s theorizations of war as sublime, is thus merited here. While Kantian aesthetic notions grounded in concepts such as ‘subjective universality’ (Critique of Judgment) are hegemonic, ethnocentric judgments, as I more extensively argued in the introduction to this book, Kant’s aesthetic philosophy—his critique of judgment—also exposes its own internal contradictions in his contradistinction between “pure taste” and “barbaric taste”; in his assertion that “a Negro must have a different normal idea of the beauty of the [human figure] from a white man, a Chinaman a different normal idea from a European”; and in his curious statement (defining the purposiveness of nature) that “all this applies to the cases of the Greenlander, the Lapp, the Samoyede, the inhabitant of Yukutsk, etc. But then we do not see why, generally, men must live there at all” (Critique of Judgment 215; emphasis added). Equally troubling is Kant’s discomfort, even disquiet, with composite colors, which reveals a latent anxiety about purity and beauty (60). Most damning, though, is Kant’s belief, “War itself, if it is carried on with order and with a sacred respect for the rights of citizen, has something sublime in it” (Critique of Judgment 102). Sublimity of war, violence, conquest (and enslavement and genocide?), aesthetics and politics are here inseparable. Consider here Kant’s pronouncements on nonwhite fear and European artistic and military superiority (the conjunction far too profoundly definitive in Kantian thought) from Physical Geography:

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Montesquieu is correct in his judgment that the weakheartedness that makes death so terrifying to the Indian and the Negro also makes him fear many things other than death that the European can withstand. The Negro slave from Guinea drowns himself if he is to be forced into slavery. . . . The Carib commits slavery at the slightest provocation. The Peruvian trembles in the face of an enemy, and when he is led to death, he is ambivalent, as though it means nothing. [...] The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world, above all the central part, has a more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world. That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons. The Romans, Greeks, the ancient Nordic peoples, Genghis Khan, the Turks, Tamurlaine, the Europeans after Columbus’s discoveries, they have all amazed the southern lands with their arts and weapons. (qtd. in Eze Race 64; emphasis added) War, enslavement, conquest, colonization: here we have a Kantian theory of the sublime as militarized, an aesthetics, as Kant defines it, of “the slightest provocation.” We have, in effect, a Kantian aesthetic “war machine.” Kincaid’s lyrical evocations of “guns and cannons” and “bands of men” remind her readers that philosophical or aesthetic notions of form, beauty, and perhaps especially the sublime are too often predicated on exclusion, denigration, and even violence, as in Kantian aesthetics. Kincaid’s tranfigurations of “blackness,” of genre, of the nuanced alterrains of self and others, subjectivity and alterity, even objectivity, are thus also textual skirmishes into the still militarized zones of the history of philosophy. In the third section of the story “Blackness,” the narrative perspective seems to shift, from one speaking I to another. This shift, however, like the one in the first section, is semblance only. The narrating I is less self-reflexive, more other-oriented, shifting the perspective from self to child, yet the shift paradoxically seems both simultaneously a regression and opening to innocence but also to danger; this change alters the equilibrium of self in relation to alterobjectivity (or objects as alteregos) and stresses the alterity of other subjects. Alterobjectivity allows for a denaturalized and destabilized movement of self not only into alterity, or into others, but also into objectivity, or into objects. In this alterobjective trajectory or movement, objects become alteregos. In the first line of the section, the narrating I says, “I see my child arise slowly from her bed. I see her cross the room and stand in front of the mirror” (49). Mirrors suggest self-reflection, yet the observation is refracted, distanced, filtered through an other. I observes

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her child observing herself in a mirror, as “she looks closely at her straight, unmarred body” (49). Mother looks and moves as if through daughter. I notes that “her [the child’s] skin is without color” (49). Her daughter’s “skin without color” contrasts the “oddly shaped ash-colored object” that I does not recognize as her own foot; it also contrasts with the blackness that “flows through . . . [I’s] veins” (46). Where blackness “enters” I and swallows her, light penetrates the girl or daughter, “and when passing through a small beam of light, she is made transparent” (49). The girl seems to dissipate into light: she is air and atom and wave without substance—ethereal if kinetic, energy transposing matter. While “the blackness cannot be separated from” I, the light reveals the daughter’s translucence; yet the mother and daughter are also indistinguishable. As blackness to light, a priori necessity to created contingency. As the passage from Genesis reads, “and darkness was over the surface of the deep.” As light embraces dark, and dark light, so the girl and I. I sees daughter sees self in mirror, which reflects all: shadow and light; coal and flame; the night and its constellations. I sees—whether face-to-face or through the looking-glass—how “her eyes are ruby, revolving orbs, and they burn like coals caught suddenly in a gust of wind” (49–50). Daughter is celestial, fiery, geologic, yet domestic—a creature of home and heart and hearth and heaven. I says with astonishment, “This is my child!” (50). Kincaid probes her readers to ask: how is child related to and distanced from self? The relationship is exemplary: mother-daughter, I-girl, exemplify the “merge[d] and separate[d]” poetics of relation that define the alterrains of the alterbiographical: they are alter-egos one of the other, distinct yet related, separate though at times merged, self as other, and other as self, in constant metamorphosis and creative flux. Alterbiographical poetics of relation are mapped both linguistically and corporeally in the story. The demonstrative pronoun this stands vaguely alone, held briefly in abeyance by the linking verb, before colliding with the undeniable and exclamatory precision of “my child!” Recalling memories of the girl’s toddler years “when her jaws were too weak,” and “I first chewed her food; then fed it to her in small mouthfuls” (50), I exclaims again, “This is my child!” (50). The embrace of mother-daughter, blackness-translucence, dark-light recurs in these lines: “I must carry a cool liquid in my flattened breasts to quench her parched throat” (50). They are linked body-to-body, corps-à-corps. “This is my child!” is repeated again, but exclamation and the finality of exclamation gives way to the pleasure and passion, the rapture and joy of seeing the child: “This is my child sitting in the shade, her head thrown back in rapture, prolonging some moment of joy I have created for her” (50). Self and other are interlocked, held in embrace, body to body. The self is experienced here, not through the alterity and alterobjectivity of the external world (an alterobjectivity clearly suffused with subjective ambiguity), but in alterrelation, one with an other. The reiterated words, “this is,” and the alterrelation of “my child” set

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self in abeyance; the reiterated words “this is” (in direct contrast with the biblical and subjective-ontological refrain of the final section—“I am”) mark a form of being through relation.14 Yet alterrelations are not always nurturing, as the girl, “pitiless to the hunchback boy” (50), reveals! As the relations alter from mother-daughter to girl–hunchback boy, danger supplants affection. This peril is shown through the metamorphosis of the girl whose “mouth twists open in a cruel smile” (50) and whose teeth become “pointed and sparkling” (50). This bodily transformation parallels the metamorphic incarnations in “My Mother,” in which the woman grows “plates of metal-colored scales on her back” (55) and her teeth “arranged themselves into rows that reached all the way back to her long white throat” (55). Like the mother in “My Mother,” the girl in “Blackness” becomes threatening, menacing in appearance—“the roof of her mouth bony and ridged, her young hand suddenly withered and gnarled” (50). Deformity, beastiality, pitilessness imbue the alterior relations of girl to “hunchback boy,” revealing that some alterior becomings, particularly those of deveniranimale, or “becoming-animal,” to evoke a Deleuzian term, not only erode the “human” but may also (violently) reinforce the ways in which the “human” is an ideological site of power manifest in its “will to power” (Nietzsche) and its “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger). Kincaid thus reveals a key point within Levinasian ethics: that the commandment “thou shalt not kill” is an ethical appeal that does not disavow the recurrent reality of violence, even murder or genocide, in the world; it is a commandment that may be broken, an ethical call that may go unanswered. Though she “is pitiless to the hunchback boy,” the girl’s “withered and gnarled hands” do no harm at first; rather, “she reaches out to caress his hump” (50). This alterrelation, though, is one driven in quite Aristotelian fashion, by pity and fear, or in extremes that disrupt peripatetic means, the lack of pity and the excess of fear. Though only caressing, the “hunchback boy” remains frightened, “squirming away from her forceful, heated gaze” (50). Though “he seeks shelter in a grove of trees,” the boy is unable to escape, for the girl’s arms “grow to incredible lengths” and “tug at the long silk-like hairs that lie flattened on his back” (50). Her gaze alone petrifies, and “her voice shatters his eardrum” (50). The boy is left deaf and defenseless, “his sense of direction . . . destroyed” (50). Though the girl’s harm to the boy is irreparable, she now extends care, if not pity or compassion: “Still my child has built for him a dwelling hut on the edge of a steep cliff so that she may watch him day after day flatten himself against a fate of which he knows and yet cannot truly know until the moment consumes him” (50). The girl is vigilant in her care: she builds a hut for the boy; she watches over him. Yet the boy is powerless and imperiled: “on the edge of a steep cliff”; flattening “himself against a fate of which he knows and yet cannot truly know”; and this fate will ultimately consume him. This image—that of the deaf, paralyzed “hunchback boy” on

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a “steep cliff”—foreshadows other stark images in Kincaid’s oeuvre: Xuela exhausted in tears before a cliff and the caged turtles, both from The Autobiography of My Mother. Kincaid’s deployment of disability motifs—blindness, deafness, deformity—in the story “Blackness” and in other literary narratives are ripe, of course, for critical analysis from a disability studies perspective; these motifs, however, also underscore the relations of power defining not only the colonial and the colonized, the human and the animal, but also the abled and the disabled. The girl metamorphoses again, this time soaring to godlike heights. In this girl apotheosis, she traces the genesis of creatures through their evolutionary stages, adoring the immaterial and uncultivated as much as the “built up”: “[S]he traces each thing from its meager happenstance beginnings in cool and slimy marsh, to its great glory and dominance in air or land or sea, to its odd remains entombed in mysterious alluviums” (51). Within these enigmatic lines, the girl writes her own “genesis” myths that are creational and evolutionary, archic and transitory, if not evolving toward a specific end or telos and thus not explicitly teleological: from origin to “remains entombed in mysterious alluviums” (51), the girl sees all with godlike perspicacity, if not omniscience. At the end, she rests, and she ponders; she hears; she feels, . . . she becomes a divinelike creator who is enabled and abled in relation to power: she is the Nietzschean cosmic child creating and destroying at will, perhaps in direct contrast to the deaf, “hunchback boy” who seems to passively suffer the creative and annihilating forces of capricious gods. The girl “sits idly on a shore, staring hard at the sea beneath the sea and at the sea beneath even that” (51). From depth to depth to depth gazed at through surface and surface and surface, the girl’s vision and thoughts confound the parameters of spatial dimensions. Reflecting the surface to surfaces beneath, her mind swirls through the interlocked boundaries of surface and depth, and “she feels the specter, first cold, then briefly warm, then cold again as it passes from atmosphere to atmosphere” (51). What is this “specter”? An apparition? A foreboding and ominous presence that “passes from atmosphere to atmosphere”? or another haunting incarnation or figuration of the girl herself or her others? This vision, this “having observed the many differing physical existences feed on each other” (51), is one “beyond good and evil” (in Nietzschean terms) or “beyond despair or the spiritual vacuum” (in Kincaid’s words). This section ends with the maternal voice astonished by the divine presence of the girl, telling readers and on-lookers, “Oh, look at my child as she stands boldly now, one foot in the dark, the other in the light” (51). The girl, like blackness, ambivalently becomes both primordial darkness and created light (“darkness was over the surface of the deep”), yet once divinely imbued and created (“there was light”) (Genesis 1: 1–5). Merging mother and daughter, fusing blackness and translucence, intermingling dark

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and light, the girl is neither and yet paradoxically both. She moves without contemplation, rushing “from death to death, so familiar a state it is to her.” The girl, like a force of nature—seemingly beyond good and evil—is as capricious as time, as ramdom as space (though she would banish it from her being), as violent as chance. Though deific, she is still subject to maternal power. I states, “though I have summoned her into a fleeting existence, one that is perilous and subject to the violence of chance, she embraces time as it passes in numbing sameness, bearing in its wake a multitude of great sadnesses” (51). In the fourth and final section of “Blackness,” the narrating I, again, takes a more self-reflexive turn, but the self-reflection is negotiated in relation to a sense of absolute alterity (for Levinas, the adieu or à-Dieu), one both annihilating and affirming. This alterity, intrinsically paradoxical, takes the form/antiform of a “silent voice” (52). The voice is both silent and audible; “it stands opposite the blackness and yet it does not oppose the blackness” (52). If the blackness is nearly ubiquitous (“the blackness is visible and yet it is invisible”), it is also precisely nowhere and bound to no thing, neither being nor nonbeing nor nothingness: “The blackness cannot be separated from me but often I can stand outside it. The blackness is not the air, though I breathe it. The blackness is not the earth, though I walk on it. The blackness is not water or food, though I drink and eat it” (46; emphasis added). Again and again, the narrator states: “the blackness is not . . .” Kincaid adopts and evokes the apophatic gestures of negative theology, which maintains that the essence of God is ineffable and may only be named or defined negatively by what the divine is not, and never positively since the nature of God is ultimately unknowable. Though the blackness pervades all domains, it is not ubiquitous. Blackness envelops without totalizing. The silent voice “stands opposite the blackness” (as the girl “can stand outside it”); “and yet,” Kincaid writes, “it does not oppose the blackness, for conflict is not a part of its nature” (52). The “silent voice” is defined as affirming, embracing, enfolding, and inviting. I says, “I shrug off my mantle of hatred. In love I move toward the silent voice. I shrug off my mantle of despair. I love, again, I move ever toward this silent voice. I stand inside the silent voice. The silent voice enfolds me” (52). Hymnlike, the final section is rhapsodic and incantatory; and the silence is amnesiac. While postcolonial writers, artists, and critics have seen the anticolonial struggles—particularly the “decolonizing of the mind” (Ng˜ug˜ı)—as efforts of anamnesia (Djebar), of active unforgetting or deliberate re-membering, Kincaid points back toward a prior (or a priori) moment of forgetting: one erased by colonial memory and postcolonial “rememory” (Morrison). For I, the silence even erases the “memory” of the blackness. Moving toward idyllic rhapsodes and refrains, I envisions a utopic space in which “the pastures are unfenced, the lions roam the continents, [and]

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the continents are not separated” (52). Evoking the poetic and prophetic language of William Blake, I’s vision is unifying, holistic, romantic. In this utopia, and “across the flat lands cuts the river, its flow undammed” (52). In this utopia, even the divisions of self-other, subject-object, and self-fractured seem restored: “within the silent voice, no mysterious depths separate me” (52). Like all utopias, though, it eludes containment. The “silent voice” is all-encompassing in its aurality yet still uncontainable: “I hear the silent voice—how softly now it falls, and all of existence is caught up in it” (52). This restoration of self to self, and self to other, and subject to object is all-encompassing, all-consuming (“all of existence is caught up in it”). The “silent voice,” like the blackness, softly falls: “how soft is the blackness as it falls” (46); “I hear the silent voice—how softly now it falls” (52). The “silent voice,” though all-encompassing, is also annihilating: “Living in the silent voice, I am no longer ‘I’ ” (52). “I am no longer ‘I’ ”: I is other, or is not at all. The last few lines of the story create a mantra that is both vibrant and apocalyptic. The story ends with the lines that repeat the refrain, “Living in the silent voice, I am . . .”: “Living in the silent voice, I am no longer ‘I.’ Living in the silent voice, I am at last at peace. Living in the silent voice, I am at last erased” (52; emphasis added). Two phrases are repeated: “living in the silent voice” and “I am.” These words are both life- and self-affirming. “I am” repeats, differently, the earlier refrain, “this is.” “I am” also evokes the Mosaic passage, “I am that I am” (Jahweh’s response to Moses’ questioning of the burning bush, who are you?). “Blackness” ends with lines that both affirm self (“I am . . . , I am . . . , I am . . . ) and annihilate self (“I am no longer ‘I,’ ” “I am at last erased”). Kincaid’s final refrain, then, draws on a long tradition of negative theology that defines God, or being, apophatically—by what God, or being, is not. Ergo, “I am no longer ‘I.’ ” What does it mean, though, when negative theological principles are used—not to define and resist defining God—but rather to define and resist defining blackness, being, ontos, a-ontos, self? In the story “Blackness,” the fidelity of death (and not the infidelity of life) is figured as the heart of the autobiographical “pact” (Lejeune): life ceases; death persists; self becomes non-self; and being otherwise than being (Levinas). Kincaid thus sees autobiographical writings, and not just life, as intimately wed to death. In an interview with Kincaid, Ippolita comments, “One more constant element in your works is death. You write a lot about death and I have the impression that you connect death and life, that you see life in death and death in life,” then asks, “In which way does this connection work? Is it just in Nature that you see this close link?” (158). Kincaid reflectively and meditatively answers, “No, no. I think it’s life which is the interruption. I think there is this void, that something interrupts it and it is called life of some kind. But I don’t think that life is what it is and death interrupts it, I think it is the opposite” (158). Kincaid also avers that “freedom only comes

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when you can no longer think, which is in death” (Vorda 83). In chapter 5 on My Brother, I return to a philosophical meditation on life and death in Kincaid’s alterbiographical oeuvre. Kincaid’s refigurations and redefinitions of blackness in the short story “Blackness” move through the restrictive terrains of negation that result from the philosophical privileging of being over alterity, self over others (Levinas), as well as from political relations of power that ground belonging in oppression, enfranchisement in disenfranchisement, and that erase the other as an ontological being (Fanon). Kincaid’s amorphic and transformative conceptualizations of blackness, however, ultimately elude such cloistered and oppressive spaces. Kincaid’s story “Blackness” thus maps new and different alterrains of “blackness.” In refiguring blackness as simultaneously affirmative and negative, as both subjective and alterobjective, Kincaid responds to Fanon’s lament of “the fact of blackness.” For Kincaid, blackness is no longer fact; it is the varied truths of fiction but no less real or meaningful. Blackness is no longer bound by the restrictive and debilitating mechanisms of épidermalisation, but rather it is bodily and soulfully self and others; it is not metaphysical fact that leads nowhere but rather a spiritual and fantastical journey that soars everywhere. For Kincaid, evoking Irigaray’s “this sex which is not one,” blackness is not one, but many.

2

Jablesse, Obeah, and Caribbean Cosmogonies in At the Bottom of the River

“In the Night” Gods, like humans, migrate. Obeah—as a diasporic religion—moved during the Middle Passage in trans-Atlantic paths, across the Atlantic Ocean, from places of African origin to “New World” Caribbean sites; likewise, it migrates from places such as Antigua to the United States and elsewhere. As diasporic subjects move, so gods move, creating a phenomenon that Joan Dayan refers to as “the gods à la dérive” (18). In this chapter, I explore Kincaid’s diasporic spaces of land, body, and self in the short story “In the Night” from At the Bottom of the River (1983). The story’s title is significant for understanding the diasporic spaces that the collection traverses: formed as a prepositional phrase, it locates the readers and the narrator in the exilic spaces of diaspora, migration, even transmigration; we and she are “in the night,” as later, we are “at the bottom of the river.” In their editors’ introduction to Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert identify the religious syncretism of African diasporic religions and contemporary diasporas as two elements that define contemporary Caribbean identities or a trans-Caribbean culture (9–10); these elements, in fact, cross the boundaries historically mapping the Caribbean—European languages and linguistic difference being prominent examples of colonially constructed borders. These two interrelated elements inform my reading of “In the Night.” Kincaid’s narrativization of Obeah in the story is linked to contemporary Caribbean diasporas and the traversal of spaces, times, and cultures that such migration enacts. “In the Night,” the second story in the collection, creates diasporic spaces that refocus the reader’s vision through Kincaid’s narrative use of Obeah 53

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and the role of the narrator as jablesse (a spirit in Obeah who metamorphoses, seduces, and traverses the boundaries of matter-spirit, animal-human, evilgood): these elements subvert the colonial and metaphysical associations of “night” and “darkness” with evil, challenging readers to see the subtleties of these terrains that are traversed by good and evil, empathy and violence. The diasporic spaces of At the Bottom of the River—like Obeah as narrative; like the narrator as jablesse—are revealed through Kincaid’s experimental verse that traverses the boundaries of self, other, alterity, and sameness. She weaves alterity into the narratives to displace traditional notions of self and space: self, for Kincaid, is always a self (or even selves) in relation to alterity, created in and through alterrelations with others; similarly, space, for Kincaid, is mapped through the alterrains of diaspora and identity.

Kincaid’s “Caribbean”: Obeah as Transaesthetic; Jablesse as Narrator Kincaid’s “Caribbean” is created textually through the use of Obeah as a “transaesthetic” (an aesthetics of transformation, or transforms) and the embodiment of the narrator as jablesse. Obeah (Obi, Obiah, or Obia, derived from the Ashanti word obayifo)—like Vodou in Haiti, Santería in Cuba and Venezuela, Quimbois in Guadeloupe and Martinique, Macumba and Camdomblé in Brazil, hoodoo and conjure in the United States, Kele in St. Lucia, and Shangó in Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, and Barbados—is an African diasporic religion. Obeah is practiced in anglophone Caribbean countries (formerly colonized by the British) by descendants of slaves with Ashanti-Fanti cultural and linguistic origins from the Gold Coast (modernday Ghana) of Africa (Richardson 173). “Obeah is a ‘hybrid’ or ‘Creolized’ Caribbean religion,” notes historian Alan Richardson, “with indigenous West African roots, which includes such practices as ritual incantation and the use of fetishes or charms” (173). According to Fernández Olmos and ParavisiniGebert, “the practice of Obeah involves the ‘putting on’ and ‘taking off’ of ‘jumbees’ (ghosts or spirits of the dead) for either good or evil purposes” (6). They also note that Obeah practice “involves the use of animal and natural substances for cures and spells” and that the terms Obeah-man and Obeah-woman, like quimboiseur (in Guadeloupe and Martinique where Quimbois is practiced), is “interchangeable with folk doctor” (7), like the term doktè fè, or “leaf doctor,” in Vodou. Obeah, like Vodou, was also a spiritual and political reservoir for the African slaves who practiced it; and like Vodou, Obeah played a key role in slave revolts and attempts to subvert colonial power. (For example, Vodou was instrumental in François Makandal’s 1757 revolt and in Boukman Dutty’s 1790 rebellion in San Domingue, which led to the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804; and Obeah played a key role in the 1760 rebellion of Ashanti

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slaves in Jamaica led by the Obeah-man Tacky (Richardson 172–74; Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 8). Prior to these revolts (inspired by African diasporic spiritual beliefs and led by religious leaders), Obeah was regarded by the British as African “superstition”—primitive, animist, but innocuous, posing little threat. After the slave revolts, Obeah was legally and socially suppressed by colonial administrators. Richardson explains, “As a cultural signifier with British colonial discourse, Obeah shifts from denoting a harmless and appropriable ‘primitive’ belief underscoring the cultural superiority of the British, to a ‘savage’ custom which evinces African barbarity and must be outlawed and obliterated by the whites” (175); yet Obeah persisted and, despite colonial suppression (often by extremely violent means), still endures in anglophone Caribbean countries such as Antigua.1 In deploying Obeah as narrative and as aesthetic transform, Kincaid draws on its insurrectional, anticolonial potential to disrupt the metaphysical paradigms and rhetorical parameters of colonialist discourse. For, as Dayan notes, “the institution of slavery, in wrenching individuals from their native land and from their names and their origins, produced communities of belief that would be distinguished from the mood or character of Western religion” (16), and I would add, Western literary forms. Kincaid’s textual narrativization of Obeah (and its nomadic, anti-Western transforms) imbues the stories in At the Bottom of the River and refigures the narrator as jablesse. In Obeah, a jablesse (or djablesse, whose masculine form is jab or djab) is a creolized spirit that takes many forms and incarnations; the jablesse also bears the marks of both African diasporic religions, and inevitably, its suppression under British Colonialism. In Vodou, Dayan notes, the devotee refers to his loa [god or spirit] not only as anges, mystères, or saints, or les invisibles, but also as diables [devils]. Here we see the crossing of languages and terms that is so much a part of the transformative processes of Vodoun. For the practitioner has internalized the language of Christian demonization, taught him by the priest or pastor in order to wean him from belief, but usually ending up reinforcing the presence of the gods in his or her life. (26) In the British West Indies, where slavery continued until 1834 and colonialism endured for a much longer period than in Haiti (where both came to an abrupt end in 1804 at the end of the Haitian Revolution with the establishment of Ayiti, the first black Republic in the western hemisphere), the suppression and “demonization” of Obeah was more thorough-going. In Obeah, a jablesse is a she-devil who is both powerful and seductive, coy and destructive. According to Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, the djab, or djablesse, is a “devil spirit who seduces and tricks men” (284). Since jablesse and djablesse are patois variants of diablesse, Dayan’s point about the

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conflation of gods and devils or loas/lwas and diables more fully resonates with the role of the jablesse in Obeah. In Kincaid’s literary texts, the powerful evocations of the jablesse are also the sparks of imagination, the creative forces of alternate worlds, and other “world-making.” In other words, the jablesse acts divinely: creating, destroying. Helen Pyne Timothy, in “Adolescent Rebellion and Gender Relations in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John,” interprets Ma Chess (in Annie John) as an “African healer, bush medicine specialist, and Caribbean obeah woman,” who is “extremely conscious of the presence of good and evil in life” and who is “able to ward off evil” (241). Timothy goes further in suggesting that Ma Chess “is also the mythological ‘flying African’ able to cross the seas without a boat, and the flying ‘soucouyant’ (female witch) who lives in the ground” (241). Despite these affiliations, Timothy notes that Ma Chess’s world “is not threatening to the child [Annie John, her granddaughter] but comforting and healing because of its coherency, its validity, and its verity” (241). I would like to expand Timothy’s point in adding that this reconfiguration of evil as good parallels Kincaid’s revaluations of jablesse/diablesse as creative, rather than destructive, force in At the Bottom of the River and her textual revaluations of Lucifer, the hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in Annie John2 and Lucy,3 as examined in the next chapter. In Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River, the jablesse appears, disappears, reappears—in the mountains, at the river, in the night. In the stories, the jablesse is a metamorphic alterfiguration of the girl (as narrator) and her mother. As writer, Kincaid, too, shifts forms—or transforms—like a jablesse. In an interview with Sewelyn R. Cudjoe—who asked Kincaid, “What is the role of obeah in your work?” Kincaid replies, “[I]t’s lodged not only in my memory but in my own unconscious. So the role obeah plays in my work is the role it played in my life. I suppose it was just there” (228–29). Later in the interview, Kincaid notes the profound alter-reality lived under the spell of Obeah in Antigua: Reality was not to be trusted[:] the thing you saw before you was not really quite to be trusted because it might represent something else. And the thing you didn’t see might be right there—I mean, there were so many stories about people who were followed home by a dead person, and the dead person eventually led them into a pond. People would say, “Oh, the Jablesse are out tonight.” (230) In the story, and in the collection, the jablesse are also out “in the night.” Just as Kincaid identifies with Lucifer in Annie John and Lucy, Kincaid identifies with the jablesse as creative force in At the Bottom of the River. As a Caribbean writer, Kincaid shares in this diabolic genesis with the Dominican writer Jean Rhys. According to Elaine Savory, Rhys saw writing as

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a “summoning [of] spirits” (217) in which the devil (or author) was source of rebellion, knowledge, and creation. In “Heaven and Hell,” a section of Rhys’ autobiography Smile Please, Rhys notes the “hell of those who seek, strive, rebel” and the “heaven of those who cannot think or void thought, who have no imagination” (140; qtd. in Savory 226). In At the Bottom of the River, Kincaid, as writer, similarly assumes the role of the jablesse. Kincaid, as jablesse, also assumes the role of the writer in the Caribbean where African créole religions offer alternative conceptions (as in genesis) or visions of reality. Many scholars have noted the transformations of the “girl” in the collection from the opening story, “Girl,” to the final story, “At the Bottom of the River,” and several scholars have also noted Kincaid’s use of Obeah in the stories;4 scholarship on Kincaid’s work, though, still lacks a thorough analysis of how Obeah forms the creative aesthetic (and philosophical) fabric of her literary texts.5 Diane Cousineau hints at such an analysis in her reading of Annie John, and my analysis of At the Bottom of the River in this chapter is indebted to Cousineau’s provocative though incomplete discussion of Obeah in Kincaid’s writings. In Letters and Labyrinths, Cousineau writes, whereas the reality of the novel seems fixed in the specular relation of mother and daughter, we discover a more elusive layer of reality embedded within the narrative that insists on the significance of what cannot be seen, presences that cannot be fixed or contained but that are experienced as having a power beyond the contesting wills of this tortuous relation. This sense of otherness, of invisible and uncontrollable forces, that hovers throughout is connected to the obeah rituals and can be translated as the mythic attempt to represent the life of the unconscious. One is thus left on the threshold of the real that refuses to be contained within the space of the mirror [Lacanian], powerful as that captivation is. (122) Whereas Cousineau’s approach is a psychoanalytic one, my own approach to the transaesthetic roles of Obeah in Kincaid’s literary texts is one theoretically informed by postcolonial, Caribbean, and diasporic studies. Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River, like magical realist narratives,6 fuses the supernatural with the natural, the spiritual with the material, and the metamorphic with the static, while altering the space-time dimensions of narrative forms. Kincaid’s texts engage philosophical conceptions of space and time, while exploring the possibilities for genesis and destruction that these categories make intelligible. In my analysis of “In the Night,” I thus explore Kincaid’s literary mythologizations of space, time, being, and nothingness. Kincaid aesthetically and conceptually traverses the boundaries between ontology and nihilism, between creative words and annihilating silence. The textual

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and poetic shifts in Kincaid’s works deconstruct the traditional spatiotemporal parameters of narrative mimesis, while presenting a new poesis (from po√hsiV) of space and time. Elements that seem fantastical by American (or colonialist) literary conventions of realism are the cultural alterrains of Obeah in the Caribbean and in Kincaid’s native Antigua. The jablesse, I argue, has a key transaesthetic and creative narrative role in At the Bottom of the River. The “girl” and the “mother” are both jablesses, spirits incarnating multiple forms (spirit, human, and animal), as when the mother and the girl metamorphose into serpents in the story “My Mother”: “Taking her head into her large palms, she flattened it so that her eyes, which were now ablaze, sat on top of her head and spun like two revolving balls”; “she instructed me to follow her example,” the girl says, “and now I too traveled along on my white underbelly, my tongue darting and flickering in the hot air” (55). Later in the story, the mother grows to “enormous height[s]” (58); the daughter glows “red with anger” (58), and like an animal, she “roars” and “whines” (56). Their metamorphoses in the stories allow the reader to traverse the boundaries of space-time, life-death, human-animal, the spiritual and the material, and both characters (in their multiple transincarnations) map the continuum between these poles. In the story “In the Night,” the girl asks her mother about the jablesse: “What are the lights in the mountains?” “The lights in the mountains? Oh, it’s a jablesse.” “A jablesse! But why? What’s a jablesse?” “It’s a person who can turn into anything. But you can tell they aren’t real because of their eyes. Their eyes shine like lamps, so bright that you can tell it’s a jablesse. They like to go up in the mountains and gallivant. Take good care when you see a beautiful woman. A jablesse always tries to look like a beautiful woman.” (8–9) Kincaid’s characterization of the “girl” and the “mother” as jablesses is akin to Ben Okri’s use of the child narrator as abiku, the spirit-child in Yoruban mythology who can move in and out of life and death.7 In the short story “Blackness,” the narrating I describes her child as a figure of the jablesse: I see my child arise slowly from her bed. I see her cross the room and stand in front of a mirror. She looks closely at her straight, unmarred body. Her skin is without color, and when passing through a small beam of light, she is made transparent. Her eyes are ruby, revolving orbs, and they burn like coals caught suddenly in a gust of wind. This is my child! (49–50)

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Mother, daughter, jablesse: beautiful, seductive, dangerous, metamorphic. For Kincaid, these metamorphoses disrupt mimetic forms: “standing in front of a mirror . . . passing through a small beam of light, she is made transparent” (49–50). For Kincaid, then, the jablesse figures not only as character and narrator, but also as transaesthetic. The narrator incarnates transitory desires through sensory experiences—sight, sound, touch—fusing alterexperiences in a provocative altersynaesthesia. Senses become interwoven synaesthetically, disrupting the boundaries of human/animal; spiritual/material; living/nonliving that are operative in the binaristic logic of colonialist rhetoric (JanMohammed; Miller; Spurr). And Kincaid’s short story collection moves through many unmarked territories or places—in the night, blackness, at the bottom of the river.

“In the Night”: Alterrains of Identity in Diaspora “In the Night” marks the real beginning of the girl’s sojourn away from hearth, home, and mother in the collection At the Bottom of the River, her movements “in the night” as the narrator and everchanging protagonist of the stories, but also as jablesse, a transitory and elusive spirit. “In the Night” weaves domestic images with dark visions, natural events with supernatural occurrences, and real moments with fantastical ones. Using ideas and beliefs from Obeah, including a soucouyant (female witch) who ritualistically removes her skin and a jablesse masked as “lights in the mountains” (8), Kincaid explores the subtle distinctions of day and night, of material worlds and spiritual ones, of wakefulness, sleep, and dreams. She also blurs the boundaries of these terrains, refusing what Abdul JanMohamed calls the “Manichean logic” of colonialist discourse. For JanMohamed, colonial discourse operates according to a dualistic mode of thought that he calls the “Manichean allegory”: Just as imperialists “administer” the resources of the conquered country, so colonialist discourse “commodifies” the native subject into a stereotyped object and uses him as a “resource” [. . .] Once reduced to his exchange-value in the colonialist signifying system, he is fed into the manichean allegory, which functions as the currency, the medium of exchange, for the entire colonialist discursive system. (83)8 JanMohamed’s concept of the “Manichean allegory” is influenced by Fanon’s discussion of the “Manichean struggle” in Black Skin, White Masks, as elaborated more extensively in chapter 1: “Good-Evil, Beauty-Ugliness, White-Black: such are the characteristic pairings of the phenomenon that,

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making use of an expression of Dide and Guiraud, we shall call ‘manicheism delirium’ ” (1969, 183).9 Kincaid’s story “In the Night” disrupts the Manichean logic of colonialist discourse and exposes lives lived under postcolonial legacies as mapped in the intimate and open, if also at times violent, spaces between the demarcated borders of colonial terrains. The people and spirits inhabiting “the night” are from all walks of Antiguan life—laborers, békés or bequés (descendants of white plantation owners), jumbees (ghosts or spirits of the deceased), soucouyants or soucriants (female witches), jablesses (she-devils), fathers, mothers, and children. The people “in the night” include the night-soil men who collect the feces from the pit toilets; a bird-woman in the trees; a girl who dreams and wets her bed; a mother who “can change everything” (8); a father who is spoken of and yet not spoken of; a man and a woman who share a bed until the man kills the woman; Mr. Straffee (“the undertaker”) who takes the woman’s body away; the béké Mr. Gishard, buried in his “white suit” from England who now stands, as a jumbee, “under a cedar tree” sipping rum (7); the people who see Mr. Gishard donning his white suit and “who now live in the house [and] walk through the door backward” (8) to keep the dead man’s spirit out; the “red-skin woman with black bramblebush hair and brown eyes” (11) whom the girl wants to marry. These real creatures and characters, spirits and bodies, haunt and inhabit the nocturnal spaces of “the night,” and their inhabiting crosses these borders. The story also introduces mother/daughter/father as a textual triad, parallel in the material realm to jablesse/girl/night-soil man in the spiritual, but the material and spiritual are not strictly divided; instead, they are interpenetrating terrains that are constantly traversed “in the night.” These triads refigure the terrains of selves as multiple, as alterrains in which the borders of man and woman, adult and child, day and night, body and soul are crossed. They see the nightly movements; they, too, move “in the night.” These alterrains refigure and remap the alterity of selves, the subjectivity of others, and the indiscernibility, at times, of each. Such a radical reconfiguration of self-other (and selves-others) clearly breaks with colonialist notions of self-other configured hierarchically and axiomatically: within a colonialist model, self is discrete, self-determining, autonomous, detached, subjectively contained (or subjectified); the other is external, distant, objectively marked (or objectified). The oppositional relations of self-other operative within colonialist logic are marked by conquest—colonizer and colonized. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson discuss the hierarchical relations of colonial subject and colonized collective, according to colonial discourse, in their editors’ introduction to De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography: “Where Western eyes see Man as a unique individual rather than a member of a collectivity, of race or nation, or sex or sexual preference, Western eyes see the colonized as an amorphous, generalized collectiv-

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ity” (1992, xvii). Kincaid’s texts do not reverse this dichotomy; rather, her literary texts reveal how these terrains are imbricated—self touching upon others, and alterity imbued with subjectivity. Kincaid refuses the colonial, hierarchical divisions of self-other, exploring the other within and the self without (or explores the alterity and objectivity of the self, the subjectivity of others and even objects). Kincaid’s literary texts, thus, suggest an ethics and politics of alterity. As Paula M. L. Moya writes, “coalitions across differences require a thorough understanding of how we are different from others, as well as how they are different from us. Because . . . differences are relational, our ability to understand an ‘other’ depends largely on our willingness to examine our ‘self’ ” (125–26). Kincaid’s textual imbrications of self with others, though, forces us to rethink the binaristic logic that divides one from the other.

Girl as Jablesse: Space, Time, and History “In the Night” In the story, nocturnal space is an all-encompassing vastness that is without temporal division. “In the night,” Kincaid writes, “way into the middle of the night, when the night isn’t divided like a sweet drink into little sips, when there is no just before midnight, midnight, or just after midnight . . .” (6). Night’s depths are unmarked; the night is oceanic in its expanse, not measured in sips. This nocturnal space is planetary, earthly, and its indivisible temporality is spatially and geographically marked. Night is a space of contrasts and geologic variations: “round in some places, flat in some places, and in some places like a deep hole, blue at the edge, black inside” (6). Time is erased in space. Here, Kincaid’s “night” is timeless, and space is contoured geologically, not cartographically as colonial territory. In this passage, Kincaid echoes the preoccupation of many Caribbean writers with history and the historical. Both Derek Walcott (in “The Muse of History”10 and “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”) and Édouard Glissant (in “The Known, the Uncertain” from Caribbean Discourse) critique Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s world historical model (as outlined in The Philosophy of History): Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained—for all purposes of connection with the rest of the world—shut up; it is the Gold-land compressed within itself—the land of childhood, which lying beyond the days of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of night . . . The negro as already observed exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we would

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rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character. . . . At this point we leave Africa never to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement of development to exhibit. Historical movement in it—that is in its northern part—belongs to the Asiatic or European World . . . . What we properly understand as African, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s history. . . . The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning. (Hegel [1892] 1956; qtd. Lamming 1995) Hegel’s model posits Africa as ahistorical, Asia as prehistorical, and Europe as historical. According to Hegel, the world existed in different historical stages of evolution, with Europe as the height of history and civilization and with Africa as the nadir of this evolutionary chain. Like Walcott and Glissant, Kincaid critiques Hegel’s Eurocentric model, revealing that “imposed nonhistory” (Glissant’s term) is a violent erasure resulting from the forced displacement and enslavement of Africans in the Middle Passage and the continued dispossessions of British and French colonialism in the Caribbean. Kincaid reminds her readers that colonial maps may territorialize space, but they also erase those perceived to be without history or without linear, temporal evolution (à la Hegel). Colonial erasure, though, is never totalizing; the shadows or fragments of lives lived under colonialism are always present, if not fully visible. The visible and the invisible, the absent and the present, in fact, are two boundaries that are transgressed in the story “In the Night.” Kincaid’s use of sensory experience alternates from sight to sound to touch in the narrative, and frequently, the images are fused synaesthetically. In the opening section of the narrative, the sensory experience is multiple, but sight predominates; the narrator focuses on what is seen and what cannot be seen; both enter into a specular economy that subverts colonialist surveillance, even as it narratively deploys the gaze. “Under Western eyes,” David Spurr writes in his trenchant analysis of colonialist rhetoric The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourses in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, “the body is that which is most proper to the primitive, the sign by which the primitive is represented” (22). The colonial administrator surveys the land and the bodies of the colonized, and in this colonialist gaze, Spurr writes, “[t]he eye treats the body as a landscape” (23). The girl’s gaze in the story also surveys the land, the night, its inhabitants; her vision, though, oper-

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ates differently. It sees the multiple figures who move in the night—each different both from the others and individually metamorphic. If the colonialist eye turns bodies into landscapes, territories to be colonized, the girl’s eye is open to the landscape as body and as embodied. The scenes and the images in this section are captivating. Returning to time, timelessness, and vision, Kincaid writes: It is then, “in the night, way into the middle of the night,” when “the night-soil men come” (6; emphasis added). Fulfilling their duties, “they come and go, walking on the damp ground in straw shoes. Their feet in the straw shoes make a scratchy sound. They say nothing” (6; emphasis added). Not only do the “night-soil men” work in the nocturnal vastness, but they also see spirits who move “in the night.” Kincaid links the labor of colonized men to the movement of African diasporic spirits—both of whom forcibly crossed oceans, suffered toil, oppression, and near extinction, and rhizomatically survived in a new land. The African diaspora marks the scattering of both people and cultures. First, “the night-soil men can see a bird walking in the trees,” only “it isn’t a bird” (6; emphasis added). What appears, at first, to be “a bird walking in the trees” is suddenly a woman shedding her skin like feathers, departing soon “to drink the blood of her secret enemies” (6). In the night, the girl as narrator also incarnates the narrator as jablesse. In the night, the bird-woman is a jablesse—or soucriant (also soucouyan, soucouyant, or soucougnan, sometimes volant)—who sheds her skin, walks in tree branches, flies. Ivette Romero-Cesareo explains that soucouyan “is a word of African origin meaning human beings transformed into balls of fire. According to oral tradition, they suck people’s blood (much like the vampires of European origin). This power, usually attributed to old women, is either inherited or acquired through a pact with the devil” (265n13). It is the night-soil men who see the bird-woman preparing for flight and departure, but the narrator also knows what the night-soil men see. The girl sees the night-soil men and the bird-woman: she watches the night, and as witness, she is figured in this relation. These are metamorphic relations, though; they are créolized, and not pure forms. The triangulated terrains of girl, night-soil man, and bird-woman map the alterrains of night. This self-in-relation diverges from metaphysical, colonialist notions of subjectivity as individuated, contained, clearly demarcated. Kincaid’s texts rusefully, and even guilefully, confound these borders—those of self-other or selves-others—deconstructing colonialist notions of subjectivity and objectivity. The triangulation of subjective spaces in the story “In the Night” is one such example. With the jablesse and the nightsoil man, the girl forms a nocturnal triad. Rather than a radical disjuncture of the material and the spiritual—as defined in the gulf between God and Man in Christian belief—here matter and spirit are interpenetrating; this

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configuration of the world displaces colonialist metaphysics in which spirit transcends body and world. Kincaid reverses British colonial desire, displacing the Christian trinity with African diasporic religious forms—or transforms. The nocturnal landscape, though, is not only spiritual or spirit-filled, exploring and deconstructing the culturally determined values of good and evil; it is also material and embodied. Indeed, the night’s inhabitants traverse the boundaries of spirit-matter, subject-object, human-animal, and perhaps most intimately, body-dwelling. In his “phenomenological inquiry on poetry,” Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard explores the house in poetics as an intimate psychological space that is both “dispersed” and “embodied” (3): “Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed.’ Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves. Now everything becomes clear, the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them” (xxxiii). For Bachelard, the house is one’s “first universe” (14), the “cosmos” (4); and the poet of space writes or reads a room, a house (14). Kincaid reminds us, though, that Antigua itself is just such a “small place,”11 and the house in Kincaid’s texts is a cosmos that textually opens onto the universe of the island. Bachelard’s “poetics of space” with rooms to be written and houses to be read opens windows and doors into Kincaid’s dwellings. Returning to the scene “in the night”: The girl-narrator knows that the bird-woman “has left her skin in a corner of a house made out of wood” (6). This connection—skin (corporeal), wood (raw, natural resource), and house (constructed)—is provocative, for it reveals body and nature, corporeality and “raw” natural resource, as constructed elements. The house, in many of Kincaid’s stories, stands in metonymic relation to body (compare, for example, the houses in “At Last,” “Blackness,” and “My Mother”). The metonymic relations of house-body also blur the boundaries of subject-object. In the passage from “In the Night,” the woman sheds subjectivity, like skin, “left . . . in a corner of a house made out of wood.” Where Bachelard’s houses are psychologically coded spaces, Kincaid’s poetic dwellings are corporeal as well as psychological—lived, embodied, but never essentialized, always built or constructed from wood chopped, hewn, planed, notched, and assembled in words. Through these constructions, a house is built; a room materializes; a body forms. Like the jablesse, or soucouyant, the girl is taken over by the spirits of others, as the jablesse ritualistically sheds herself and is taken over by the lwas or spirits. The passage describes the vision of the night-soil men in alterobjective terms: “[I]t isn’t a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin. . . . It is a woman who has left her skin in a corner. . . . It is a woman who is reasonable and admires honeybees in the hibiscus. It is a woman, who, as a joke, brays like a donkey when he is thirsty” (6–7). In this passage, the boundaries between human and animal are also crossed, a transformation common to Obeah. In this last reference, girl and jablesse

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merge in a frightening, if seductive, illusion, as she, they, brays “like a donkey.” According to Obeah folklore, the jablesse often embodies the form of a beautiful, seductive woman from the waist up, but with the body of an animal from the waist down; her feet are hooves, and she often brays, once her victim recognizes her as a jablesse.12 But Kincaid refuses an aesthetic or religious reduction of jablesse to diabolic incarnation; she is also a benign and creative force, a reasonable woman admiring bees and flowers. In so doing, Kincaid reminds us that the spiritual force of jablesse as diabolic is a Western, Christian construct. The lines describing the vision of the jablesse, or soucouyant, with alterobjective detachment reiterate the impersonal subject-verb construction, “it is . . . it is . . . it is . . .” This woman who removes her skin and “brays like a donkey” is no woman at all: she is jablesse, incantatory, and seductive spirit. The night-soil men see the jablesse or spirit, and the girl-narrator knows. In this knowledge, the girl elusively embodies both but remains bound to neither. Earlier I interpreted this triad as refusal of the colonialist divisions of material and spiritual, but it also suggests a refusal of the colonialist demarcations of self and other. Desire and knowing are triangulated through the girl, the jablesse, and the night-soil man: they are not, in Christian terms, three persons in hypostatic union; conversely, the relations of self and others here (and throughout the narrative) are transient, shifting, malleable, yet still embodied and sensately experienced. If the early British colonialists regarded the slaves as “in need of the Christianization and ‘de-Africanization’ which [they felt] only a reformed colonial system might effect” (Richardson 180), then Kincaid foils this desire to “Christianize” and “de-Africanize” West Indian subjects. Using Obeah as transaesthetic force opening the narrator to embodied, sensory worlds, Kincaid also subverts the colonialist subordination of body to mind or spirit: in Obeah, body and spirit are interpenetrating, and intellect is not valorized over the senses as a form of knowing. Sound, in the next paragraph, replaces image as the girl-narrator shifts senses poetically; the narrator’s words are detached and impersonal initially (“there is the sound”) yet open ultimately into intricate and diverse sounds. Again, Kincaid’s philosophical-textual evocations of “there is” move between Heideggerian generosity in es gibt and Levinasian anonymity and horror in il y a, as elaborated in chapter 1. Words form incantations: oral and aural suffuse the textual. Kincaid tunes the reader’s ear to life in Antigua; her words are, as Glissant writes, “the passage opening onto the archipelago of languages” (1997, 84). What the night-soil men see, what the girl-narrator knows, unfolds in a long paragraph marked by phrases that all begin, “there is the sound . . .”: There is the sound of a cricket, there is the sound of a church bell, there is the sound of this house creaking, that house creaking and the other house creaking as they settle into the ground. There is the

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sound of a radio in the distance—a fisherman listening to merengue music. There is the sound of a man groaning in his sleep; there is the sound of a woman disgusted at the man groaning. There is the sound of the man stabbing the woman, the sound of her blood as it hits the floor, the sound of Mr. Straffee, the undertaker, taking her body away. There is the sound of her spirit back from the dead, looking at the man who used to groan; he is running a fever forever. There is the sound of a woman writing a letter; there is the sound of her pen nib on the white paper; there is the sound of the kerosene lamp dimming; the sound of her head aching. (7; emphasis added) The paragraph opens with everyday sounds—crickets chirping, church bells chiming, houses creaking, merengue music playing on the radio—before conducting more intimate, grating, even violent sounds: “a man groaning . . . a woman disgusted at the man groaning . . . the man stabbing the woman, the sound of her blood as it hits the floor, the sound of Mr. Straffee, the undertaker, taking her away” (7). Kincaid’s text creates a symphony of the commonplace, the quotidian, and the simple, yet these sounds are often inharmonious. “In the Night” captures the sounds of everyday people whose lives are not usually seen or heard; she melodically, mellifluously, and rhythmically composes beauty from simplicity. These sounds begin and end in houses—bodily metonyms—as sounds spread from “this house creaking; that house creaking, and the other house creaking as they settle into the ground.” These sounds merge and symphonically fuse “in the night.” Kincaid’s domestic, even homely homilies, are embodied and lived, yet they refuse essentialist definitions of body: like houses, they are built and dwelled in, sometimes destroyed or abandoned. As houses “settle into the ground,” the murdered woman’s body refuses to “settle into the ground,” and the night-soil men hear “the sound of her back from the dead, looking at the man who used to groan” (7). This woman who refuses death, like the bird-woman “who has removed her skin” and left it “in a corner of a house” (6), returns to the house where her murderous husband, “who used to groan,” lies racked with illness, “running a fever forever” (7). Skin, like houses, may be abandoned or recovered. And skin, as Sidonie Smith notes, “is the literal and metaphorical borderland between the materiality of the . . . [writing] ‘I’ and the contextual surround of the world” (1994, 266). In this sense, Kincaid’s mapping of bodies and texts displace colonialist and patriarchal divisions of body/text. The woman exacts revenge: the night-soil men see the jablesse “on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies” (6). Does the jablesse swarm and return for the blood of the woman “as it hits the floor”? Or, is the blood her own? Instead, the woman writes a letter. Kincaid rewrites folkloric legends of the soucouyant (soucriant) who sheds her skin, flies at night, sucks the blood of unsuspecting victims into a

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woman who writes, whose skin is page and blood, ink; a woman who turns her body into text. The narrator explains that “there is the sound of her pen nib on the white writing paper” and “the sound of the kerosene lamp dimming”; as the paragraph closes, the final note is “the sound of her head aching” (7). Kincaid’s text—and metatextually, the woman’s letter—reframe skin, paper, blood, ink, written text, and oral sound as interrelated. Sound and the music of words fuse with the palpable resonances of body and text. In the next few lines, sounds continue to suffuse night’s air, but the senses also shift toward touch and visceral sensations. The narrator describes the night and the rain as it “falls on the tin roofs, on the leaves, in the trees, on the stones in the yard, on sand, on the ground,” leaving the night “wet in some places, warm in some places” (7). In the rain, in the night, the narrator and the night-soil men are immersed in the material and the spiritual, among the living and the dead; the spirits, creatures, and people who move in the night traverse the boundaries of space and time, of life and death. The living lie in bed feverishly; the dead move about. Sight, sound, touch fuse synaesthetically in the play of Kincaid’s words. The narrator says, “There is Mr. Gishard, standing under a cedar tree which is in full bloom, wearing that nice white suit, which is as fresh as the day he was buried in it” (7). Like a jumbie (jumbee or duppie) standing beneath a silk cotton tree, Mr. Gishard drinks rum, dividing now the night “like a sweet drink into little sips” (6); in his hand is “the same glass full of rum that he had in his hand shortly before he died” (8). Mr. Gishard is an ambivalent presence—he is not only béké,13 symbol of colonial power and continued, postabolition plantation economy, but also jumbee/jumbie, a ghost of the dead who returns to guard his house, survey his land, and control the living. As a béké, Mr. Gishard orders space through colonial divisions; he represents the plantation economy of time measured, scheduled, charted and space divided, guarded, plowed. Under the cedar tree, he watches “the house in which he used to live” (8), striking terror in the hearts of the people who now live in his house. Dwelling in Mr. Gishard’s house, the people “walk through the door backward” (8) when they see the dead man standing under the cedar tree. As with Obeah belief, the people walk backward to keep the jumbee from entering, yet Mr. Gishard is both béké and jumbee. As both, he is the guardian of space and possession; in walking backward, though, the people seem to reverse time, space, and possession. These alterrelations are embodied, and disembodied, in the house. In death, as in life, his presence marks space as colonial territory, just as plantation economies endured—and in some places, still endure—in the Caribbean long after slavery ended. “The disintegration of the system left its marks,” Glissant writes (in discussing the closed space of the plantation): “Almost everywhere planter castes degenerated into fixed roles” (1997, 72). Clearly, Mr. Gishard’s possession of the house is material. Kincaid reminds the reader

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that houses are owned, as land is colonized and as bodies are enslaved; yet Mr. Gishard’s possession of the house is also spiritual—he possesses it as spirit, as jumbee—and this possession is only translatable through Obeah’s transaesthetic forms.

Dreaming Mother as Jablesse: Space, Time, and History “In the Night” From girl as jablesse to mother as jablesse, Kincaid draws the reader into her night world. The girl as jablesse is creative; the mother as jablesse is terrifying yet awe-inspiring: daughter emulates mother, but she also fears her. In the second section of “In the Night,” the girl dreams, and in her dreams, she sees a “baby being born,” a baby who walks through pastures, eats “green grass,” and bleats like a lamb. Again, the human-animal boundary is transgressed, and Kincaid’s transaesthetics reveal that such metamorphoses, though rare in Western hierarchies, are common in Obeah. She says, “Its eyes are closed. It’s breathing, the little baby. It’s breathing. It’s bleating, the little baby. It’s bleating” (8). The passage alternates between breathing and bleating, between baby’s breath and lamb’s bleat, but also between life and peril, as “bleating” evokes the sound of “bleeding” and the murdered woman of the first section whose blood “hits the floor” (7). The baby (or lamb) is described in gentle terms, though, with “soft and pink lips” (8). This discordant juxtaposition of tenderness and violence precedes a midnight encounter with the girl’s mother. Next, the mother appears at her bedside gently, as the girl says, “shaking me by the shoulders,” rousing the girl from her dreams by calling out, “Little Miss, Little Miss” (8). The girl says to her mother, “But it’s still night,” to which the mother replies, “Yes, but you have wet your bed again” (8). The mother, like Mr. Gishard, is a symbol of power, a guardian of old mores, of old world values (as in Annie John, where the mother, Annie, has interpellated Victorian mores and strictly imposes them on her daughter). The mother is native and foreign, gentle and terrifying. As symbol of power, the mother divides the night with time. The wetness—the flow of urine—evokes the night’s rainfall; both spill over divided terrains, blurring boundaries, mapping alterrains of space, time, sleep, wakefulness, dream, reality. The rain, the urine, the rum—all divide the night, breaking space into the measured demarcations of marked time. In contrast to colonial time marching to the tempo of historical evolution (recall the “bands of men” in the story “Blackness”), the girl’s night is a space of memory not marked by time’s intervals until her mother disrupts it. This memory is not individual but transindividual, collective: as Walcott intimates, “All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory” (1998, 82).

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Looking into her mother’s face, which is “still young and still beautiful, and still has pink lips” (8), the girl recalls the “soft and pink lips” of the baby’s face from the dream. The repetition of “still” (“it’s still night”; “still young”; “still beautiful”; “still has pink lips”) creates a pacific and halcyonic scene of daughter and mother and dreams. The girl’s dreams are also nightmares, though, and the mother is powerful and threatening, if also tender and beautiful. Although the mother evokes the power of colonialism, she—like Mr. Gishard who is both béké and jumbee—also ambivalently embodies the awe and danger of the jablesse. As the mother removes the “wet nightgown” and her “wet sheets,” the girl thinks, “My mother can change everything” (8). Here, change or alteration ruptures stillness, and the girl notes, “In my dream I am in the night” (8). These words remind the reader that the peaceful scene is not without peril, and this section ends with dialogue between daughter and mother about “the lights in the mountains” that are really a jablesse or a “person who can turn into anything, but you can tell that they aren’t real because of their eyes” (8–9). From the mother who “can change everything” (8) comes the jablesse “who can turn into anything” (8–9). The mother tells her daughter that “their eyes shine like lamps, so bright you can’t look” (9). Especially beware “when you see a beautiful woman,” the mother warns, “a jablesse always tries to look like a beautiful woman” (9). The mother, “still young” (8), is also “still beautiful” (9); she is gentle, and she is terrifying. Mother, daughter, jablesse “merge and separate, merge and separate” in alterbiographic relations, as jablesse/girl/night-soil man also “merge and separate, merge and separate” earlier in the narrative;14 and in the next section, mother/daughter/father form a alternative textual triad.

Filiation, Ineffable Words, Oral Worlds The third section of the story is composed of one long quote, words spoken by the girl, words she claims that “no one has ever said to me.” So she begins: “No one has ever said to me, ‘My father, a night-soil man, is very nice and very kind” (9). Here, we return to sound, and words spiral into memorable melodies, an oral backdrop to colonial history, the histories of the colonized conveyed only through spoken language, if at all. In this long, meandering quote (in which the girl speaks of words that no one ever said to her) the father, the night-soil man, takes center stage. The girl tells of the father and all that he does in his daily life: that he pats a dog when he passes it, rather than kicks the animal; that he prefers pink shirts and pants to the brown and navy ones he wears; that “he fell and broke his ankle,” “while running to catch a bus”; that he likes to sit on a “stone under a mahogany

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tree” (9) to watch the children playing; that he “eats the intestines of animal stuffed with blood and rice and drinks ginger beer” (10). By invoking her father’s words and action, she also invokes alternative possibilities—those of kicking the dog, donning pink clothes, preferring brown and navy, devouring children instead of blood sausages. The words describing his meal are suggestive, anatomically and corporeally, exposing the intrinsic violence of eating. The girl repeats the words her father has spoken to her: “He has told me this many times: ‘My dear, what I like to do most,’ and so on” (10). Again, Kincaid places her readers within the domestic sphere of families and their daily lives. Words spoken, like commonplace sounds, are lyrically woven into the music of simplicity. Yet these words are never spoken; they exist in the girl’s imagination only, as she creates alterworlds to experience and inhabit. Kincaid’s text subtlely undermines colonialist discourse, revealing that colonialist and phallogocentric discourses are imbricated and that filiation as power operates according to a colonialist logic. Not all men, Kincaid shows, are powerful; power is conferred through race, class, nationality. Here, the father is not the law, the guardian of the Symbolic order (à la Lacan); the father does not speak; he is marked by aphasia; his words are imagined by his daughter, the true creative spirit of language, and stories, and worlds created in words. (This motif recurs in the “biographical” novel Mr. Potter, as discussed in chapter 6.) She imagines a father; she imagines a father’s words; she imagines words never spoken; she even imagines love. The girl reflects on what her father, the night-soil man, does for her and reflects on her feelings for him: “I love my father the night-soil man” (10). Here, the relations alter, desires and dreams circulate: jablesse/girl/night-soil man enter into alterrelations with mother/daughter/father. Extending the emotions of love, affection, and intimacy for the father even further, the girl says, “Everybody loves him and waves to him whenever they see him” (10), but these feelings also evoke jealousy in the girl. “He is very handsome, you know,” the girl says, “and I have seen women look at him twice” (10). The girl who watches the night-soil men at work way into the middle of the night also sees women gazing at her father. Kincaid’s reversal of the colonialist gaze may be seen in this passage: it is not colonial administrator, or even father, who surveys land and bodies, as Spurr so incisively discusses in The Rhetoric of Empire; rather, it is the girl-narrator who watches others. The girl notes how differently her father dresses “on special days” and “on ordinary days,” but her obedience to the father is constant on all days. “When he calls me, I say, ‘Yes, sir’ ” (10). The section ends with a line expressing happiness, hope, and expectation: “He makes us happy, my father the night-soil man, and has promised that one day he will take us to see something he has read about called the circus” (10). This line, however, is the closing line of a long quote that “no one has ever” spoken to the girl, and this happiness, hope, and expecta-

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tion seem, therefore, tenuous. Yet this girl weaves worlds with the creative (and destructive) force of a jablesse, incarnating and disincarnating multiple, transitory forms. Or, as Glissant writes, “this is an orality that is not spoken aloud but articulated in underground understandings” (1997, 39).15

Language, Gardens, Worlds The sea sighs with the drowned from the Middle Passage, the butchery of its aborigines, Carib and Aruac and Taino, bleeds in the scarlet of the immortelle, and even the actions of surf on sand cannot erase the African memory, or the lances of cane as a green prison where indentured Asians, the ancestors of Felicity, are still serving time. —Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says

Kincaid and Walcott share a sense of genesis in writing, of creating and recreating worlds in words. For Kincaid and Walcott, poetic creation involves the translation of the natural world into language, as much as it does a making of worlds from words; for each writer, the natural world does not oppose history absolutely, yet the Antillean geography holds a counterhistory to the erasures of colonial history. (Here, we should return to Bachelard’s poetics of space with rooms to be written, houses to be read, but we must add to those closed spaces, the terrains of sea and flora and island.) For Kincaid, “Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy”; as she notes in an interview published in The Boston Globe, “The garden itself has become like writing a book. . . . I am reading the landscape.” In the penultimate section of “In the Night,” the girl’s eye ambles through Antiguan gardens and witnesses those who work there. The gardens, the flowers, the workers are all legible “in the night.” Here, the girl reads the landscape and eloquently records the beauty she sees. The passage paints in words, poetically, multiple images of flowers that “close up and thicken” before narrating the daily events that precede night’s fall. The densely lyrical, intensely poetic passage traverses space and time through evocative images and lush language. Kincaid uses repetition and difference in this section to alternate between generic phrases that are reiterated and longer phrases that follow and are woven with specificity and variation. For Glissant, the generic or the general are part of a colonial leveling process in which differences are erased into a dominant sameness: “For centuries ‘generalization,’ as operated by the West, brought different community tempos into an equivalency in which it attempted to give a hierarchical order to the times they flowered.” “Is it not, perhaps,” Glissant asks, “time to return to a no less necessary ‘degeneralization’?” (62). Kincaid’s passages begin with the general, but her

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words explode into myriad blooms. Her flowers answer Glissant’s call for a “necessary ‘degeneralization.’ ” Such lyrical repetition and difference, poetic vacillation between genre or type and species, refigures the relations of each. In the first paragraph, the generic image is the flower, and it blooms in Kincaid’s lines in multifarious colors and manifold varieties: the hibiscus flowers, the flamboyant flowers, the bachelor’s buttons, the irises, the marigolds, the whitehead bush flowers, the lilies, the flowers on the daggerbush, the flowers on the turtleberry bush, the flowers on the soursop tree, . . . the sugar-apple tree, . . . the mango tree, . . . the guava tree, . . . the dumps tree, . . . the pawpaw tree, . . . (10–11) The paragraph opens with the line, “In the night, the flowers close up and thicken” (10). In discussing the disruptions of orality in Saint-John Perse’s poetry, Glissant says that “root stumps” appear when “language thickens into nodules” (39). This thickening disrupts. After the catalogue of flowering trees and blooming annuals, the paragraph ends by saying that “the flowers everywhere close up and thicken” (11). The line reveals that there are recesses of meaning in the natural flora that are impenetrable to the eye; the flowers “close up” and resist being read, just as language “thickens” into hard knots or “root stumps.” Then, the girl tells us, “the flowers are vexed” (11); only anger or irritating frustration may be read in the flora. Kincaid’s line, like Walcott’s quotation used as an epigraph to this section, suggests a form of Caribbean resistance that imbues even the landscape, the foliage, the sea. The paragraph moves from the general to the specific, from the generic flower to all its varieties; from the first line to the last, repetition and difference move in spirals. In the second paragraph of this section, Kincaid again uses repetition and difference to move from the generic phrase, “Someone is . . . ,” to specific actions and moments taken from daily life. The syntax of the repeated lines (impersonal pronoun + linking verb + present progressive verb + object[s]) establishes a constant structure that enters variation and difference. Someone is making a basket, someone is making a girl a dress or a boy a shirt, someone is making her husband a soup with cassava so that he can take it to the cane field tomorrow, someone is making his wife a beautiful mahogany chest, someone is sprinkling a colorless powder outside a closed door so that someone else’s child will be stillborn, someone is praying that a bad child who is living prosperously abroad will be good and send a package filled with new clothes, someone is sleeping. (11; emphasis added)

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The scenes are domestic, as the actions are daily: weaving, sewing, cooking, building, cursing, praying, sleeping. The impersonal and generic “someone is” is completed by myriad and varied moments—some nurturing, others threatening. Many of these tasks are gendered forms of labor, reminding us that the generic is a patriarchal as well as colonialist construct. Kincaid returns the reader to the scenes of domestic care and violences that opened the story. As the girl sleeps and dreams in the second section, so someone here “is sleeping.” This final phrase evokes the girl who sleeps and dreams and is awakened by her mother who changes her wet nightgown and tells her about the jablesse (8); the line also evokes the man who groans in his sleep, disgusts the woman, then murders her. Sleep, and the alterrains of night, the girl knows, are not always peaceful.

History, Alterity, Transdesires The final section centers on the girl and her transdesires. In playful and sensuous language, the girl maps desires both erotic and maternal, expressing her love for “a red-skin woman with black bramblebush hair and brown eyes, who wears skirts that are so big I can easily bury my head in them” (11). This woman fuses Carib and African diasporic genealogies; the passage refigures those lost in the colonialist violences of genocide and slavery as a woman to adore and embrace. She is beautiful and wild, with “red skin” and “black bramblebush hair.” She is also maternal and doting with flowing skirts “so big” that the girl “can easily bury [her] head in them” (11). The girl also weds her body to the victims of genocide, slavery, and colonialism, not as another person destroyed in the wake of European institutions, but as one who desires corporeal embrace with those lost, one who desires bodily memory of broken ancestral lines, as further elaborated in chapter 4 in The Autobiography of My Mother. The maternal and the erotic fuse in carnal, even primordial, longing for the woman, and the girl says, “I would like to marry this woman and live with her in a mud hut near the sea” (11). “Hut,” as house, stands in metonymic relation to body. Here, it is an intimate corps-à-corps dwelling. The dwelling is water and soil, soul and flesh, built from earth moistened by the sea, evoking the elements of water and earth: theirs is an elemental passion. Inhabiting this space, the two will live and thrive, sharing possessions and dividing them. They live in the altersubjective spaces of transdesires. The girl lists the items shared and those separate: In the mud hut will be two chairs and one table, a lamp that burns kerosene, a medicine chest, a pot, one bed, two pillows, two

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sheets, one looking glass, two cups, two saucers, two dinner plates, two forks, two drinking-water glasses, one china pot, two fishing strings, two straw hats to ward sun off our heads, two trunks for things we have very little use for, one basket, one book of plain paper, one box filled with twelve crayons of different colors, one loaf of bread wrapped in a piece of brown paper, one coal pot, one picture of two women standing on a jetty, one picture of the same two women embracing, one picture of the same two women waving goodbye, one box of matches. (11–12) The girl begins the list by enumerating utilitarian and domestic objects, both those shared—a table, a lamp, a medicine chest, a pot, a bed, a mirror—and those that are individual—“two chairs”; “two pillows, two sheets”; “two cups, two saucers, two dinner plates, two forks, two drinking-water glasses”; and so forth. The household items, even the individual ones, arrange their lives in matching units: two of each kind. The girl and the red-skin woman with the black bramblebush hair will eat together, drink together, sleep together, fish together, and store away items together, yet separately, in “two trunks for things we have very little use for” (12). The items stored in the matching trunks are also given in ones and twos—“one basket, one book of plain paper, . . . one loaf of bread wrapped in a piece of brown paper, one coal pot,” with the solitary exception of “one box filled with twelve crayons of different colors” (12). A world of color, not black and white. The paired items are just these: the girl and the woman she marries in several photographs. There is “one picture of two women standing on a jetty, one picture of the same two women embracing, one picture of the same two women waving goodbye” (12; emphasis added). The images are repeated in similar phrases, “one picture . . . two women,” but the images show different moments and reveal differing emotive points in time—“standing on a jetty,” “embracing,” “waving goodbye” (12). Girl and lover merge and separate. The girl shares in the erased histories, yet she is, ultimately, not outside of the History that erases. Although the two women are separate, they are together in the pictorial triptych; although the women are two, they are also the same. (Recall the “one looking glass” that the women share; compare also the ending of Annie John in which Annie John walks to the jetty, says goodbye to her mother, and leaves the island with a trunk in hand, evoking her mother’s earlier departure from Dominica.) The three pictures tell a story of togetherness, love, and loss. The final object in the trunk is “one box of matches,” capable of destroying the pictures, the trunks, the hut, and all the two women share and possess, in their elemental passion, fire. The girl embraces those eclipsed by history, knowing that lives and loves are fragile terrains. This

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fiery destruction remains possibility only, potential only, and the girl imagines with childlike fervor and impetuousness a fantasy of playful bliss: Everyday this red-skin woman and I will eat bread and milk for breakfast, hide in bushes and throw hardened cow dung at people we don’t like, climb coconut trees, pick coconuts, eat and drink the food and water from the coconuts we have picked, throw stones in the sea, put on John Bull masks and frighten defenseless children on their way home from school, go fishing and catch only our favorite fishes to roast and have for dinner, steal green figs to eat for dinner with the roast fish. Every day we would do this. (12) The scene described (or imagined) is one of childhood fun, laughter, playfulness, mischief, one suffused with the sheer joy of living. The girl and her “red-skin woman” (who clearly recalls “Red Girl” from Kincaid’s novel Annie John) will live—day in, day out—with plenitude and happiness. And “every night,” the girl adds, “I would sing this woman a song; the words I don’t know yet, but the tune is in my head” (12). The song binds the girl and her red-skin woman carnally, soulfully, musically. It is a song the girl does not know yet, but “the tune is in [her] head” (12). The song is both primordial and unwritten, marked by genealogy and genocide, future promise and past suffering. Song and woman are earthly echoes that, like the landscape, may be translated. In a similar passage in Annie John, the protagonist writes an “autobiographical essay” for a school assignment; in the essay, the mother holds the languages of land and sea and the histories housed there. Annie John writes, “I would place my ear against her neck, and it was as if I were listening to a giant shell, for all the sounds around me—the sea, the wind, the birds screeching—would seem as if they came from inside her, the way the sounds of the sea are in a seashell” (43). In the final lines of “In the Night,” the girl reflects on “this woman I would like to marry [who] knows many things” (12). For the girl, the woman’s knowledge is earthly and benevolent; she would “never dream of making me cry” (12), the girl insists. The woman’s knowledge is maternal, even primordial, and their nightly ritual is rhythmic and oral. It recounts a prehistory, a time before, a necessary myth: “Every night, over and over,” the girl tells us, “she will tell me something that begins, ‘Before you were born’ ” (12). Myth counters history, opposes the erasures of time: “A poetics cannot guarantee us a concrete means of action. But a poetics, perhaps, does allow us to understand better our action in the world” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 1997, 199). The storytelling ritual, like the song, binds the girl and the red-skin woman in mythic spaces, in altersubjective terrains. The final line of the story reads, “I will marry a woman like this, and every night, I

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will be completely happy” (12). The girl’s transdesires, like the alterrains of night, are utopic—if also terrifying—fusing elemental passions and oneiric visions. Kincaid’s story weds lost historical points to the Caribbean’s “fragments of epic memory”16 that remain; the two are joined in the girl and the red-skin woman that she marries. “That is the basis of the Antillean experience,” Walcott writes in “this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong” (1998, 70). Kincaid, thus, opens history to alterity, presencing the lives of those eclipsed by time. Kincaid’s transformative, alterpoetics—like Glissant’s poetics of relation and Walcott’s poetics of fragments—infuses self with other, other with self, history with alterity, presence with absence. Kincaid’s texts reveal that, as Glissant writes, “Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not simple and straightforward, with only one truth—mine” (1997, Poetics 154). “In the Night,” like so many of Kincaid’s texts, weaves together the embodied and disembodied experiences of altersubjects and alterobjects, transporting and transfiguring the textual alterrains of the short story through the shifting narrative frames of the “girl” as jablesse. The altersubjective terrains of “In the Night” (the baby’s breath, the lamb’s bleat, the night-soil men at work, the bird-woman, Mr. Gishard with his glass of rum, the “red-skin woman with black bramblebush hair,” and others) stitch alterity and otherness into reflections of (and on) self. Kincaid’s “In the Night” thus draws on the subversive, anticolonial tradition of Obeah (as an African diasporic religion that inspired slave revolts in the nineteenth century) in the Caribbean to create a creolized poetics that disrupts Western, colonialist literary forms: the world, as seen through this transaesthetic lens, is not static, fixed, or hierarchical; it is metamorphic, malleable, transformative, and transrelational. It blurs the boundaries of colonial, metaphysical binaries—those operative in the hierarchical relations of self-other, human-animal, living-dead, matter-spirit, body-dwelling—creating diasporic spaces or alterrains of difference. Sensately, Kincaid weaves a world of experiences in which sight, sound, and touch synaesthetically imbue the Antiguan landscape and the inhabitants of the night. All is experienced through the girl-narrator and the textual, embodied worlds she creates, yet she is often indistinguishable from that world, those flowers, the creatures, spirits, and people “in the night.” The girl traverses boundaries; she is other. The narrator in this diasporic terrain, “in the night,” is jablesse, a spirit who by definition is metamorphic and elusive. Kincaid’s use of Obeah as transaesthetic and her use of the jablesse as narrator constitute willful acts of memory—ones not bound by history or connected to time but rather to

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creation. This memory contests history, rather than remembering it. Memory, Glissant muses, “is not a calendar memory; our experience of time does not keep company with the rhythms of month and year alone; it is aggravated by the void, the final sentence of the Plantation” (Poetics of Relation 72). But this touching upon the void, this experience of the abyss that is the inheritance of the Middle Passage (or, “the final sentence of the Plantation”) is also genesis, creation—“the infinite abyss, in the end became knowledge” (Glissant 1997, 8); “the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, make one vast becoming, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green” (6). Or as Walcott eloquently notes, “If there was nothing, there is everything to be made” (1998, 4). In weaving worlds through this anticolonial transaesthetic, Kincaid herself plays the role of jablesse—the she-devil of colonialism, the banished Lucifer (as in Annie John and Lucy) of the “New World,” the postcolonial and diasporic writer who creates, like a god, “new worlds.”

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3

The Diabolic as Diasporic in Annie John and Lucy

“Rooting for the Devil” Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heav’n. —Lucifer, Paradise Lost, book 2

Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n. —Lucifer, Paradise Lost, book 2

Into this wild Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixt, Cofus’dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th’Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds. —Paradise Lost, book 2

Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), a fictionalized autobiographical novel, recounts the experiences of the young protagonist leaving her island home in Antigua, a hot tropical island in the Caribbean, to arrive in the urban northeastern United States in mid-January—if Manhattan, another island, but one that is bleak, windy, cold, icy, and dreary. While we do not discover the name of the protagonist until the final chapter of the novel; nor does the author ever 79

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fully disclose the name of the northeastern U.S. city (though it is likely New York) where the young woman has arrived, the title itself reveals her name: Lucy. Having taken a position as an au pair in order, first, to save money to remit to her family back home and to pay tuition for nursing school (her mother’s ambitions for her diasporic daughter), Lucy finds herself for the first time isolated, alone, lonely, and separate from her mother, a dominating, even suffocating force in her life. Lucy thus begins as Annie John ends with the island “girl” from a “small place” charting routes, departing mother and motherland to begin a new life in diaspora—for Lucy, in New York; for Annie John, in London. In this chapter, although I also draw parallels to Annie John, I primarily analyze the novel Lucy and the protagonist’s diasporic movement from Antigua to New York as related to another central theme in the novel: Lucy’s being named after Lucifer “himself.”1 After Lucy informs her mother of her desire to change her birth name to Enid, the mother reveals to her daughter that she was named “Lucy” after Lucifer “himself,” since she has been “such a botheration from the moment you were conceived” (152). Yet Lucy resists her mother’s interpretation of Lucifer and embraces her name. In the novel, Lucy also openly reflects on learning to read by being forced to read passages from Genesis, Revelations, and Paradise Lost (passages that she had to memorize as a punishment in grade school); these textual clues have, of course, led to important intertextual analyses of Lucy in relation to Paradise Lost, but these analyses are guided primarily by thematic parallels. While John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a clear literary influence, which Kincaid references numerous times in interviews and which Lucy directly alludes to in the novel, less mined are the Hebrew biblical, Septuagint, Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and Dantean influences on the Caribbean author’s representations of Lucifer. Within this chapter, I explore the import of these other biblical sources and literary influences for reading Kincaid’s novel and the figure of Lucifer as performatively embodied in the protagonist Lucy. In the opening section, I examine the identification of the protagonist Lucy with her namesake, Lucifer, theorizing the ideological and power relations of names, naming, and the dynamics of possession and dispossession as Kincaid herself philosophically contemplates in My Garden (Book): if for Walcott, it is always morning in the Antilles, and if the Caribbean poet is the “second Adam” whose gift and burden is to name and rename the “fragments of epic memory,” then, for Kincaid, “to name is to possess,” and naming oneself is a powerful act not only of self-reclamation, but also of self-creation. Lucy, as Lucifer, not only reclaims a fallen history and a lost world: she creates “new worlds” for her own diasporic dwelling. I also analyze the elements of paradise and hell, or paradisio and inferno, as they structure the homeland-diasporic, geographic, climatological, and implicitly

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theological (or perhaps, more precisely in Kincaid’s novel: a-theological, or atheological) depictions of Antigua and New York. In the second section, I overview the complex, multilayered, multilinguistic, and divergent theological traditions that have historically clustered around the figure of Lucifer, tracing the unique and disparate genealogical histories of this namesake through the translations of one biblical passage (Isaiah 14:12–15) in the Hebrew Bible, the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the King James English Version. Precisely because Lucifer or Lucifers (and there are many) are historically, exegetically, linguistically, and theologically distinct from Satan, or Satans (legion also), within this chapter, I deliberately keep the genealogical histories of Lucifer separate from those of Satan, which have different, evolving, and amorphic histories. My purpose in tracing these interwoven, yet distinct genealogical histories is twofold: first, Kincaid’s erudite mind interdwelling in a thinking, sentient body that was raised in the Anglican traditions of British colonized Antigua, migrated to the multireligious and secular terrains of New York city and later converted to Judaism as she settled in Vermont—has likely assimilated these biblical and literary sources; but second, and perhaps more important, I hope to establish the historical framework for considering the Caribbean figure of the jablesse, or djablesse, in Obeah as part of those rich, unique, distinct, and undeniably amorphous theological traditions, which I undertake in the chapter. In the third section, then, I examine the literary representations of Lucifer in both John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commediea (Divine Comedy), literary poems that the scriptural passages from Isaiah 14—in all its myriad translations—have inspired. I do so by focusing on Kincaid’s creative adaptions of Miltonian and Dantean literary motifs about heaven and hell and the author’s refusal of the Augustian theological conceptualizations that understands evil (and by extension: Lucifer) as negation, as absence, as privation, as a-ontologically substanceless, as only the absence of the positive, omnipresent, and ontologically substantive being of God. For Kincaid, in contrast, Lucifer is not a negative force but a creative one; and Lucy, like Lucifer, rejects ontological negation. And Kincaid’s conceptualizations are also decidedly and decisively Caribbeanist. Like these earlier biblical, exegetical, and religious traditions that are theologically and linguistically distinct, the Caribbean too has a complex system of spirituality that creolizes Christian thought and eclectic systems of African diasporic religious beliefs, such as in Obeah. Rather than seeing the figure of the jablesse, or djablesse, in Obeah as a mere patois linguistic and theological corruption of the diablesse, or the “she-devil,” which it is not, these earlier traditions establish that Lucifer and the devil (from Diablo) are not one—they are legion—and enable us to see this Caribbean figure as part of those rich and metamorphic genealogies.

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Finally, I also theorize the diasporic as the diabolic or the diabolic as the diasporic. To further complicate simplistic notions of literary allusion and creative influence, I interpret Kincaid’s novel as grappling with negative theological traditions as well as rethinking philosophical notions of space, time, and generation (both as creation and as lines of descent or lineages). I specifically argue that Kincaid’s creative engagements with Lucifer manifest a grappling with the theoretical and philosophical implications of the diabolic. I also explicitly theorize the diabolic as diasporic and the diasporic as diabolic, or diaspora in relation to diabola. Movement, migration, diaspora—like diabola—represents a definite motility across space and time, yet it need not mean irreparable loss. As I have elsewhere written: In Lucy’s world, like the inverted world of Lucifer (if we dare to see through the eyes of the oppressed), those called brutes are like fallen (or oppressed) angels, and those so-called angels are actually (colonialist) brutes. The diasporic borders here on the diabolic, and Derrida reminds contemporary readers that for Socrates, in the Cratylus, the unseen (aïde¯s) and the realm of the dead (haide¯s; Haide¯s) are etymologically related.2

“To Be Called Lucifer Outright”: Lucy, “A Girl’s Name for Lucifer” Throughout the novel Lucy, Kincaid depicts the worlds of Antigua and New York in strikingly dichotomized spatiotemporal parameters: Antigua is mother is motherland is past; New York is surrogacy is diaspora is future. These worlds are also portrayed as distinct in metaphysical terms: Antigua is fiery, hot, sweltering, sunny, and tropical, an infernal place of birth, conception, and genesis, but also, paradoxically, of subjugation and death; New York is gray-black, overcast, cold, icy, dying, yet also, paradoxically, a place of infernal self-rebirth or self-creation, though Lucy only comes to this realization at the novel’s end. When she first arrives in a city that seems to be Manhattan, Lucy experiences her diasporic place of arrival in distinctly spatiotemporal, climatological, and metaphysical parameters: “It was my first day. I had come the night before, a gray-black and cold night before—as it was expected to be in the middle of January, though I didn’t know that at the time—and I could not see anything clearly” (3). If Antigua is day and sunlight, then this North American city is night and darkness. If Antigua is brilliance and clarity (an extreme and blinding light?), then the diasporic city is obscurity, opacity, yet an ability to see or discern. Lucy remembers Antigua as a world away (both spatially and temporally), a tropical zone across waters, no matter whether vast and limitless or contained and minute:

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“I was no longer in a tropical zone,” Lucy muses, “and this realization now entered my life like a flow of water dividing formerly dry and solid ground, creating two blanks, one of which was my past—so familiar and predictable that even my unhappiness then made me happy now just to think of it—the other my future, a gray blank, an overcast seascape on which rain was falling and no boats were in sight” (5–6). The Caribbean Sea marks the diasporic journey from Antigua to New York, from her motherland to the United States. And this “flow of water” creates two blanks: that of the (lost) past and that of the (expectant) future. If Antigua is a known (and totalizing) past, then the diasporic city is an open future, yet one that remains blurry, undefined, even dreary, “a gray blank.” Lucy maps this temporal boundary in cartographic, or geographic, language; the spatial is temporalized; time is spatialized; and Lucy internalizes both the spaces and the times of home and diaspora, as well as their borders: Lucy says, “I looked at a map” and notes that “[a]n ocean stood between me and the place I came from,” asking, “but would it have made a difference if it had been a teacup of water?” before deciding, “I could not go back” (9–10). Away from home, Lucy receives numerous letters from her mother, other family members, and friends. Refiguring the poststructuralist relations of writing and being, or of la lettre and l’être, what Derrida calls the “viol de la lettre,” or the “violence of the letter,” Lucy refuses to read the letters. Lucy, the novel, manifests Kincaid’s refusal of the epistolary telling of a novelistic plot, even as the character Lucy stores the letters inside her brassiere: they are unopened, hidden, unread, cherished, yet also violatory. Letters unopened and unanswered also evoke the heat and sultry climate of home: they burn her breasts. These scorching signs of Antigua are sharply contrasted with the cold diasporic winter: “While the weather sorted itself out in various degrees of coldness, I walked around with letters from my family and friends scorching my breasts” (20). New York’s spring thaw does not also melt Lucy’s frozen heart: while all around her, rain, time, and weather change, she does not. As Lucy feels the passing (and past-ing) of winter, she realizes that the season is now part of her past: Everything that had seemed so brittle in the cold of winter—sidewalks, buildings, trees, the people themselves—seemed to slacken and sag a bit at the seams. I could now look back at the winter. It was my past, so to speak, my first real past—a past that was my own and over which I had the final word. I had just lived through a bleak and cold time, and it is not to the weather outside that I refer. I had lived through this time, and as the weather changed from cold to warm it did not bring me along with it. (23–24)

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Although Antigua and her mother, Annie, are Lucy’s distant past—a past orchestrated for her by her mother’s design—the winter just passed in New York marks the girl’s entrée into womanhood and into time: it is, as Lucy says, “my first real past,” not one that has been preordained for her. Winter weather and the ice, cold air, and bleak days without sunlight parallel the psychological transformation that Lucy experiences through time and in a new diasporic place: unlike the past of home and homeland, New York is the diasporic place of self-birth, or autogenesis, for Lucy. Diasporic rebirths are not, though, without suicidal perils: as winter lingers, Lucy remembers how “[t]he skies where hard and gray; it rained and the rain felt like small, hard nails; the sun shone sometimes, but weakly, as if it held a grudge. I noticed how hard and cold and shut up tight the ground was. I noticed that because I used to wish it would just open up and take me in, I felt so bad” (140). As she experiences the diasporic dislocations of winter, Lucy also realizes that she “wanted to die in a hot place,” yet “[t]he only hot place I knew was my home. I could not go home, and so I could not die yet” (141). Paradise burns, hell freezes, yet the inability to return to paradise lost, to have a paradise regained, abruptly arrests the suicidal pulse of winter’s cold. Unable to return, Lucy simply cannot fathom lying at rest in frozen ground. She thus survives winter, while refusing a retour au pays natal. For Lucy, though, the past is a subjective loss yet also a genealogical and historical line that can be redrawn: “I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be and things you used to do. Your past is the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in” (137). While past and future are crafted in the spatial geographies of home and diaspora, the present is suspended or held in abeyance between these two temporalities: for Lucy, present moments are linked to the totalizing sameness of the past: “As each day unfolded before me, I could see the sameness in everything; I could see the present take a shape—the shape of my past” (90). In a Levinasian sense that disrupts the Heideggerian being-towards-death, or Sein-zum-Tode, synchrony reduces all others to a simultaneity and sameness, a verisimilitude of space and time, whereas the diachrony of the future creates a space in which alterity creatively surfaces; Lucy’s future is an other subjective spatiotemporality from her past “self,” which is really no self at all, since she has been deprived autonomous, subjective agency. She is an object of her mother’s dreams, wishes, desires, and ambitions; at this moment in time, she is not, or at least, is not yet. Still Lucy’s past “self ” is also an other: it is her mother, and the daughter laments that “[m]y past was my mother” (90). As Lucy recalls, “I had spent so much time saying that I did not want to be like my mother that I missed the whole story: I was not like my mother—I was my mother” (90). She is her mother’s echo, her divine image reflected in childlike form, an angelic

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creation of the godlike mother, though fallen. Evoking Ovid’s myth from Metamorphosis of Narcissus and Echo (who cannot speak except to repeat the last words spoken to her: a curse upon the nymph by Juno for diverting the goddess by chattering incessantly in order to give the nymph-lovers of Jove time to disperse as his wife approached and who withers away bodily from unrequited love for Narcissus), Lucy too feels herself diminished (in body and in spirit) by her mother’s all-too-present presence. As the daughter, Lucy feels she was created for the sole purpose of echoing her mother’s being, though she would prefer to die: “I had come to feel that my mother’s love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn’t know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone” (36). If Lucy is Lucifer (luminous star that reflects the light of God and echoes divine presence) yet fallen angel and, like Echo, an emaciated nymph, then her mother, Annie, is an omnipresent and all-powerful God, a creative force in and of the universe; and the daughter is made in her mother’s image, an echo, godlike. As the echo or reflection of her divine mother, Lucy is not: she has no ontological substance; she has no subjective core; she is not a “self” but, rather, her mother’s inverted, negative other. And Lucy intimates, “I would see her face before me, a face that was godlike, for it seemed to know its own origins, to know all the things of which it was made” (94). And in her mother’s eyes, if not her own, Lucy feels like Lucifer, “doomed to build wrong upon wrong” (139). Yet Lucy, like Annie John, learns to playfully embrace and diabolically delight in her own transgressions, despite her mother’s censure or seeming damnation. She does so through diasporic flight or diabolic hurling: Lucy flees mother-God and Antigua-paradise. When Lucy flees her mother, she also flees her motherland (both Antigua and Britain, as the two remain implicated, for Lucy, in the colonialcolonized relation). Lucy’s flight is thus diasporic, but it is also diabolic: acting of her own free will or agency, Lucy is the agent of her own hurling, or falling, from Antiguan and maternal paradise, though she also expresses feeling, at times, cast out or banished (like Lucifer, whose namesake she bears) by mother (divinelike) and from her motherland (paradise and hell all at once). Lucy’s diasporic experience, even as diabolic, is also creative: it marks the birth of the young woman as an artist and as a writer; and it marks her separation from, even betrayal of, her mother and the surrogate Mariah, both of whom Lucy feels have betrayed her first, betrayals accomplished in language, words, books, divine creation, cosmic forces. Recall Kincaid’s memory recounted in My Brother about her mother’s fiery destruction of all her books when she was an adolescent. Betrayals are necessary to Lucy’s becoming a writer. When Mrs. Potter, Lucy’s mother, privileges her sons’ educations over her daughter’s, the girl feels “a sword go through [her] heart,” and she begins to call her mother “Mrs. Judas” (130). This

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stigmatized and mythically loaded “naming” of her mother empowers Lucy, and the power dynamic reverses as Lucy becomes the betrayed but ultimately victorious Jesus and her mother, once conceived of as “like a god” (150), becomes traitor in the daughter’s eyes. Names, naming, and renaming—for Lucy, as for Kincaid—are fundamental to self-definition, reclamation, and possession, and Lucy’s “name” is also related to her diasporic/diabolic experience in the novel. In one of the most engaging, provocative essays in My Garden (Book), “To Name Is to Possess,” Kincaid reflects on the powerful connection between naming and possession, as well as the indigenous “impulse to reach back and reclaim a loss” through renaming; “it is not surprising,” she writes, “that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names (Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka)” (122), or Elaine Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid. And so for Lucy Josephine Potter. Though Lucy initially hates her given name, “Lucy Josephine Potter” (Josephine after an Uncle Joseph who acquired wealth in the sugar industry in Cuba but died destitute; Potter after some English man who owned her slave ancestors; and Lucy after Satan “himself”), she finally embraces the name Lucy, once she learns its devilish origin. The protagonist—who finds her name “slight, without substance” and who as child called herself “other names: Emily, Charlotte, Jane . . . the names of authoresses whose books I loved”3—finally decides to change her name to Enid, “after the authoress Enid Blyton” (149), a twentieth-century British author of children’s literature or juvenile fiction.4 Lucy’s identification with authors signals her desire to write her own life and rename herself, supplanting her mother’s role as name giver and divine author. Lucy’s identification with Enid Blyton is also significant: in Blyton’s Adventure series, one of the key characters is Lucy-Ann Trent, a name, of course, that suggests both Lucy and Annie John from Kincaid’s earlier novel; Blyton’s novels told tales of secret adventures, thrilling mysteries, hidden treasures, petty crimes (such as theft) to be solved, naughty behavior, and childhood pranks, so Lucy’s identification with (as) Enid reveals her desire for a life outside the one sanctioned by her mother (recalling Annie John’s secret adventures with Red Girl, her hidden marbles, and her stolen books). Lucy’s desired life as child clearly contrasts with her mother’s desire for a model child. When she tells her mother of her intent (to rename herself Enid), the narrator tells us, “she turned a dark color, the color of boiling blood . . . [S]he was no longer my mother—she was a ball of fury, large, like a god” (150). These words are significant, for we discover later that if her mother is divine, Lucy is diabolic. When the protagonist asks her mother later why she named her Lucy, she replies (only after the question is repeated), “ ‘I named you after Satan himself. Lucy, short for Lucifer. What a botheration from the moment you were conceived’ ” (152). The transformation that Lucy undergoes after hearing her mother’s words is profound:

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In the minute or so it took for all this to transpire, I went from feeling burdened and old and tired to feeling light, new, clean. I was transformed from failure to triumph. It was the moment I knew who I was. [ . . . ] Lucy, a girl’s name for Lucifer. That my mother would have found me devil-like did not surprise me, for I often thought of her as god-like, and are not the children of gods devils? I did not grow to like the name Lucy—I would have preferred to be called Lucifer outright—but whenever I saw my name I always reached out to give it a strong embrace. (152–53)5 This extended passage in which the protagonist self-discovers a “diabolic” identification with Lucifer through naming parallels strikingly a similar passage from Kincaid’s first autobiographical novel, Annie John. In Annie John, the young girl protagonist sees her changing adolescent reflection in a store window on Market Street, not recognizing herself at first, then comparing herself to a painting of The Young Lucifer: I saw myself among all these things [items in store window], but I did not know that it was I, for I had got so strange. My whole head was so big, and my eyes, which were big, too, sat in my big head wide open, as if I had just had a sudden fright. My skin was black in a way I had not noticed before, as if someone had thrown a lot of soot out of a window just when I was passing by and it had all fallen on me. On my forehead, on my cheeks were little bumps, each with a perfect, round white point. My plaits stuck out in every direction from under my hat; my long thin neck stuck out from the blouse of my uniform. Altogether, I looked old and miserable. Not long before I had seen a picture of a painting entitled The Young Lucifer. It showed Satan just recently cast out of heaven for all his bad deeds, and he was standing on a black rock all alone and naked. Everything around him was charred and black, as if a great fire had just roared through. His skin was coarse, and so were all his features. His hair was made up of live snakes, and they were in a position to strike. Satan was wearing a smile, but it was one of those smiles that make you know the person is just putting up a good front. At heart, you could see, he was really lonely and miserable at the way things had turned out. I was standing there surprised at this change in myself, when all this came to mind. (94–95) The comparison between Annie John’s vision of herself and the description of Lucifer in the painting is remarkably similar; here, she identifies with Lucifer, cast out of his paradise, and like the fallen angel (or “morning star”), she grieves her losses. Diane Cousineau writes, in Letters and Labyrinths, “When Annie sees her face reflected in a shop window, she is appalled in part by

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the alarming changes that adolescence has brought—her image strange, unexpectedly large, and ugly—but also because she sees herself through the eyes of her mother’s disapproval and therefore identifies with Lucifer in his fallen state, ‘lonely and miserable’ (95)” (125).6 In contrast to Annie John’s “miserable” identification with Lucifer in the novel Annie John, Lucy revels in her identification with Lucifer, “transformed from failure to triumph” (152). The name ‘Lucy’ suddenly supplants ‘Enid’ as the one the girl desires, though she “would have preferred to be called Lucifer outright” (153). The identification with Lucifer in these texts is closely related to the girl’s identification with the jablesse, or djablesse, in the stories in At the Bottom of the River, as already discussed in chapter 2. In the next section, seeking to both refute and complicate the commonly held (and hegemonic Christocentric) misconceptualization that Lucifer is one, not many or legion, I overview the metamorphic genealogical histories of the figure of Lucifer as s/he creatively emerged and became linguistically and theologically manifold within biblical and literary texts.

Naming / Misnaming Lucifer: “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, Son of Dawn!” I did not know how much I was rooting for the Devil. —Kincaid in Vorda, “I Come from a Place That’s Very Unreal”

Biblical accounts of Lucifer may be traced to one passage: Isaiah 14:12–14. How one reads, translates, and exegetically interprets this passage, however, depends on whose Bible is being read, which language it has been written in, transcribed from, or translated into, and whose theological traditions have been brought to illuminate the biblical verses. In the Torah, or Hebrew Bible, the name ‫רחש ןב לליה‬, heilel ben-shachar, means “shining one, son of dawn,” and it signifies the planet Venus, known in antiquity as the “morning star.” Symbolically, in the passage from Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible, the “morning star” referred to the Babylonian king. The New Oxford Annotated Bible translates ‫רחש ןב לליה‬, heilel ben-shachar as “Day Star, son of Dawn!” with the full translation reading as follows: 12

How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! [‫רחש ןב לליה‬, heilel ben-shachar] How you are cut down to the ground, You who laid the nations low!

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You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne Above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of assembly On the heights of Zaphone; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit.7

According to Charles M. Laymon in The Interpreter’s One Volume Commentary on the Bible, The prose intro. in vss. 3–4a [the preceding passages] indicates that the setting of the material which follows is the period of the exile in Babylon and that there is the prospect of a release from servitude when Babylon falls. Together with the interpretive comment of vss. 22–23 it makes the application of the intervening poem seemingly clear as referring to the fall of Babylon. The remainder of the ch. is concerned with an earlier situation, that of the fall of Assyria and a judgment on Philistia (vss. 24–31), culminating in a final hopeful word for Zion. (341) Exegetical commentary included in the New Oxford Annotated Bible also notes that the passage from Isaiah “[d]raws on a Canaanite myth of the Gods Helel and Shahar (Morning Star and Dawn), who fall from heaven as a result of rebellion” (999 Hebrew Bible). Laymon similarly writes, The theme of downfall is vividly elaborated in a mythological picture. The tyrant is likened to the Day Star (vs. 12), pictured as rebelling and seeking to find a place enthroned in the assembly of the gods on the far N mountain, to ride the clouds, and to be like the Most High. The language and allusions of this point to Canaanite mythology, and a comparison may be made with similar material in Ezek. 28. The dwelling of the gods and the riding of the clouds are both known to us from the Ras Shamra texts found at Ugarit in N Syria, and so too is Dawn as a deity, of whom this figure is described as son. The Most High is Elyon, the title so often used of God in his association with Jerusalem. All these elements may

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be paralleled in the OT, suggesting how richly Canaanite religion and mythology have influenced OT thought. (341; bold in original commentary) In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that dates from the Hellenistic period of Alexandrian rule in Judea, the Hebrew ‫רחש ןב לליה‬, heilel ben-shachar is translated as °osjorouV (Eosphorous) or °ousjorouV (Eousphorous), which is synonymous with josjorouV (Phosphorous), both of which denote the “morning star” or Venus. The extended passage in Greek reads as follows: HSAIAS ~ V ÷x°pesen ÷k tou˘ o¶ranou ˛ …wsj¬roV ˛ pw rw¥ ™nat°llwn; sunetr√bh eÎV t‹n gh~n ˛ ™post°llwn pr¿V pºnta tΩ ⁄qnh. ~ 13 s∞ d‰ eÎ paV en t h~ diano√a sou EÎV t¿n o¶ran¿n ~n' ™st°rwn ' tou˘ o¶ranou˘ q–sw t¿n ™nab–somai, ÷pºnw tw ~ ~ ÷p¥ tΩ #o¢rh tΩ •yhlΩ tΩ qr¬non mou, kaqiw ÷n #o¢rei •yhlw ~ ' pr¿V borran, ~ ~n [nejelw ~n], ⁄somai 14 ™nab–somai ÷pºnw twn nejw ~ ∏moioV tw •y√stw . 15 ˘ ' nun dÆ eÎV '≤dhn [≤dou] katab–sh ka¥ eÎV tΩ qem°lia ~ ~ ' ' ' thV ghV. 12

In his creation dialogue, the Timaeus, Plato also uses variants (…wVj¬ron, …wVj¬roV) of the noun °osjorouV (Eosphorous) to signify the planet Venus, or the “morning star.” Rather than a mythological account of fall, disarray, and cosmological disorder, Plato’s myth is one of creative or harmonious order: So then this was the plan and intent of God for the generation of time; the sun and moon and five other stars which have the name of the planets have been created for defining and preserving the numbers of time. And when God had made their several bodies, he set them in the orbits wherein the revolution of the Other was moving, in seven circles seven stars. The moon [sel–nhn] he placed ~n], and in the second above the earth in that nearest the earth [gh ~ ≈¢lion] and the morning star […wVj¬ron] [ghV] he set the sun [h ~] he asand that which is held sacred [˘er¿n] to Hermes [#Ermou signed to those that moved in an orbit having equal speed with the sun [≠l√w ], but having a contrary tendency: wherefore the sun and Hermes' and the morning star [ ≈‹ l√oV te ka¥ ˛ tou~

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#Ermou~ ka¥ …wVj¬roV] overtake and are overtaken one by another. (Timaeus 38e) When Jerome translates the passage into Latin as part of the canonical Christian Vulgate, he does not translate directly from the Hebrew text; rather, he translates from the Septuagint, or from the Greek, into Latin. Jerome’s Latin term Lucifer (from lux, light + ferre, to carry or bear) is the first appearance of the word ‘Lucifer’ in biblical scriptures to denote Venus or the “morning star.” In Latin, the extended passage reads: LIBER ISAIAE Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, Lucifer, fili aurorae? Deiectus es in terram, qui deiciebas gentes, 13 qui dicebas in corde tuo : « In caelum conscendam, super astra Dei exaltabo solium meum, sedebo in monte conventus in lateribus aquilonis, 14 ascendam super altitudinem nubium, similes ero Altissimo. » 15 Verumtamen ad infernum detractus es, in profundum laci. 12

While it is clear that the Latin noun ‘lucifer,’ or ‘lucifero,’ was a common astrological name for the planet Venus during the late antique period, what is less clear is precisely the moment or date when the noun became a personal noun and when the figure of the fallen “morning star” became equated with the cosmological source of all evil in the Christian mythological universe. According to commentary in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, “In Christianity the myth reemerges as the fall of Lucifer and his attendant angels (cf. Lk 10.18)” (999 Hebrew Bible). But precisely when this occurs is unclear. For example, in the Vulgate, Jerome also uses the exact same Latin word—‘lucifer’—to compare Jesus to the “morning star” when translating 2 Peter 1:19 from the Greek New ~≈ kalw ~V Testament (ka¥ ⁄comen bebai¬teron t¿n projhtik¿n l¬gon, w ~ ~ ~ ' poieite pros°conteV „V l§cnw ja√nonti ÷n a¶cmhrw topw , ¤wV o• ' ™nate√lh ÷n tai~V kard√aiV ' ' •mw ~n) ≠m°ra diaugºsh ka¥ jwsj¬roV ' ' into Latin (Et habemus firmiorem propheticum sermonem, cui bene facitis attendentes quasi lucernae lucenti in caliginoso loco, donec dies illucescat, et lucifer oriatur in cordibus vestries): “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your

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hearts” (King James). The fact that the Greek term used for “morning star” in 2 Peter 1:19 is jwsj¬roV (‘Phosphorous’), not °osjorouV (‘Eosphorous’), makes Jerome’s translation as ‘lucifer’ all the more striking. Given the fact that ‘lucifer’ commonly denoted Venus in the fourth century CE, it seems almost unthinkable that Jerome would have used the Latin noun ‘lucifer’ to describe Jesus, assumed within Christian soteriological theology to be the risen Christos and ascended Soter, if the term had already become saturated with its theological resonances with evil, disorder, sin, death, and a state of fallenness from divine being, unless, of course, the passage intends to explicitly affiliate the damning spatiotemporal fall of Lucifer (and of Man) with the redemptive, eternal-infinite ascent of Jesus as interlocking cosmological events, which is also a theological possiblity, but a decisively Manichean one. What is clear is that by the time that the Latin Vulgate was translated into the vernacular English, albeit the King’s English, in 1611, the noun ‘lucifer,’ or ‘lucifero,’ had long been personalized, singularized, and vilified as the source of all evil, woe, sin, accursedness, and affrontery to God in the universal cosmological order. The passage from Isaiah in the King James Version of the Bible reads: 12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. 15 Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

As may be seen from even this briefest of historical overviews, genealogical histories for the figure of Lucifer (or more precisely, Venus, or the “morning star”) are myriad, intricately overlapping, linguistically and theologically distinct.8 And the sources for Lucifer are not merely biblical, they are also decisively literary. Two works of literature that theologically and poetically wrestle with the postlapsarian Christian figure of Lucifer are John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante Alighieri’s Divina commedia, particularly Inferno, the first canticle. While several scholars, notably Simmons, have written on Kincaid’s identification with Lucifer in Paradise Lost, I want to move that discussion beyond a thematic reiteration of Milton’s epic poem. To complement but also to complicate these readings, I illustrate in the next section the ways in which Kincaid’s novel incorporates elements of Dante’s

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Inferno and yet also refuses the Augustinian conceptualizations of evil (and by association, the fallen Lucifer) as negative, privative, or insubstantial (a theology of which the Florentine author is legatee, in part, through Thomist scholasticism).

Hurled across Space and Time? The Diabolic as the Diasporic, Lucifer as Lucy In Dante’s Inferno, at the deepest pits of hell, the fallen world turns out to be totally frozen, not fiery at all: Dis, or Lucifer, is frozen up to his waist, if not his three heads (devouring Judas! Brutus! and Cassius!). Virgil and Dante climb his hair as a ladder into purgatory to emerge up from down to find themselves on the other side of hell ascending toward heaven through purgatory, which has scattered into the remote distance from Lucifer who fell head-first into the icy lake. The canto is quite bizarre in (at least) two respects: on the one hand, the head of Lucifer becomes the ladder/bridge through the center of the earth (from the northern to the southern hemisphere) and, the sojourners ascend, quite literally, up Dis’ inverted ass into purgatory, and thus his ass marks the exit portal from inferno and the entry point into paradisio (via purgatorio); the passage is excrementary, if ascending; and on the other hand, Lucifer’s fall actually informs or creatively structures the celestial sphere in that he is a force that causes the earth and the heavens to scatter away from him.Terratological and celestial diasporic (and diabolic) movement is figured theologically (or atheologically) as creative, or generative (from the same etymological Greek root as gen–siV, genesis). While not Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” as the substantive essence of God (the “I am”), Lucifer, nevertheless, is the “moving mover” whose fall scatters the earth and firmaments: once fallen, Lucifer becomes Dis (“Ecco Dite,” “Behold Dis,” Dante writes, reversing the words of Pilate spoken of Jesus: “Ecce Homo,” “Behold the Man”), the “unmoving” who cannot “move” (himself, others, or other objects), though he gnaws the “unmoving” bodies of the three traitors—Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.9 Kincaid accomplishes something very similar to Dante, I contend, in the novel Lucy: Antigua is tropical and hot, yet her mother is fiery, blazing, godlike; and New York is cold, icy, dreary; yet like Lucifer in Paradise Lost, she gets to diabolically reign in hell, which is better than to serve in heaven, as Milton’s Lucifer proudly proclaims. Kincaid reverses heaven’s and hell’s parameters: like Dante’s inferno, New York’s hellish diasporic location is frozen, icy, and cold. Antigua’s scorching climes are occupied by a divine mother who casts out her created, angelic child: Lucy/Lucifer. Mother is no benevolent deity, though: she is vengeful, retaliatory, oppressive, restrictive, dominating, and punitive. In Kincaid’s novel Lucy, mother is divine, yet evil,

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even villainous: “—she was a ball of fury, large, like a god” (150). She is, in fact, much like the Judaeo-Christian concept of God the Father, the righteous exactor of justice. And Lucy, like Lucifer, is a fallen angel who will rule in other worlds of her own literary creations, or geneses. Kincaid accomplishes similar sorts of reversals with God, Satan, and Job in Mr. Potter, in which the title character’s grandfather is a suffering Joblike figure, and God, not the devil, becomes the challenger and evil inflictor of pain, doom, and suffering. Kincaid’s novel thus not only underscores the motif of “paradise lost,” or “hell,” or diabolic points of creation that are possible only in a postlapsarian state but also profoundly rewrites and powerfully reinscribes the corporeal, geographical, and metaphysical boundaries of that myth. I find Kincaid’s reversal (or even refusal) of the Augustinian conception of evil to be quite fascinating: Augustine, in an effort both to move away from Manicheeism’s dualism and to sustain Monotheism, postulates that evil has no ontological valence or that it is precisely nothing or nothingness, that it is privation only (i.e., the negation or absence of god). Dante’s Divina Commedia has typically been conceived to be both Thomist and Augustinian in its theological literary formations, yet the pits of hell and Dis make Lucifer very much a creative, ontological force albeit creative through descent or destruction: that is, his fall from Eden. And while it is true that Lucifer, once fallen and transformed into the nearly impassive Dis, is passive and immobile in Dante’s Inferno, his fall (as Lucifer, the star of dawn’s light) undeniably causes movement; he is thus a “moving mover,” if not an “unmoved mover,” in Aristotelian metaphysical terms:10 Da questa parta cadde giù dal cielo; e la terra, che pria di qua si sporse, per paura di lui fé del mar velo, e venne a l’emisperio nostro; e forse per fuggir lui lasciò qui loco vòto quella ch’appar di qua, e sù ricorse. [This was the side on which he fell from Heaven; for hear of him, the land that once loomed here made of the sea a veil and rose into our hemisphere; and that land which appears upon this side—perhaps to flee from him— left here this hollow space and hurried upward.” (Mandelbaum trans.)] [On this side he fell down from Heaven; and the earth, which before stood out here, for fear of him made a veil of the sea and came to our hemisphere; and perhaps in order to escape from him that

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which appears on this side left here the empty space and rushed upwards. (Singleton trans.)]11 Scholars have typically identified Paradise Lost as Kincaid’s source of literary influence in Lucy, yet the author’s depictions of Lucy/Lucifer seem also to have been influenced by Dante’s Inferno from Divina commedia. Of course, in Paradise Lost, Lucifer creates a bridge across Chaos to Earth; but he himself (sui generis) in body is not an embodied bridge to paradisio (via purgatoria) as in Dante’s Divine Comedy. To interrupt the neatness of intertextual and thematic critical readings of Kincaid’s novel Lucy in relation to Paradise Lost, I further gesture toward the theoretical implications of the diasporic as diabolic in part through an etymological argument. Kincaid’s understanding and portrayal of both the diasporic and the diabolic is as fully informed by Obeah and African diasporic religions as by European Christianity that infiltrated the Caribbean through colonialism’s “civilizing mission,” and which became syncretized with African diasporic and Amerindien (Arauac, Carib, Taino) belief systems. Religious syncretizations incorporate more nuanced (and less axiomatic) valences to figures like jabs and jablesses. In other words, Caribbean creolized conceptualizations of the diasporic and the diabolic defy the negative (and negating) metaphysical logic of Christianity: within Obeah, the diasporic and the diabolic are syncretic fusions that ultimately resist (through ambivalent creolizations of thought and forms) the overly dichotomized Christian logic of good-and-evil. Kincaid’s conceptualizations of Lucifer and the diabolic are thus distinctly Caribbeanized ones in the sense in which African diasporic spirits became both “converted” by and “perverted” by Christian notions. In Obeah, for example, a jablesse, or djablesse (a creole or patois form partially derived from “diablesse,” yet culturally, historically, and folklorically distinct from the Christian notion of a “she-devil”), is a perilous, seductive, metamorphic figure but not the source of all evil in the universe; in fact, the jablesse remains quite an animistic figure. In Haitian Vodou, for example, the lwa (or spirits) are signified by words that—from a Christocentric world view—might seem contradictory: mystès (mystères), anj (anges), but also djab (diab): within the syncretized world view of Vodou, however, devils are angels, and angels, devils. So Lucifer is the fallen angel, the ascended devil. Kincaid’s figurations of the jablesse are strikingly similar, in fact, to the ways in which Vodou lwas are commonly and interchangeably referred to as “mysteries,” “angels,” and “devils”—with no apparent contradictions in the multiple and shifting valences between “good” and “evil” as would clearly be the case from a Christocentric perspective. The etymology for diº-boloV, dia-bolos (both a “slanderer” and the “Devil” of Christian thought)12 comes from dia-bºllw, dia-ballo¯, which means to throw or hurl across (space): the diabolic thus has a metaphoric

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and spatial relation to the etymological roots for dia-sporº, dia-spora (“dispersion”) from dia-spe√rw, dias-spero¯, which means “to scatter abroad,” or “throw about,” but also “to be scattered abroad,” as in “to scatter seeds,” across the earth or ground spatially.13 Scattered seeds also suggest a rerooting, though only with contingent radicles (or rhizomes, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest). We need to reconceptualize the Caribbean as diasporic and diabolic—a countercurrent to colonialist depictions of Antillean “paradise.” Edenic metaphors for the Caribbean are indeed as old as Columbus’ first sighting! And diabolic forms of resistance (through creolized religious fusion, syncretic ritual practices, and ultimately, through slave revolts) are just as pervasive. In Kincaid’s literary oeuvre, and indeed throughout the Caribbean, the diabolic functions as an anticolonialist counterforce, precisely because a jab (djab) or jablesse (djablesse), while a menacing figure who strikes fear, is not an “evil” creature or entity. A jab, or jablesse, is powerful and awe-striking. And Kincaid plays on a very romantic idea: the jablesse as a creative force that supplants God. According to the Liddell-Scott Greek-English lexicon, dia-ballo¯ may also mean “to set at variance, to make a quarrel between”; “to be at variance with”; “to traduce, slander, calumniate”; “to be filled with suspicion (against another)”; “to misrepresent (a thing), to state slanderously”; “to give hostile information (without insinuation of falsehood)”; “to deceive by false accounts, impose upon”; or “to be slanderously told that . . .” While these definitions of the “diabolic” all gesture toward a flouting of truth, or the deliberate prevarications crafted to deceive, Kincaid’s novel Lucy also refuses these axiomatic significations: for Kincaid, truth may be told precisely through lying; and autobiography disclosed (or veiled) through fiction. Borrowing the language of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, I pose these questions: If God is the “unmoved mover,” how might we reconceive of Lucifer (in medias res; or quite literally, in the midst of falling) as a “moving mover,” one whose very falling creates movement or cosmological traffic? If space and time—according to Augustinian theology—are the created parameters with God alone as eternal and infinite (or: outside of his own creation), then Lucy/Lucifer charts moving trajectories across spatiotemporal or diasporic boundaries without becoming fully static (or emplanted) like Dis. For Milton, Lucifer (even in his postlapsarian state) remains a dynamic instigator of no good, a meddler on earth and in human affairs.(In this way, Lucy is undeniably like Milton’s Lucifer.) For Dante, conversely, Lucifer/Dis does not actively mediate—or meddle, in the Miltonian sense—precisely because he has been permanently and passively “emplanted” in the earth as its central axis or as a bridge from northern to southern emisperio, in effect becoming a perversion of the Edenic “tree of life.” The verb diabºllw, or diaballo¯, also raises vexing or thorny questions: Is Lucifer hurled by God (the “unmoved mover”) across space/time as a consequence of his rebellion (and thus the fall itself constitutes an act that

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absolutely—and merely—adheres to the divinely ordained natural laws of the universe)? Or might the agency of Lucifer’s own free will and subsequent rebellion cause (or: generate) the movement of the fall? Here the distinction between effect/consequence and cause/force seems crucial. Are the cosmological rearrangements of earth and heaven mere effects of, or rather consequences of, the fall? Or contrarily, are they the affective realignments of a diabolic (and hurling) causative agent or force? And how might we understand Kincaid to be playing with these theological problems or philosophical questions in her novel Lucy? I argue (in Aristotelian terms) that if God is the “unmoved mover,” then Kincaid remains invested in a falling Lucifer (a “moving mover”), rather than an absolutely fallen (i.e., postlapsarian) Lucifer (in Dante’s Inferno, no longer Lucifero, morning star of light, but Dite, or Dis). As the moving mover whose falling (in Dante’s Inferno) creates movement (the terra and cielo scattering away as if to flee), Lucifer contrasts with Dis (in a postlapsarian hell) as the “immovable” and “unmoving” (or at least limited to the automatonlike fluttering of his three head’s wings to freeze the lake and the munching of his three mouths, or his endless gnashing of teeth). For Kincaid, and her playful or ludic, if also diabolic, literary imagination, there is no “postlapsarian” hell: the dynamic movement of falling is thus liminal to heaven and hell; and Lucy/Lucifer remains a liminal figure that dynamically moves (i.e., a moving mover). Lucy/Lucifer is therefore a diabolic/diasporic figure, charting moving trajectories across spatiotemporal boundaries without becoming fully static (or “emplanted”) like Dis. I thus conclude by proposing that we simultaneously adopt yet radically revise that age-old motif of diaspora experienced as an unending state of exilic “hell.” To do so requires that we rethink, as I have sought to do, the categories of the “diasporic” and the “diabolic,” while rejecting the notion that the latter is, ineluctably, a negatively structured category.

Creative (In)Conclusions, Literary Metamorphoses: Migrating with the Moving Mover If Lucy’s mother, associated with divine scripture and divine betrayal, is both an omnipotent god “from an ancient book” (150) and Mrs. Judas (130), Mariah is a demigod who gives the gift of a notebook “of leather, dyed blood red” (162). The image of the “blood red” notebook parallels Lucy’s description of her mother as “the color of boiling blood” (150). In this blood red notebook, Mariah urges Lucy to record her experiences as a woman (the identity Mariah believes they share: gender and gender oppression). When Lucy decides to leave Mariah’s house, she tells Mariah that “my life stretched out ahead of me like a book of blank pages” (163); when Mariah

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gives Lucy the notebook, she reminds Lucy of that fact. Mariah’s gift leaves Lucy still feeling scripted, despite the blank pages “white and smooth like milk” (162) that the older woman tells her to fill with feelings, thoughts, and ideas, just like other women have historically done. This act—giving Lucy a notebook, a life, an objective to write—reveals Mariah’s authorial position for Lucy; to become a writer, though, Lucy must destroy those who will to author her life on her behalf. Lucy must renounce the divine in order to embrace (and become and be) the diabolic, the moving mover who refuses static worlds of other’s creating for her own diasporic terrains in which she, like Lucifer, reigns (“better to reign in hell . . .”). Lucy’s metamorphoses—from cherished child to injured adolescent girl to diasporic young woman and ultimately to diabolic adult writer—can only fully occur when she obliterates the scripted narratives that both her mother (“British colonial subject”) and Mariah (“women, journals, and of course, history,” 163) have written for her. Compare two passages from Lucy that Kincaid closely juxtaposes, though each passage is located within a different chapter. The first passage is from the final pages of the chapter “A Cold Heart”: Mariah wanted to rescue me. She spoke of women in society, women in history, women in culture, women everywhere. [. . .] Mariah left the room and came back with a large book and opened it to the first chapter. She gave it to me. I read the first sentence. “Woman? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female—this word is sufficient to define her.” I had to stop. Mariah had completely misinterpreted my situation. My life could not really be explained in this thick book that made my hands hurt as I tried to keep it open. My life was at once something more simple and more complicated than that: for 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. (131–32) The passage above reveals Mariah’s script for Lucy’s life, and like the scene in which Mariah shows Lucy daffodils for the first time, Lucy is speechless (“I couldn’t speak . . .”). Mariah’s voice (echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex) and her insistence on speaking for Lucy deprives the younger woman of her own voice. The second passage reveals a different script, one that Lucy’s mother has authored for the girl. The passage quoted below, which offers a parallel and a counterpoint to the first, is taken from the beginning of the next and final chapter entitled “Lucy”: “I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law

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and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence” (133). Lucy becomes Lucifer and thus acquires being as Lucy: she is herself, not her mother or her mother’s echo, ontologically speaking. In this last namesake chapter (“Lucy”) of the novel Lucy, the protagonist must unfetter herself from the narratives written for her by Mariah and by her mother; she must learn to name herself in order to possess herself. As the novel ends, Lucy writes her name “Lucy Josephine Potter” on the first page of the notebook that Mariah has given her, and though “many thoughts rushed through” Lucy, she can only write, “’I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it’ ” (163–64). But this love is one that Lucy has already known all too well; recall the earlier passage in which Lucy laments that “for 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). Moved by shame and intense emotion for desiring (and for having experienced) love that destroys, Lucy cries, and the tears that “fell on the page . . . caused all the words to become one great big blur” (164). Before Lucy can write her life, she must first destroy the prescripted narratives that others have authored for her; only then can she emerge as a writer and a woman (and a devil of one at that!) in her own right. The tearful blurring of words on page erases prescripted narratives through an emotional, even corporeal release of love that one could die from; she purges her mind and her body from that shameful and ultimately self-destructive desire. Lucy emerges, painfully, as a writer in the novel itself and this movement is circular, but ultimately self-fulfilling: although the book seems to end before we fully witness this transformation, we know (in Jamaica Kincaid) that Lucy will write; moreover, the book (Lucy) that we are in the final process of reading is the book that Lucy (Jamaica Kincaid) has presumably written. If, as Lucy implies, her conception is illegitimate, her emergence as a writer will not be. Lucy’s book is not one of shared gender oppression (or of women and history, as Mariah desires), nor is it one of uncomplicated, transracial love and affection for Mariah (or self-annihilating love for her mother); rather, it is (in the book Lucy that we have read) one of racial and colonial domination (or marginalized groups and history), a history that often unfolds among women (as among Lucy, her mother, and Mariah, and seen in Mariah’s “insisting that I be the servant and she the master” 143). Kincaid thus illustrates that the roles of good and evil, victor and vanquished, God and Lucifer, like those of colonizer and colonized, are already culturally determined and value-laden positions; she forces us to see through the eyes of the fallen, the cast out, the banished. This role, though, is not purely that of victim: Lucifer, like the jablesse, is a creative force—generating words and worlds. Kincaid’s texts (in their devilish

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identifications) suggest provocative ways for rethinking diaspora: to reiterate, in concluding, diasporic and diabolic share etymological prefixes in ancient Greek, and their meanings are similar; diasporic means to scatter seeds across land; diabolic means to throw, cast, or hurl across territory (space and time dimensions, across the heavens, into infernal pits); and both words suggest a dislocation from place of origin. How unsurprising then that in some discussions of diaspora the homeland is configured as a lost paradise and absence from it an unending hell! Kincaid reveals, though, that the diabolic and the diasporic may be creative of “new worlds” to inhabit. The seeds sown across new grounds—even if cast or hurled out of heavens—rhizomatically spread, form lateral roots, move into and across new territories, ones that are self-cultivated, self-owned, and self-defined. For Kincaid, the diabolic Lucifer (and by association, the diasporic Lucy), as “moving movers,” are positive, effusive, and ontologically substantive forces to be reckoned with: they are creative forces that effectuate movement or act as causative and disruptive agents against divine will. More important, for Kincaid, Lucy/Lucifer is not evil or destructive: rather, he or she is a conspirator who creates alternate worlds to inhabit. Although Judith Lee has quite thoroughly and compellingly overviewed a pre-Miltonian notion of Lucifer (far more extensively than my own brief gloss in this chapter) by examining the precursors in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the apocryphal Pseudephigraph, much to the critical-analytical neglect of the literary figure of Lucifer as depicted (and performatively embodied) in the novel Lucy, Lee’s overarching argument that Kincaid’s conceptualizations of Lucifer are directly linked to these earlier (and for Lee, more feminist) portrayals of Lucifer—as a messenger for God, a challenger of human fidelity to God (as in the Job narrative), and as a symbol of uncertainty in human existence—is ultimately less persuasive.14 Rather, Kincaid’s understanding of Lucifer (and thus her portrayals of Lucy in the novel) are distinctly Caribbean in origin: the presence of Lucifer in Lucy is directly related to the Caribbean diasporic figure of the jablesse (or jab), a creative, yet perilous force in a spiritually suffused and not damned “New World.” Kincaid’s diabolic-diasporic conceptualizations of the region (openly resisting, even subverting, prosaic and idealized notions of Antillean “paradise”) thus also articulate powerful countercultural challenges to European modernity as charted by trans-Atlantic slave ships; the enslavement of African peoples; the colonial and imperial conquest of property; the territorial acquisition of islands, oceans, and natural resources; the capitalist accumulation (or more accurately, theft; as Kincaid might say, Dem tief, dem a dam tief); and, most egregiously, the deliberate and disease-driven forms of native genocide against indigenous Caribs, Aruacs, and Tainos throughout the Caribbean archipelago.

4

Genre, Genealogy, and Genocide in The Autobiography of My Mother

“Damning History” Life is of course not a mystery, everyone born knows only too well its entire course . . . —Xuela Claudette Richardson, The Autobiography of My Mother

Unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you. You are conceived; you are born: these things are true, how could they not be, but you don’t know them. —Xuela Claudette Richardson, The Autobiography of My Mother

The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) is a novel in autobiographical form about Xuela Claudette Richardson, the protagonist, who at the age of seventy retrospectively recounts the events of her life as they have unfolded in Dominica. She begins by telling the readers that her mother (a beautiful Carib woman named Xuela who was herself orphaned as an infant) died “at the moment that she was born,” and this loss is the central preoccupation of the novel. We discover that Xuela’s mother was abandoned as an infant by her own Carib mother (to save her from certain death?) who left her outside a convent where she was discovered by Claudette Desvarieux, a nun, from whom she acquired her full name: Xuela Claudette Desvarieux. After her mother’s death, her father, Alfred Richardson (himself the son of Mary, an African mother, and John Richardson, a “Scots-man”), delivers her to

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the care of Ma Eunice Paul, a wet nurse who provides the infant shelter and nourishment but no love. At the age of seven, Xuela is sent to school, where she suffers greatly from the scorn of an African teacher who is Methodist and African boys who are merciless toward her because, though she is of mixed racial descent (Carib, African, Scot), they see only the Carib traits in her features and, thus, regard her as one of history’s most “defeated,” an heir to the legacies of colonialist genocide in the Caribbean. After dreaming of her mother’s nightly descent down a ladder from heaven (seeing only her “heels and hem”), and after writing a series of letters to her absent father, Xuela is rescued from this oppressive school and taken to her father’s house in Mahaut, where she will live for seven years with her father and her stepmother, a cruel woman who envies the love Alfred has for Xuela and her dead mother and who tries on numerous occasions to poison the child. Xuela moves again at fourteen, this time to Roseau, the capital of Dominica: she is given by her father (for financial profit?) to an elderly couple, Monsieur Jacques and Madame Lise LaBatte, to work in their house as a servant while she continues her education; her duties, she there discovers, include providing companionship to both Lise and Jack, the former by day, and the latter by night. When she becomes pregnant at the age of fifteen, it becomes apparent that the elderly couple has exploited her to obtain a child and that now pregnant, Xuela will fulfill, they hope, this desire. She flees to an abortionist, Sange-Sange, who rids her body of the unwanted child, and Xuela renounces motherhood for the remainder of her life. Following the abortion, Xuela isolates herself in the wilderness, after tracing the geography of her mother’s people’s land, and enters an androgynous phase; she leaves this isolation, later, at her father’s insistence that she return home, because her half-brother, also named Alfred, is ill and dying. Xuela returns briefly to the LaBatte’s house and then to her father’s, where she reveals the sadness and suffering of her half-brother and his sister Elizabeth, a daughter rejected by her own mother (who idealizes the son) and who desperately seeks love in the arms of a man. To see him, Elizabeth rides her bicycle to his residence, and returning one day, she falls over a precipice and suffers a great injury. Elizabeth’s British doctor, Philip Bailey, nurses her back to health, but she never fully recovers. Out of spite and the desire for revenge against her stepmother and the woman’s children, Xuela sleeps with her sister’s love and then marries Philip, after his own wife, Moira (a racist woman who scorns the Africans of Dominica), dies from a poisonous tea Xuela brews for her that ironically turns her skin black as coal and then kills her. Xuela reflects on her mother’s death at the moment of her own birth and also on her father’s death later in her life; her father, according to Xuela, was a cruel man driven by vanity, greed, and power. At the end of the novel, and at the end of Xuela’s life, although she has had a brief

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amorous and love-filled affair with a stevedore named Roland, she dwells in a loveless marriage with Philip, each locked in the “spell of history” that has defined them, respectively, the colonizer and the colonized. Complex interwoven narrative lines in the novel The Autobiography of My Mother, however, swirl concentrically and even obsessively around a single problematic: that of autobiography. In this chapter, I analyze that problematic. First, I examine how Xuela’s genealogy (Carib, African, Scotch) parallels the “historical processes” (Paravisini-Gebert 152) of conquest in the Caribbean—genocide, slavery, and colonial domination. Then, I explore how these historical processes are symbolically and historically embodied in the character of Xuela herself—through her maternal Carib and paternal African-Scotch genealogical lines. Finally, I hope to complicate the generic boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, novel and autobiography, by analyzing the ways that Kincaid inflects genre with the historical and narrative lines of genealogy and genocide in The Autobiography of My Mother. Xuela Claudette Richardson’s character is, as critics note, central to a postcolonial and historicist reading of the novel The Autobiography of My Mother. Xuela is key to unlocking the novel’s historic and symbolic puzzle: it is Xuela—through her mother’s fictional, autobiographical portrayal and that of her people, the Caribs—who stands as an intractable fragment of historical memory. Xuela; her mother, Xuela Claudette Desvarieux; and her Carib ancestors interlock to pose the problem of genocide at the foundation of the novel and of Caribbean history. And within this generically most complex novel, genocide also inflects genre: novel and autobiography are creatively imbricated, complicated, and even hybridized in this difficult text. Narrating her own story, as death approaches, through a telling of the “autobiography of my mother,” Xuela herself reflects, “I can hear the sound of much emptiness now . . . I only wish to know it so that I may one day tell myself the story of my existence within it” (226). Death is a radical alterity in Xuela’s life: the il y a, or ‘there is,’ of Levinas. Xuela’s autobiography of her mother is her own, as well as that of the children she never bore (she even claims that it is their autobiography of her), as well as an ancestral and genocidal history of the Carib people. For Xuela recognizes that “all roads come to an end, and all ends are the same, trailing off into nothing; even an echo eventually will be silenced”: Xuela, her mother Xuela, her unborn children, as Caribs, are birthed into “the great yawn of nothingness” (215, 197). Xuela realizes that her father—of African Scotch descent—fails to apprehend this historical annihilation when she muses, “He would not have asked, Who are the Carib people?” In all these ways (textual, philosophical, historical), The Autobiography of My Mother reveals how deeply imbricated are the fissures of genre, genealogy, and genocide. Xuela herself is this interface. Since the publication of The Autobiography of My Mother in 1996, in fact, literary scholars have continued to wrestle with the precise nature

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of Xuela Claudette Richardson, the protagonist of the narratively complex and philosophically convoluted novel. Is Xuela to be read intimately and personally, even psychologically? Is she to be interpreted, as the title coyly suggests, autobiographically, or as the title also intimates, biographically? Or should Xuela be understood historically, genealogically, even symbolically? Comparative literary critic Caroline Rody (in The Daughter’s Return) regards Xuela Claudette Richardson—and by extension, her Carib mother, Xuela Claudette Desvarieux—as representative of the indigenous peoples of the island Dominica and the entire Caribbean archipelago. As Rody writes, “The mother whose emblematic death spawns this profusion of negativity was a Carib of the island of Dominica, one of the region’s last retreats for the remnants of this indigenous people” (128). Rody also reads Xuela symbolically, seeing her as a literary embodiment of maternal refusal, the rejection of motherhood and the foundational (or genealogical) births of nationhood: “Kincaid’s heroine rejects the key symbolic gesture of choosing an adoptive daughter as an heir, of becoming mother of a nation. Indeed, she makes no gestures at all toward futurity” (129). Xuela eclipses time, history, expectation: she refuses the future. In the novel, Kincaid asks us to confront the loss of future horizons, the real of past genocide. Probing the historical contours of Xuela’s character, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert regards Xuela as the archipelago itself, arguing that the protagonist “embodies the historical trajectory of the Caribbean region” (144; italics added). If Xuela is cruel, as reviewers asserted, her “cruelty,” Paravisini-Gebert explains, “is the result not of an indifferent nature but of a historical process that has led to widespread moral deformity” (148; italics added). Yet Paravisini-Gebert also sees Xuela as “the least autobiographical, the most nakedly literary” of Kincaid’s characters: she is “meant to be read not as a faithful representation of a flesh-and-blood woman, but as an artifact of the text, as a voice than can articulate, flesh-out so to speak, the predicament of the individual and community subject to the full force of colonial oppression” (149). Extending Parvisini-Gebert’s paradigm, we might similarly ask if Xuela is not also an artificact of history or historical forces, both creative and destructive. Paravisini-Gebert does revealingly elaborate on the historical parameters of Xuela as Caribbean literary artifice: Kincaid’s meditation on history in the text . . . [t]his independent stand [Xuela’s] is crucial to Kincaid’s articulation of the Caribbean historical processes in the novel. Kincaid refuses to inscribe Xuela’s tale in the world of romance, romance being “the refuge of the defeated,” who need soothing tunes because their entire being is a wound. Instead she seeks to embody the historical process through the various heritages she receives from her parents: a Carib woman dead at the moment of her daughter’s birth, representative of a race

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doomed to disappearance from history from the moment of the colonial encounter; and a man of mixed African and European race torn apart by his historical legacy. (152; italics added) For Paravisini-Gebert, the entire Caribbean historical process is saliently, if brutally, articulated in the novel “through the interrelated themes of motherlessness, lovelessness, miscegenation, and the differences between the language of the colonizer and the colonized” (158). And however located within and as historical process, Xuela nevertheless longs to be “outside history” (Paravisini-Gebert 163). According to Caribbeanist literary critic Allison Donnell (1999), Kincaid self-consciously works within and against literary genres in The Autobiography of My Mother in the crafting of her fictional autobiographical character Xuela: In The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid locates her writing within a genre with a strong tradition of women’s writing and feminist criticism, as well as one which consciously brings to the fore questions concerning her own identity as a writer, a woman and an American-Antiguan subject. However, at the same time she forces an immediate dislocation from this generic positioning, signaling that this work is not seeking to define itself unproblematically as a piece of life-writing which takes either herself or her mother as its subject, but as a piece which addresses the multiple imbrications of self, m/other and writing. (124) Autobiography, Donnell demonstrates, is particularly vexing as a literary genre, and it is precisely within the convoluted contours and intractable logics of autobiographical writing that we must read this fictional autobiography, or autobiographical novel, and its protagonist Xuela. For Donnell, Xuela is an autobiographical artifice, a threaded and unthreaded, woven, and interwoven character, since “as a genre autobiography can be likened to a restless and unmade bed; a site on which discursive, intellectual and political practices can be remade; a ruffled surface on which the traces of previous occupants can be uncovered and/or smoothed over; a place for secrets to be whispered and to be buried; a place for fun, desire and deep worry to be expressed” (124). Citing Liz Stanley’s influential work on biography, autobiography, or the historical intersections of autobiography and biography as literary genres that explores the narrative and discursive lifewriting of the self and of others, Donnell articulates how life stories, or autobiographies, are always already informed by the life stories of others: “The idea that stories of the self always connect to stories of others, and that ways of being are enmeshed in ways

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of knowing, has prompted some critics to question the inevitable collision and conflation of autobiography and biography” (125). Stanley explains,

The notion of auto/biography involves the insistence that accounts of other lives influence how we see and understand our own and that our understandings of our own lives will impact upon how we interpret other lives, maximally it mounts a principled and concerted attack on conventional views that “works” are separate from lives, and that there can be an epistemology which is not ontologically based. (Stanley 1994, i; qtd. by Donnell 125) For Donnell, “[t]his notion of the ‘auto/biographical,’ . . . connects with both post-colonial and feminist theories which have sought to reconstruct the subject in an assertion of identity-based politics and theories of agency, and which have also been attentive to the idea of the self as a collaborative project in which both others and language play an active role” (125–26). The literary-ontological question that Kincaid seems to ask for and through Xuela is this one: “[H]ow can one represent an ‘other’?” (Donnell 1999, 126–27). As Donnell intimates, “this question of representation is implied in the very title [The Autobiography of My Mother] as ‘how can one tell somebody else’s story of the self?’ ” (127). Donnell identified this autobiographical conundrum as “the enigma of the proposed ‘autobiography of the mother’ as a text which seeks to write the story of the unknown mother in order to write the story of the self” (127).1 Ambiguity thoroughly riddles the interlocking and even contradictory meanings of autobiography in this novel: “Tantalised,” Donnell writes, “by these partial truths, we cannot be certain who the auto/biographer is [in] this text, or if there is more than one, for if this is Kincaid’s mother’s auto/biography, then Kincaid is still present as the ‘ghost’ writer/biographer” (127). For Donnell, the writing of autobiography is a complicated process that entails and “necessitates some rethinking around the relationship between self, other and writing” (127). Donnell sees this autobiographical process as being marked by the “slippage between mothers and daughters, mothers and mothers, fact and fiction, history and literature, autobiography and biography[, which] . . . foregrounds those questions of authorship and ownership which are implicit to all acts of writing, but are particularly highly charged with reference to autobiographical works which traditionally authorize themselves by their claims to authentic representation” (127). Naming, possession, and identity are deeply interconnected in the novel, clear from Xuela’s reflections on her mother, her mother’s name, and her own feelings of self-possession and dispossession: “And your own name, whatever it might be, eventually was not the gateway to who you really were, and you could not ever say to yourself, ‘My name

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is Xuela Claudette Desvarieux.’ ” This was my mother’s name, but I cannot say it was her real name, for in a life like hers, as in mine, what is a real name?” (79).2 As Donnell incisively explains, “[b]earing the name of her dead mother, Xuela needs to find the self in her story as well as the story of her mother which is embedded in her self. Her subjectivity is marked as both supplement and substitute to her mother’s, to which she is joined by a paradoxical and painful ‘connection through separation’ which is signified by the text’s refrain: ‘My mother died the moment I was born’ ” (128). For Donnell, the bios, or life story, is signed autographically (or through Xuela’s autograph) in the novel’s opening lines and precisely through her mother’s death that gives her life: to quote from Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother, as Xuela Claudette Richardson powerfully opens the narrative account of her life: 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. I could not have known at the beginning of my life that this would be so; I only came to know this in the middle of my life, just at the time when I was no longer young and realized that I had less of some things I used to have in abundance and more of some of the things I scarcely had at all. And this realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward: at my beginning was this woman whose face I had never seen, but at my end was nothing, no one between me and the black room of the world. I came to feel that for my whole life I had been standing on a precipice, that my loss had made me vulnerable, hard, and helpless; on knowing this, I became overwhelmed with sadness and shame and pity for myself. (3–4) For Donnell, it is not eclipsing of voice, but rather its “very composure . . . [that] is so unsettling, and the conjuring of a whole life as known and complete which is so intriguing” (1999, 130–31). As Donnell asks, and as Kincaid seems to beg her readers and critics to ask, How can a person know their own beginning and end in such a way as to bring that knowledge to language? Our birth and our death are events and stories which others must tell for us, but here there is no other, just the language of the self. It is a self which speaks the language of beginnings, middles and ends, of looking backwards and forwards; a self which speaks the language of writing and of reading. It is as if before we can read the story of this life, before the textualisation of subjectivity can commence in the more usual way—“When my mother died”—we must be given a prologue to

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the relationship between subjectivity, language and memory. It is a relationship in which the self and the story of the self cannot be separated, a relationship whose configuration was frozen at the moment of our narrator’s birth and her mother’s death. (131) Donnell thus concludes that “[t]he first sentence of the novel ‘My mother died at the moment I was born’ positions the mother as the necessary prerequisite to the ‘I,’ as all mothers are to their birth-children, but the absolute contiguity between death and birth also implies that the ‘I’—the identity constructed in the official, colonial language of English, her fathertongue—was created as a consequence of the mother’s death” (131). As in My Brother, the biographical autograph is sealed in and through the death of the other: one could even suggest that Kristeva’s notion of the “abject” mother inflects and infects Xuela’s maternal relationship to death (which is further extended through genocide, or Xuela’s dead mother who is from a historically “extinct” people, the Caribs): stillborn historically, yet literally dying while giving birth, Xuela Claudette Desvarieux also suffers genocide, enacts its historical resonances, and hers remains a death marred by violent, even annihilating historical forces. For Donnell, the death-birth, or genesis narrative that swirls into genocidal violence also marks the entry into language: “As we read more of Xuela’s story we learn how important the death of her mother and her entry into the English language are to this ‘I’ ” (131). Contexualizing this birth-into-language as a colonialist move into the English language that is predicated on the death of the mother, the abjection of the maternal body, and the ends of a Carib genealogy, Donnell suggests that Xuela’s odyssey is one of language, power, annunciation, and renunciation of self: With her mother’s death, Xuela is orphaned from the sensory reality of a body and a language in which the relations of self and other are not organized around ideas of individuation and hierarchy. But, unlike Kincaid’s other works, The Autobiography of My Mother does not stage a return to the mother’s pre-patriarchal, pre-colonial language (see Donnell, 1993; Murdoch, 1990; Natov, 1990), but rather attempts to negotiate a space of enunciation from within the English language. (131–32) That Xuela begins her life as a child in a state of self-imposed aphasia, or refusal to speak, until the moment that she proves herself fluent not only in French patois, but also in the Queen’s English, further underscores the ways in which language and power structure her identity: speaking and refusing to call her self into and out of being. We should recall Xuela’s own periods of aphasia as a child in the novel.

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Language and power nevertheless form the matrices of self-definition and discovery: and “[t]owards the end of the book, the adult Xuela writes herself a genesis story,” as Donnell notes, quoting a passage from the end of the book and near the end of Xuela’s life: “My life began with a wide panorama of possibilities: my birth itself was much like other births; I was new, the pages of my life had no writing on them, they were unsmudged, so clean, so smooth, so new. If I could have seen myself then, I could have imagined that my future would have filled volumes” (214). Xuela’s self-metamorphosis in language establishes the parameters or corps-texte for birth, rebirth, death, transformation in body and in language: it is not a writing of the body, or a writing on the body; it is a writing of body into being in and through language. Words write the body; the body articulates or refuses words or annunciation. And Xuela comes into being, drifts out of being through words announced and renounced, spoken and refused, written and erased. For Donnell, this articulation and disarticulation of self must be understood within the patriarchal and colonial order of things: Capturing in the image of an unwritten text the possibility of a life never to be lived, and in the language of cultural domination an identity she could not own, Xuela chronicles a brief moment of her being before entry into the social and cultural script of a patriarchal colonial society. Nevertheless, she must enter the language of this script in order to imagine her life outside it. In the English language which identifies her as other, Xuela is able to re-memory a self—a non-realist self which reconnects her to the stories others have told and will tell of her. Bearing her dead mother’s name, she marks the site of loss but also of continuity, she embodies the past as well as the present, the m/other as well as the self. In this autobiography, the “I” looks backwards and forwards, identifies subject and object, writer and teller in an act of collaborative subjectivity which rewrites the violent individuation of the child. If we ask again, “How can a person know their own beginning and end in such a way as to bring that knowledge to language?,” then this time we can answer that it is by allowing the language of the self to speak the language of others and be spoken by others. (133) We must also, I would argue, understand the articulation and disarticulation of self in relation to language, power, and being as an ontological script: one always already coded, of course, by the strictures of racism, colonialism, masculinism, and ultimately of genocidal violences. For Donnell, Xuela’s self-narrative ultimately “testifies to the reciprocal constitution of self and other, lives and works, autobiography and biography. Yet although this parting metanarrative functions as an explanatory narrative for the text as

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a whole, or of text or of identity—it is peculiarly other-directed. Indeed, in Kincaid’s text the idea of genres and of identities as mutually constitutive presents us not only with a particular politics of identity around an idea of the self, but also with the ethics of identification around the idea of the other” (134). In the pages that follow, I thus also address Kincaid’s alterbiographic deformations of the generic borders of autobiography in her novel The Autobiography of My Mother, a literary text that radically challenges the discreteness of myriad literary and philosophical categories: self, other, subjectivity, objectivity, autobiography, and biography.

“Brutality Is the Only Real Inheritance”: Genre, Genealogy, Genocide 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, and 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 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. —Xuela Claudette Richardson, The Autobiography of My Mother

Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother transmutes and refigures the boundaries of genre—specifically, those of autobiography and novel. In the passage quoted above, taken from the end of the novel The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid poses a textual and subjective conundrum: “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, and it is their account of me” (227). The first element in this conundrum suggests maternal interconnectedness, a merging of the lives of mother and daughter, the inability to separate their lives, their autobiographies; however, the second element frustrates such a reading of intimacy and subjective interrelation. It is not only the account of a mother and a daughter but also of all the children never born to the daughter; and more perplexingly, it is the account of the daughter’s life as given (however impossibly) by these (never-born) children. Asked in an interview with Dwight Garner for SALON magazine about the title of her 1996 novel, The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid again foregrounds, yet foils, an autobiographical reading. Garner comments

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that “[d]espite the novel’s title, it is only tangentially about the mother in the book and then asks, “Why did you call it ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’?” Kincaid’s response is illuminating. She explains that “it was a deliberate choice . . . somewhat explained in the book” by the fact “that the main character is a fertile woman who decides not to be”; she goes on to add, And that is drawn from an observation I’ve made about my own mother: That all her children are quite happy to have been born, but all of us are quite sure she should never have been a mother. I feel comfortable saying that publicly, I think. I try not to corner my mother anymore. Because I have at my disposal a way of articulating things about her that she can’t respond to. But I feel comfortable saying that the core of the book—and the book is not autobiographical except in this one way—derives from the observation that my own mother should not have had children. (5) The autobiographical element of the novel—coyly titled the “autobiography of my mother,” and yet at the same time, defined as a novel—is its geneaological refusal; Xuela’s refusal of maternity in the novel parallels Kincaid’s mother’s maternal refusal, if not a biological disavowal or a genealogical actuality, then an emotional and psychological one. The difference resides in the fact that Xuela actualizes a refusal of maternity and Kincaid’s own mother, according to the author, simply “should not have had children.” Autobiography, Kincaid suggests, is an elusive genre—one that can never be the account of one person’s life exclusively, as much as it cannot be a definitive account of life itself. Recall the epigraphic quotation that opens this chapter: “Unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you. You are conceived; you are born: these things are true, how could they not be, but you don’t know them” (202). In this text (autobiography? novel?), life borders death, and death informs the lives of those portrayed; the legacies of death and a refusal of birth also have tales to tell about the women who refuse. The autobiography, then, seems to elude its autobiographical subject and, like a scythe, mows down the lives of many caught in its path; here, autobiography portrays lives that are not, as much as it portrays those that are. The quotation further suggests that autobiographical representation always misses its mark, if it insists on transparency, reality, truth in language, a textual approximation of being. “In me,” Xuela intimates, “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 see me” (227–28). Xuela’s self-defining includes the unknown, even when that unknown is genealogy and the severing of

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genealogical continuity: she is her mother, her daughters and sons, and yet she has never seen their faces, never heard their voices, though they resonante within her. Xuela understands that she is that which she does not know: self-knowledge is as easy and as possible, as elusive and as impossible, as seeing those faces, hearing those voices—a profoundly arduous journey of discovery and the impossibility of fulfillment. Xuela thus concludes, “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” (228). The references in this sentence are unclear: who is the “person who was never allowed to be”? Xuela’s mother, Xuela Claudette Desvarieux? Xuela’s children? Xuela herself? Perhaps, all of these? And why was this person “never allowed to be”? What were the delimitations placed on her horizons of being and becoming? Clearly, Kincaid’s novel poses the difficulty of autobiography and frustrates the desire to tease out autobiographical veracity from the novel. In analyzing the question of genre in Kincaid’s writings, and to underscore the autobiographical-fictional matrix through which her texts are woven, I juxtapose passages from The Autobiography of My Mother with parallel passages from the earlier novel Annie John. The Autobiography of My Mother forms, in many ways, the mirror image to Annie John. In Annie John, her first novel, Kincaid retraces the memories and experiences of Annie John’s childhood growing up in Antigua. In the novel, Annie John’s love-hate relationship with her mother, Annie, takes center stage, and the novel explores Annie John’s growing independence from her mother. The evolution of Annie John as a self, though, is mediated through multiple relationships with others, both alive and dead: the spirits who inhabit the cemetery and follow Annie John; the charming schoolmate Gwen; the tempestuous and wild child Red Girl; the headmistress and her teachers at the school; Ma and Pa Chess; her quiet, loyal father who builds furniture for Annie John; her mother; and others, historical others as configured, for example, in “Columbus in Chains”; and even nonbeing itself. In the seventh chapter of Annie John, “The Long Rain,” Annie John becomes ill and is bedridden. During this time, Annie John enters a liminal phase—between childhood and adolescence, death and rebirth, stasis and motility, home and departure. Annie John is also between her mother, Annie, and her grandmother, Ma Chess, Annie’s mother: her mother values British culture and customs; the grandmother represents the Afro-Caribbean “Obeah” beliefs of Dominica; Annie stifles Annie John; Ma Chess nurtures her. Annie John must find her way between these extremes, between these two different women, and between two different value systems. Annie John’s bed in this chapter symbolizes the liminal territory (almost a wombic space) between, and her period of illness suggests death, transformation, and finally rebirth. In the final chapter, “A Walk to the Jetty,” Annie John leaves Antigua, her mother, her father, her

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childhood. Ironically, of course, in abandoning her childhood and her family, Annie John identically retraces her own mother’s footsteps, when Annie departed from Dominica, leaving her parents, Ma and Pa Chess, behind. At the close of the novel, Annie John departs for England, the place whose values her mother Annie reveres. Annie John is a self-in-transformation, on the move, departing. At the end of the fourth chapter of Annie John, “Somewhere, Belgium,” the protagonist, seeing a “big and solid shadow” (107), becomes frightened: “For I could not be sure,” Annie John laments, “whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world” (107). The opening lines of The Autobiography of My Mother echo, yet invert, this alterrelation of mother-daughter-shadow. At the opening of the novel, Xuela says, “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” (3). “Between me and the rest of the world” “. . . between myself and eternity . . .” In both narratives, Annie John and The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid weaves a fictional self in relation to other, and others, and in relation to world or eternity. In both narratives, self is positioned spatially, psychologically, and corporeally at one end of a spatial continuum with the presence or absence of another standing between the self and the remote space—contiguous, yet distant. The passages, though, are inversely related: in the first passage from Annie John, the child feels her mother to be too present, invasive, smothering, blocking her entry into the world—either in body or in shadow, but always “between me and the rest of the world” (107). In the second passage from The Autobiography of My Mother, the protagonist Xuela narrates her life, her birth, her loss of mother, reflecting on the day she was born and the day her mother died as an older woman looking back to her beginning and her end. In this novel, the mother is too absent, evasive, remote, this absence engulfing Xuela in an abyss of solitude she must endure and survive. In the mythological, genealogical “chaosmos” created in Kincaid’s oeuvre, we witness two narrators exploring the relations of self to family, community, world, space, time, and eternity. Each finds herself spatially located at one end of a pole with a presence or an absence mapping the liminal territory between; each marks her spatial-psychological embodiment in relation to other spheres of being. In Annie John, the girl Annie John seeks the world that her mother seems to deny; in The Autobiography of My Mother, Xuela seeks her mother who “died at the moment [she] was born,” the mother whose death left “nothing” between herself and eternity. These textual paths are mirrored in the short stories in At the Bottom of the River (1983), as well as in the novel Lucy (1990), the memoir My Brother (1997), the essays in My Garden (Book) (1999), and the short story “Biography of

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a Dress,” published in 1992 in the literary journal Grand Street. The stories in At the Bottom of the River all explore the life of the protagonist “Girl,” but the stories are transmuted in poetic form and abstract language. “My Mother,” one of the most lyrical and cryptic narratives in the collection, refigures the relations of mother-daughter, life-death, being-nonbeing, spiritmatter, human- and nonhuman forms. The short story mirrors the dynamic of self in relation to others seen in Annie John; in fact, Annie John may be read as a more extended meditation of self-in-relation. “My Mother” refigures and remaps the paths of the self (or of malleable selves) in motion. In the story, mother and daughter metamorphose into myriad forms—human, spirit, serpents hissing, crocodiles threatening to devour. The Autobiography of My Mother returns to the mise-en-abîme of self-other, refiguring these relations textually and visually. The novel is multifaceted, narrating many lives: those of Xuela Claudette Richardson, the orphaned daughter of a Carib woman and a very vain Afro-Scotch man; Xuela’s dead mother, Xuela Claudette Desvarieux, and the shadowy presence she casts in the novel as she climbs a ladder nightly in Xuela’s dreams, her heels and the white hem of her dress only seen; Xuela’s cruel father, Alfred Richardson, “the despised official” (103), whose colonial uniform becomes a second skin that replaces the old if it ever existed at all; Ma Eunice the caregiver for the young Xuela, the woman who also washes her father’s clothes; her stepmother who tries to poison Xuela; her idealistic stepsister, Elizabeth, who rides her bicycle over a precipice as she rides to meet her secret lover; her stepbrother, Alfred Jr., who mysteriously grows ill and suddenly dies; Madame Lise and Monsieur Jacques La Batte who take Xuela in—Lise to procure a child by the young woman, Jacques to procure sex; and the men she finally came to know—Philip whom she marries, and Roland whom she loves. Like Annie John, the novel The Autobiography of My Mother also includes historical others: John Wesley; John Hawkins; and the half-brothers, whose story reveals the heart of genocidal strife, Philip Warner and Indian Warner. The novel also tells of Xuela’s thousands of unborn children whom she aborts (she says, “I would bear them in abundance; they would emerge from my head, from my armpits, from between my legs; I would bear children, they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god” [97]). The visual layout of the first edition of The Autobiography of My Mother foregrounds a striking portrait of a beautiful Afro-Carib woman in brown and gold hues, donning a floral print dress, a linen blouse, beaded necklaces, a simple gold bangle, a printed scarf, and a headwrap; she is stately yet austere in her casual stance. On the back cover is a photograph of Kincaid wearing a floral print robe; like the woman on the front cover, she gazes impassively into the camera. Throughout the book the portrait of the unnamed woman

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appears in fragments: before the first chapter, only a sliver of the portrait is seen; each subsequent chapter reveals more and more of the portrait, until the final chapter reveals her in full: at the end, her fullness is manifest, as if falling and folding into the photograph of Kincaid on the back cover. The photograph is enigmatic, its reference ambiguous. So the title of the novel: The Autobiography of My Mother. Whose mother? The reference is unclear. Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother thus blurs the terrains and referents of both autobiographical prose and photographic transparency. If the reader presumes a clear autobiographical referent, an autobiographical self who narrates the story of her mother’s life, she will be mistaken. This “autobiographical enigma” is further problematized by the character of Xuela herself. There is a radical disjuncture between the beautiful lyricism of Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and, in the sentiments of many critics and readers, the utterly detestable character of Xuela Claudette Richardson. Reviewing the novel for the New York Times Book Review, Cathleen Schine calls The Autobiography of My Mother “shocking,” “a brilliant fable of willed nihilism” (5), whose protagonist is “intoxicated with self-hatred,” a “truly ugly meditation on life” (5; qtd. by Niesen de Abruna 181). Diane Simmons notes that “in a work that reviewers have called ‘inhuman,’ and ‘almost unbearable’ (Schine), ‘bitter’ and ‘repell[ant]’ (Kakutani), Kincaid portrays a world in which the coming-of-age girl is hopelessly trapped in history” (1998A, 107). “The rage and vehemence of the responses to the novel have unquestionably made it, since its publication” according to Paravisini-Gebert, “Kincaid’s most controversial text” (144). In the opening pages of the novel, the young protagonist, Xuela, who has been left in the care of Ma Paul Eunice, reflects on her lot in life and sadly concludes that “[i]n a place like this, brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is sometimes the only thing freely given” (5). Given her profound losses—first, the death of her mother in childbirth; then, the abandonment by her father—Xuela’s “inheritance” is indeed one tainted by death, tragedy, and neglect. Xuela’s “inheritance” is one that unfolds not only in the historical trajectories of her genealogical beginnings—Carib, African, Scot—but also in the gendered and colonialist manifestations of inherited power (her father’s hypervisible, territorial face, a colonial map, and the masks he dons) and disinherited powerlessness (her mother’s unseen face, her heels, and the hem of her dress). Xuela’s “inheritance” is a central preoccupation in the novel, and I argue here that it informs not only the character’s life but also the genre in which it is told. Genre, or the question of genre, in The Autobiography of My Mother is intimately linked to genealogy; and in the case of autobiography as genre, this intricate web of filiation, even in its broken or severed lines, forms a labyrinthine path for Xuela’s self-awakening. The fatal separation cutting off Xuela Claudette

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Richardson from her mother, Xuela Claudette Desvarieux, is mirrored by the maternal grandmother’s severing from her own daughter, who was “cut off” or abandoned by her own Carib mother, who leaves her on the steps outside a convent. What historical forces, we must ask, compelled the Carib woman to such an extreme form of genealogical loss, but also of protection and endurance, of sacrificial love collapsed into abandonment as perhaps the only means or path toward partial genealogical survival? The autobiographical problematic of the novel is bound, then, to Xuela’s genealogical loss, as well as that of her mother and maternal grandmother; it is bound to the genealogical loss of all Caribs in their old world that historically and violent became “new” in more dominant eyes, the tragic fate of the worst form of cultural contact. Xuela is part Carib, part African, and part Scot, like her creator, Jamaica Kincaid, who states in an interview with Allan Vorda, “I’m part African, part Carib Indian, and part—which is a very small part by now—Scot. All of them came to Antigua by boats. This is how my history begins” (81). Xuela’s mother, Xuela Claudette Desvarieux, was Carib, and Xuela’s father was biracial, the offspring of a Scot father, the rum trader John Richardson, and an African mother, simply Mary. Xuela’s mother, who dies giving birth to her only daughter, her only descendant, was also the descendant of a Carib mother, a mother who abandoned her own daughter on the steps of a convent. Xuela’s “mixed” racial heritage is an important part of the history she inherits, and as heir, her historical inheritance is burdensome; at the end of her life, Xuela states of her and her husband Philip, a British doctor, “We were weary; we were weary of being ourselves, weary of our own legacies” (221). The tragic death of Xuela’s mother is parallel to the historical genocide of the Caribs in the Caribbean islands, a point that I outline here but forground more extensively in the next section—particularly, its genocidal implications for genre and the writing of autobiography (a genre, by definition, grounded in the self and its life). Autobiography, in this context, then, borders on autothanography or the writing of death into one’s story or written account. In this section, I overview Xuela’s genealogy, including her father’s African Scotch descent and her mother’s Carib ancestry, as well as the Carib’s actual, historical genocide. I also discuss the problematic of genealogy for genre, particularly for autobiography. After all, one is, at least in part, the product of one’s genealogy, and the writing of one’s life is also the writing of the history of one’s genealogy; yet, alterbiographically, genealogy points to the limits of genre as well. I also examine how power and power relations of dominance and oppression enter into both genealogy and genre. In the section below addressing genre and genocide, I address more fully the aesthetic and philosophical implications of genocide for the writing (or rewriting or transmutations) of genre: how it impacts, shapes,

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or even misshapes and deforms the traditionally discrete boundaries of genre(s)—specifically, the generic terrains of autobiographical writing. Xuela’s maternal ancestral line is her “brutal” inheritance, her “crumbling” ancestral line. Much is made in the novel of Xuela’s Carib ancestry. As an elementary pupil, Xuela feels ostracized from the other students, who are of African or mixed European and African descent, because these students see only (and quite negatively read) her Carib features and their legibility in her face as racialized, embodied difference: “[T]hese boys looked at me and looked at me: I had thick eyebrows; my hair was coarse, thick, and wavy; my eyes were set far apart from each other and they had the shape of almonds; my lips were wide and narrow in an unexpected way” (15). Xuela explains, as an answer to the question of why they perceive her as manifestly different, I was of the African people, but not exclusively. My mother was a Carib woman, and when they looked at me this is what they saw: The Carib people had been defeated and then exterminated, thrown away like the weeds in a garden; the African people had been defeated but had survived. When they looked at me, they saw only the Carib people. They were wrong but I did not tell them so. (15–16) When the male students see Xuela’s face, they see more than racial difference; they see defeat, historical erasure, a trace of a people who did not survive. Just as Xuela’s peers see her as one of history’s “defeated,” so does her school teacher “who was trained by Methodist missionaries” (15). The teacher, who “was of the African people,” distrusts Xuela because she is Carib; however, she has also interpellated colonialist perceptions of herself and other non-European people that they “conquered,” enslaved, or exterminated. Xuela sees that this teacher regards her own Africanness as a great “source of humiliation and self-loathing, and she wore despair like an article of clothing, like a mantle, or a staff on which she leaned constantly, a birthright she would pass on” (15). The teacher suffers from her own interpellation of the colonialist and Christian-imposed, but selfperpetuated “humiliation and self-loathing”: she is no less merciless toward her part Carib pupil; defeat has not taught her compassion. Even when the child excels academically, the teacher blames it on Xuela’s ancestry, rather than lauding her efforts and intelligence. According to the narrator, “I learned to read and write very quickly. My memory, my ability to retain information, to retrieve the tiniest detail, to recall who said what and when”; however, Xuela was not praised for her intellectual astuteness.

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Instead, her mental acuity “was regarded as unusual, so unusual that my teacher, who was trained to think only of good and evil and whose judgment of such things was always mistaken, said I was evil, I was possessed—and to establish that there could be no doubt of this, she pointed again to the fact that my mother was of the Carib people” (16–17). Xuela, despite the racism she suffers as Carib, sees her mother and her mother’s people as “pure,” untainted by profane mixtures of the victor and the vanquished, which she associated with her father and his “mixed” genealogy as further addressed below. Xuela describes her mother’s skin as that of “the Carib people”—“brown, the deep orange of an old sunset”—suggesting her ancient indigeneity: she also notes its purity, how it “was not the result of a fateful meeting between conqueror and vanquished” (197). This passage has a parallel in the essay “The Glasshouse” from My Garden (Book). In this essay, Kincaid recalls visiting the botanical garden in St. John’s, Antigua, with her stepfather when they both were ill; she compellingly reflects on the imbrications of the human and the botanical, as well as of gardening, history, and conquest in the essay, and she wonders if the two of them were not just another specimen or object on display in the colonizer’s “glasshouse,” just as in this passage of The Autobiography of My Mother, she laments that the Caribs are no more than “living fossils . . . in a museum, on a shelf, enclosed in a glass case.” Xuela is also her father’s daughter, a historical product of her paternal genealogy. Alfred Richardson, Xuela’s father, is one of the two “legitimate” sons of a Scotsman, John Richardson, and his wife, Mary, a descendant of the African people, and “this distinction between ‘man’ and ‘people’ was an important distinction, for one of them came off the boat as part of a horde, already demonized, mind blank to everything but human suffering, each face the same as the one next to it; the other came off the boat of his own volition, seeking to fulfill a destiny, a vision of himself he carried in his mind’s eye” (181). John Richardson is described in the novel as a Scottish rum trader with red hair and gray eyes, the marking physical features of all of his descendants—red-head boys, both those “legitimate” and “illegitimate”—throughout the West Indies. His wife, Mary, is otherwise described; for her son Alfred, she is indistinct, unrememberable: “His mother remained to him without clear features” (183). Alfred’s father, John, dies at sea when the boy is eight years old; it remains a defining loss in his life; and he tells the story over and over again to his family, though it does not make him a more compassionate man; nor does it make him sympathetic to the sufferings of others, even his own first-born daughter later in his life. Xuela recounts the story of her father’s loss, the loss of his own father, as if the scene is a moment of time painted on the canvas of her father’s face:

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“It was a beautiful day, a day of such beauty that it remains stamped forever on my memory,” my father would say to me, telling me of the day his father boarded a boat that sailed to Scotland; it never reaches its destination, and so this picture that began in sunshine ended in the black of cold water, and my father’s face, my father’s very being, was the canvas on which it was painted. (195) Alfred’s mother, Mary, dies when he is a young man, “a policeman in St. Kitts and already on his way to establishing his own small dynasty of red-haired boys,” though Mary’s death is not so significant that the son returns to her funereal or discloses to his own daughter how she died (“of something . . . perhaps of heartbreak, perhaps not”) (183). Inside their son Alfred, “the Scots-man and the African people met” (185). Like her father, Xuela is part African and part Scot; and like her father, Xuela embodies both the victor and the vanquished, who meet in her very person. These two forces (those of the victor and the vanquished) were never at war in this man, Alfred Richardson, and Xuela explains, “My father rejected the complications of the vanquished; he chose the ease of the victor” (186). Alfred’s decision is so important, makes such an impact on Xuela’s life, that she reiterates her father’s choice once again: “And so as in my father there existed at once victor and vanquished, perpetrator and victim, he chose, not at all surprisingly, the mantle of the former, always the former” (192). Unlike her father, though, who assumes the mantle of the victor, the powerful, Xuela allies herself with the vanquished, the defeated. Contrasting herself with Philip Bailey (“this man I married was of the victors”), Xuela claims that “only through a book of history could he be reminded of a time when he might have been something other, something like me, the vanquished, the defeated” (217). Xuela is also, unlike her father, part Carib, and this overwhelming elemental mixture of Carib and African, as well as the lesser element that is Scot, creates in her a map for reading history: it is not blood (i.e., biological essence or race), but rather relations of power in history that determine victor and vanquished and their relative positions within individual subjects. Is Xuela, though, ineluctably the vanquished? Throughout the novel, Xuela allies herself with the “defeated, doomed, conquered, poor, diseased, head bowed down, mind numbed from cruelty” (187); however, she also assumes at times the mantle of the victor. These are Xuela’s contradictions. Though Xuela claims to be of the vanquished, she often exhibits cruelty toward many people—Ma Eunice, her stepmother (who well deserves it); her half-sister Elizabeth, her guardian Madame Lise La Batte, her British husband Philip Bailey; and his first wife Moira—thereby reversing historical and colonial relations of power. Xuela says that these forces—victor,

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vanquished; conqueror, defeated—were not at war in her father (196); these forces are, though, at war in Xuela, his first-born daughter. Just as genre and genealogy are intimately linked in The Autobiography of My Mother, so genre and genealogy are violently and irrevocably disrupted (on an historical as well as personal plane) through genocide. Like genealogy, genocide also has its etymological roots in the Greek word genos, but its other root is –cide from Latin, which means to kill, decimate, or destroy. Passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, it also marks (through absence, erasure, impossible beginnings, uncertain endings) Xuela’s future (Carib) generations that will never be. Xuela’s Carib ancestry is, as she sadly notes, one of the world’s “crumbling ancestral lines” (200). Xuela, of mixed racial descent (African-Scotch-Carib), marks the historical alterrains of the colonized Caribbean; her familial ancestry or genealogy symbolizes the historical forces of conquest, colonialism, slavery, and genocide; she embodies within her self, within her body, within her généalogie métisse (her mother’s Carib ancestry and her father’s African-Scotch ancestry), and within the text, the conflictual forces of the Caribbean’s history. Xuela’s alterrelations are not just those of métissage but also those of genocide and violent, imposed forms of nonbeing. Xuela speaks to, and for, those violently decimated: “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 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” (227–28). In the novel, Kincaid thus reveals what autobiography violently conceals and erases: the individuals, races, and communities erased from time and history, as well as the unfulfilled terrains of those who exist in the margins of time and history. When Xuela states, “I am not a people, I am not a nation,” not only do her words echo Walcott’s line, “Either I am nobody, or I am a nation” (from “The Schooner: Flight”), but they also reveal the foreclosure of some historical possibilities. Kincaid reminds us that some nations will never be. In Lucy, an alterbiographic novel, Kincaid’s protagonist, Lucy, both claims and destabilizes her claim to Carib ancestry. Unlike Mariah, who wears her “Indian heritage” like the badge of the “victor” who has devoured the “vanquished,” Lucy disavows the possibility of (or desire for) possessing Carib ancestral lines. To paraphrase Lucy’s description of her maternal grandmother in the novel Lucy, the people she came from are all dead. She further notes that some people, “if they could get away with it, . . . would put my grandmother in a museum as an example of something now extinct in nature” (40; emphasis added). Xuela, in her refusal of motherhood, not only resists colonialist appropriations of black female bodies (as she clearly does and as Caroline Rody suggests in The Daughter’s Return); she also reveals

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within her births made (historically) impossible, nations disallowed, people destroyed through genocide in the Caribbean. In an audiotaped interview of Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Enrique Fernández by Ray Suarez for “Talk of the Nation,” the talk turned to native Caribbeans and their “absence” or “presence” within history, geography, and the culture of the Caribbean islands. Questioned about whether descendants of Carib Indians remain in the Antilles, and Suarez conjecturing that they are “present in their absence,” Kincaid replied that “they survive in the way of relics and we needn’t pretend [otherwise]”; Danticat similarly responded that the Caribs and the Tainos and other indigenous peoples of the Caribbean “exist in literature and folklore as ghosts that surround us.”3 Yet people of Carib descent—even if one of history’s seeming “crumbling ancestral lines”—do exist in Dominica and throughout the Caribbean archipelago. Returning to the question of genre, we see that Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother weds self to others, present to future to past, and subjectivity to history. Kincaid’s text disrupts the boundaries of genre through broken genealogical lines. Unlike the story “Biography of a Dress” that attempts to recover past incarnations of self and others through memory, the novel The Autobiography of My Mother enacts, but also refuses, such historical recovery: the novel forcefully reminds its contemporary readers of harsh (historical) colonial legacies; it does so—beautifully, lyrically, violently, nihilistically—through its textual imbrications of self and radical alterity (i.e., death), subjectivity and its impossibilities, being and nonbeing. It does so, ultimately, through its textual imbrications of genre and genocide. All of Kincaid’s texts—from the early stories collected in At the Bottom of the River to her novels Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother, and the more recent nonfictional texts My Brother and My Garden (Book)—move through the alterrains of self and others, destabilizing and displacing traditional notions of autobiography and subjectivity, but few as forcefully as the novel The Autobiography of My Mother. In all of her writings, Kincaid illustrates the violence of subjective construction through objection (and altersubjective) annihilation. As destabilizing antiforms, her literary texts are alterbiographic, not autobiographic. And Kincaid’s texts, like Walcott’s, powerfully reveal that “every ‘I’ is a fiction finally” (Walcott 1992, 28).

“Crumbling Ancestral Lines” and the “Daughter’s Return” Kincaid stages impossible (genealogical and geographical) returns in her 1996 novel, The Autobiography of My Mother. Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother revisits genesis mythologies through the protagonist Xuela’s making and unmaking of possible worlds and descendants, as a way of confronting

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the historical realities of genocide in the Caribbean. Xuela’s personal loss is exponentially compounded by the historical loss of Caribs, who suffered genocide and whose “old world” violently ended as the Americas suddenly became “new” in imperial eyes. Xuela’s Carib ancestry is, as she sadly notes, one of the world’s “crumbling ancestral lines” (1996, 200). Xuela’s desire for a genealogical return to her Carib mother and a geographical return to the land of her mother’s people—or, to a pure arche or origin—is complicated and ultimately failed by the horrific and irreversible reality of genocide. And genocidal legacies haunt the entire Caribbean. The Autobiography of My Mother also addresses the problematic interrelations of race, créolité, and genocide and insist on the racially coded nature of power. Drawing on Glissant’s distinction between créolité (or métissage) and creolization in the book Poetics of Relation, I discuss the persistence of race within metaphors of créolité and within lived experiences of interracialism as coded within Kincaid’s narrative. The text suggests the need to problematize more celebratory treatments of hybridity, créole, métissage, and other widely deployed metaphors of cultural syncretism. The Caribbean is defined by creolization, a process that is more profoundly new and diffuse for Glissant than métissage, and this process creates a “new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains [as were the maroons] and free beneath the sea [as were the ancestral spirits dwelling in Guinea], in harmony and in errantry” (34). The Caribbean, for Glissant, “may be held up as one of the places in the world where Relation presents itself most visibly, one of the explosive regions where it seems to be gathering strength” (33). The distinction between métissage and creolization is crucial in Glissant’s theorizations of a poetics of Relation. “If we posit métissage as, generally speaking,” Glissant writes, “the meeting and synthesis of two differences, creolization seems to be a limitless métissage, its elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable. Creolization diffracts, whereas certain forms of métissage can concentrate one more time” (34). For Glissant, then, métissage as the “synthesis of two differences” is a deterritorialization that may be reterritorialized. The persistence of race and the possibility for racial reterritorialization are foregrounded in The Autobiography of My Mother, especially in the creole characters of Alfred Richardson and Xuela Claudette Richardson, who may be seen as emblematic of the forces of métissage and creolization respectively. Yet Xuela survives. She survives the death of her mother, her father, and even genocidal violence against her Carib ancestors. Yet the burden of Xuela’s legacy is also that of her Carib heritage. As Xuela laments, the Caribs were “exterminated, thrown away like weeds in a garden.” For those who know Kincaid’s essays in My Garden (Book), this image is particularly resonant, for as a botanical metaphor, it reveals the colonizer’s regard for those who are considered inferior, weeds, the world’s

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refuse even. Kincaid lucidly reminds us, though, that ideological and racialized notions of “whiteness” as “pure” threatened all those not so designated within this privileged relation to power, not the other way around. And through Xuela, Kincaid powerfully returns to Faulknerian apocalyptic narrative moments, indicting history, colonialism, slavery, and genocide within the entire Americas. In the essay “Reading,” from My Garden (Book), Kincaid notes how “the garden repeats itself all the time and will advance only so long as human history and all that it entails moves along also” (61). The significance of this quote in the context of the Carib people is twofold: one, it ironically recasts the Hegelian ideal of historical progress under the dictum that all must “move along,” not just the dominant group within a hierarchical order; second, it sadly reveals that the notion of historical progress is indeed a fallacy, because all does not, has not, “move[d] along”: in the case of European colonialism in the Caribbean, entire groups of peoples did not “move along” with history—for example, the Caribs, the Tainos, the Arawaks. Although Xuela is mistreated because of her Carib heritage, she sees her mother and her mother’s people as “pure,” untainted by profane mixtures of the victor and the vanquished, which she associates with her father and his “mixed” genealogy. Xuela reverses the presumed poles of racial purity, but in more positive ways: she sees her mother as racially pure, not tainted by the profanities of European whiteness. Xuela imagines her mother’s virginal skin and her father seeing it for the first time as her lover: [M]y mother’s skin—the skin on her face, the skin on her legs, the skin between her legs, the skin on her arms, the skin underneath her arms, the skin on her back, the skin below her back, the skin on her breasts, the skin below her breasts . . . the color of her skin—brown, the deep orange of an old sunset—was not the result of a fateful meeting between conqueror and vanquished, sorrow and despair, vanity and humiliation; it was only itself, an untroubled fact: she was of the Carib people. (197) The textual and philosophical play on her mother’s skin is important: Xuela’s mother is beautiful, pure, yet she is also tragic, and again, her tragic nature is that of being (or having been) Carib, for they have suffered genocide or extermination. At the end of her life, Xuela mourns that “the past in the world as I know it is irreversible” (209), but she also promises that “[t]o reverse the past would bring me complete happiness” (226). The Caribs, for Xuela, are “outside history” (218), ultimately, because they are the ruinous product of historical (European) fulfillment (or its fatal failure) and because they are its consummate or absolute victims, remaining only relics of a long-gone

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past. This fact is signified in the passage when Xuela describes her mother’s skin as the color (“brown, . . . deep orange”) of “an old sunset.” For Xuela, the sun has set (eternally and irrevocably and lamentably) on the Carib people, her mother’s people, an old group of indigenous inhabitants in the Caribbean—long before Columbus, long before John Hawkins and Francis Drake, long before John Newton, or those who came after. Xuela can only see her mother and her mother’s people within this historical frame, even as she realizes that this historical frame equals absolute historical erasure and genocide. Still, the daughter returns. Referring to her father’s misapprehension of the Carib genocide, Xuela grieves: “He would not have asked, Who are the Carib people? or, more accurately, Who were the Carib people? for they were no more, they were extinct, a few hundred of them still living, my mother had been one of them, they were the last survivors. They were like living fossils, they belonged in a museum, on a shelf, enclosed in a glass case” (197–98). In The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid foregrounds a narrative preoccupation with genealogy, miscegenation, and even genre. Genre, like genesis, genealogy, and even genocide, has its etymological root in the Greek word genos, which means, generally, “sort” or “kind” but can also, more specifically, mean “race,” “tribe,” or “family.” And in The Autobiography of My Mother, genre itself becomes inflected by genesis, genealogy, and genocide. Genesis and genealogy, of course, are complicated by miscegenation, which also has etymological roots in genos: from the Latin “miscere, to mix, and genus, race” (Sundquist 108); and the Latin genus derives from the Greek genos. Kincaid’s novel thus inflects genre with genealogy and genocide. Just as genre and genealogy are intimately linked in The Autobiography of My Mother, so genre and genealogy are violently and irrevocably disrupted (on an historical as well as personal plane) through genocide. The autobiographical problematic of the novel is bound, then, to Xuela’s genealogical loss, as well as that of her mother and maternal grandmother; it is bound to the genealogical loss of all Caribs in their old world that historically and violently became “new” in more dominant eyes, the tragic fate of the worst form of cultural contact. Passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, it also marks (through absence, erasure, impossible beginnings, uncertain endings) Xuela’s future (Carib) generations that will never be. Xuela’s Carib ancestry is, as she sadly notes, one of the world’s “crumbling ancestral lines” (200). Autobiography, in this context, borders on autothanography or the writing of death into one’s story or written account; yet the daughter returns, despite crumbling ancestral lines. In thinking through the problematic of genre and genocide, I offer a passage that is striking in its articulations (and disarticulations) of impossible genealogical returns, a passage recounting

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Xuela’s willful renunciations of maternity and the myriad, violent abortions corporeally embodying (and disembodying) her renunciations of motherhood and genealogy: I would bear children, but I would never be a mother to them . . . [T]hey would emerge from my head, from my armpits, from between my legs; . . . they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god . . . I would eat them at night, swallowing them whole, all at once . . . I would walk them to the edge of a precipice . . . I would cover their bodies with diseases, embellish skins with thinly crusted sores, the sores sometimes oozing a thick pus for which they would thirst . . . I would condemn them to live in an empty space frozen in the same posture in which they had been born. I would throw them from a great height; every bone in their body would be broken and the bones would never be properly set, healing in the way they were broken, healing never at all. (97–98; emphasis added) Like Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Xuela kills her beloved children, rather than see them brutalized, maimed, or killed under systems of racial oppression. Xuela, in her refusal of motherhood, thus not only resists colonialist appropriations of black female bodies and their stolen children (as she clearly does and as Rody suggests in The Daughter’s Return); she also powerfully reveals within her births made (historically) impossible, nations disallowed, people destroyed through genocide in the Caribbean and in the Americas. As destroyer, as memory slayer, and paradoxically, as griotte (who unearths and articulates alternarratives of repressed genocidal American histories/memories), Xuela reveals what history has already destroyed (through slavery and genocide); as maternal creator, and as abortionist, she also refuses the misappropriation of her offspring to postabolition yet residual systems of racial violence, mental enslavement, and genocidal memory. The language that Xuela speaks, in the passage quoted above, not merely alludes to, but also shockingly echoes and reiterates, the historical forms of racialized violences, of lynchings, and of genocides: powerful and nihilistic, Xuela’s words are uttered as if to ritually annihilate the brutalities of history; abortifaciently, Xuela’s children (history’s “strange fruit” or its legatees of slavery and genocide) hang from her body like fruit “from a vine.” Xuela’s violent language of infanticide, and the discursive echoes of historical violences uttered in her hypnotic cadence, actually exorcise history, expel and expose its false truths: in Xuela’s alternarrative of transAmerican histories, the words of her “sorrow song” both birth and bury: literally force never-born, never-conceived, never-fully-gestated, cut-short

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“crumbling ancestral lines,” out of her body sterile even in fertility, out of their imagined (and in relation: actual) historical graves. By reenacting, or performatively and powerfully restaging in text, the violences historically committed against the bodies of black men and women—indeed her ancestors in their broken genealogical lines—Xuela both trespasses the embodied boundaries between oppressor and victim (turning the tables, if you will, on history itself and refusing oppressive historical locations), and—almost ritualistically—attempts to smite and destroy colonialist systems of power and racist destruction through performative detours that pass through—or textually trespass—history itself. I am not, however, intending to imply that Xuela herself commits racialized forms of violence against her potential children, only that her textual reiterations of those historical forms of violences in her serial abortions become embodied and disembodied rituals or spiritual blood rites (“blood memories”), for exorcising history, for transcending or trespassing oppressive historical locations, and for disentangling oneself and one’s “crumbling ancestral lines” from final historical erasure. From genesis to genocide to digenesis, beginning again even if with nothing (à la Glissant’s poetics of relation); and from genealogy, the impure inflections of genre. Returning then to the imbrications of genealogy, genre, and genocide in Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, it is important to stress Kincaid’s aesthetic wedding of present to future to past, subjectivity and autobiography to history, and finally, individual selves to historical, cultural others, and genealogical lines, those pure or mixed, to historical forms of genesis and genocide. The Autobiography of My Mother performatively stages the legacies, especially those of Carib genocide and African slavery, of colonialism in the Americas; and the novel reveals—at times, even beautifully, lyrically, violently, if also nihilistically—the textual and historical imbrications of genre, genealogy, and genocide, and thus also the imbrications of self and alterity (even the radical alterity of death), subjectivity, and its historical impossibilities, being and nonbeing. Xuela’s abortions resist colonialism’s and slavery’s residual, postabolitionist historical forms of violence by performatively restaging or textually reiterating the language of violence in order to finally, once and for all, exorcise it from one’s “blood memories” and one’s “crumbling ancestral lines.” Xuela is a revenant or ghostly and apparitional reappearance, the disinherited daughter performatively returning to destroy the systemic forms of “plantation” violence in the Americas that destroyed the daughter’s maternal ancestral lines or other possible genealogical horizons. Through Xuela’s “brutal inheritance,” a genealogy marred and broken by the historical realities of Carib genocide in the Americas, Kincaid forcefully and necessarily underscores that some genealogical lines have been irreparably broken, severed, extinguished, annihilated; there are some “crumbling ancestral” or genealogical lines that will never be. Kincaid is not advocating

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pure genres or races; however, she powerfully insinuates the perpetuation of power as codified through racial distinction in mixed or hybrid forms. All of Kincaid’s texts swirl and circumnavigate the alterrains of self and others, subjectivity and alterity, as well as the colonialist notions of language, autobiography, and subjectivity, but few as historically and as hauntingly as the novel The Autobiography of My Mother. Xuela becomes the performative utterance of an “unspeakable métissage”: she tells of the “daughter’s return.” Kincaid thus renegotiates the relations of the past to the present and to the future; she historically trespasses, through performative textual detours, the strictures of slavery and genocide in Caribbean plantation economies, while rethinking the boundaries of region and countries to hemispheres.

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5

Death and the Biographical Autograph in My Brother

Fallen Angels The stories of the fallen were well known to me, but I had not known that my own situation could even distantly be related to them. —Kincaid, Lucy

[A]re not the children of gods devils? —Kincaid, Lucy

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words. —Addie Bundren, As I Lay Dying

Within Kincaid’s literary oeuvre, My Brother (1997) offers the most extended literary imprinting of death as a “biographical autograph” that philosophically troubles the genre of biography, or “life writing.”1 Biographical questions and generic problems recur in My Brother: the memoir destabilizes and metonymically displaces the writing self, or autobiographical “I,” and its presumed referentiality into the biographical brother Devon Drew, the author’s youngest half-brother. Kincaid thus returns to and foregrounds a destabilization of genre’s boundaries, specifically those of biography and

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autobiography, in My Brother. Written following the death of her youngest half-brother from AIDS-related medical complications, the memoir poignantly reflects on Devon’s life and his death, the author’s relationship with her sibling, who was only a toddler when she left Antigua for New York, and the relationship of both children to their dominating, overpowering mother, Annie Drew. In the memoir, Annie Drew is configured as the guardian of death; the sister, Jamaica Kincaid, as biographer, life-writer, and thus, also life-giver; and the brother Devon Drew as a liminal body that is half-dead and half-alive. Mrs. Drew is also the divine mother—not only creator of children, hearth, and home, but also the vengeful God of retribution and judgment—and her divinity imbues her with nature’s destructive forces and elemental power: Mrs. Drew’ offspring, her children, people the paradise she creates, but they are eventually cast out, punished, forsaken. They fall; they dwell in postlapsarian worlds. Like Lucy in the autobiographical novel of the same title, whose namesake is Lucifer, Annie Drew’s children—her oldest child and only daughter, Elaine Potter Richardson, and her sons Dalma, Joe, and Devon Drew—are fallen angels. Annie Drew, both divine and infernal, is the god who creates and destroys: to rid parasites from a soursop tree entangled with passion fruit vine, she burns it to the ground; to punish her fifteen-year-old daughter, Elaine (who becomes the writer Jamaica), for neglecting to change Devon’s soiled diaper when he was a baby and when she was reading instead of paying attention to him as instructed to do, the mother gathers together and burns all the daughter’s books—in essence, destroying her psyche and her life. In the memoir, death (qºnatoV, thanatos) denaturalizes the presumed parameters of life, bios (b√oV), in writing, in deeds, and in facts: in his older sister’s memoir, Devon’s dying body is pocked with pustulant sores from thrush, blossoming over his emaciated, near-corpselike body with vitality and ebullience. Kincaid thus asks her readers to see the forces of death as elementally fundamental to life itself, to see generation as tied to degeneration or annihilation: one form dying (Devon’s), others flourishing (the yeast that symbiotically invade and thrive on his disintegrating epidermis). While the textual juxtaposition is profoundly jarring and harshly graphic, Kincaid’s juxtaposition also asks us to see the beauty in Devon’s dying, in his dying body, that nevertheless sustains and births new life forms that are not his own: he becomes quite literally a humus that nurtures and spawns living alterity or molecular otherness. Kincaid’s “biographical autograph” and the author’s figuring of death into the autobiographical and biographical genres profoundly complicate the Freudian bifurcation of eros (from ⁄roV) and thanatos (from qºnatoV) or the life and death drives outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: by foregrounding AIDS as a complex, embodied, and symbiotic (or parasitic) site mediated by the forces of life, sexuality, and death, Kincaid powerfully

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illustrates the ways in which these drives are imbricate, interlocking, and deeply embedded one within the other. She does so through meditations on Devon’s body. Botanical images of her youngest brother’s body underscore its liminality to life and death, text and reality, or graphe and bios: he is affiliated with a banana tree, an unidentified dormant tree that suddenly and unexpectedly blooms, and a lemon tree that he had earlier planted in his mother’s yard and that she thoughtlessly, even ruthlessly, chopped down. Kincaid, evoking the homoerotic imagery and graphic language of midtwentieth-century French gay writer Jean Genet, also describes Devon’s body as liminal to eros and thanatos: Devon’s penis, covered with thrush, becomes a flowering rod that bursts into petals. I explore two interrelated motifs in the chapter: first, I examine the provocative interweaving of bodies, botany, and cultivating efforts at “colonizing” nature in My Brother, analyzing Kincaid’s botanical tropes for life and death, or creation and destruction, and probe how these tropological motifs inflect the writer’s transformations, or transmutations, of the genres of autobiography and biography. To do so, I adopt poststructuralist and queer conceptualizations of bodies and nature as material constructs that are always already constituted in and through language, culture, ideology, and power relations. Second, I analyze the ethical “economies” of gifts, debt, and death in My Brother, exploring Kincaid’s uses of the autobiographical and biographical forms (here: memoir) as philosophical ways of understanding subjectivity and its relations to others and to death; I do so by drawing on the anthropological writings of Marcel Mauss and the philosophical texts of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. To conclude, I suggest the place of the “biographical autograph” and the signature of death in Kincaid’s oeuvre by considering the intersections of reading, writing, living, and dying in the memoir My Brother.

Bodies, Botany, “Colonized” Nature Theorizing bodies as open vectors of desire and death and theorizing fluidity as excess (that also troubles notions of body as closed or sealed) illuminate Kincaid’s graphic rewriting of Devon’s body as a complex site for the interlocking vectors of eros and thanatos. Bodies are indeed strange things, cultural materializations and materialized cultural artifacts—neither and both, performed and instantiated somewhere in between, orifices, organs, skin, convex and concave parts in symbiotic, sometimes antagonistic, molecular relation and movement to others. While hyperbolized and hypervisible in Devon’s dying body, Kincaid intimates as much about all bodies. Postmodern-influenced theorizations of the body, or bodies, problematize the surface-depth model predicated on notions of exteriority and interiority, real as opposed to

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purely manifest (i.e., surface effect): Gilles Deleuze, influenced on Leibniz, challenges the distinctions of inside/outside through the conceptual model of le pli, or the fold (ever fluctuating surfaces that alternately bulge and indent, protrude or invaginate); building on these insights, Elizabeth Grosz (feminist, queer “body” critic) conceptualizes bodies as Moebius strips that defy facile divisions of internal and external. Devon’s body pours outward even as the spawning, spore world seems to move in, invade, and even parasitically territorialize both his orifices and his projections. Other theorists have examined the force-power relations that encode and constitute bodies imprisoned, tortured, or enslaved: forces structure bodies that secondarily create subjects. Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison (1975) (Discipline and Punish [1977]) and Elaine Scarry’s Body in Pain (1985), drawing from Louis Althusser’s ideological interpellation as constitutive of subjectivity, both focus on the discursive forces of power that produce bodies from the outside in—from body to subject; not from subject to body. And Devon’s erotogenic body and his HIV+ or seropositive status indeed structure, shape, and call into being his Antiguan identity as “aunty man” or gay man on the island. Saidiya Hartmann further elaborates, in Scenes of Subjection (1997), on the legal constructions of subjectivities through bodies as confined by and defined within law. Such is undeniably true for homosexual subjects in locales where same-sex eroticism is proscribed and fiercely policed. Another influential theorist of bodily excess, or the corporeal excessive, is Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Writing under the repressive “purge” of Stalinist communism in the late 1930s, Bakhtin expresses a notion of expenditure and excess that resists the strictures of the repressive state apparatus or the Gulag. Focusing on laughter, disruption, and embodied forms of the grotesque in Rabelais and His World (1968), first published in 1940, Bakhtin examines the intersections of the performative, the material, the political, and the textual. “The grotesque body,” for Bakhtin, “is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body” (317). The grotesque body is a productive body, birthing other bodies in and from itself: as if imbued or suffused with parthenogenetic potency, it spawns other bodies that spiral out from its material growths, protrusions, and orifices. In this sense, Devon’s body is a grotesque body. As Bakhtin writes, “the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world” (the exemplum par excellence being “Gargantuan’s birth on the feast of cattle-slaughtering”) (317). In its fertile capacity to conceive “a new, second body,” the grotesque body is one of overdetermined (or territorialized) “productive” sites: phallus, genitals, bowels, nose, mouth, anus. Parts (or secondary formations “subject to positive exaggeration, to hyperbolization”) overtake and territorialize, even as they simultaneously deterritorialize, the grotesque body (primary, yet hidden or obscured by its secondary outgrowths that can “even detach” from

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it). Body parts eat and defecate worlds: “the mouth, through which enters the world to be swallowed up”; and “the anus,” through which other worlds exit (1968, 317). “All these convexities and orifices,” Bakhtin conjectures, “have a common characteristic”: it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation. This is why the main events in the life of the grotesque body, the acts of the bodily drama, take place in this sphere. Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body—all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. In all these events the beginning and end of life are closely linked and interwoven. (317) Of primary concern for Bakhtin is the open, proliferating, productive, and grotesque body that defies or “ignores” the “artistic logic” of the “closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences (sprouts, buds) and orifices, only that which leads beyond the body’s limited space or into the body’s depths” (317). Worlds, like secondary bodies, are also archipelagically spawned by the grotesque body in perpetual creative and destructive motions and counterflows: worlds are architectonically built, material formations from material formations, and not from raw matter: “Mountains and abysses, such is the relief of the grotesque body; or speaking in architectural terms, towers, and subterranean passages” (317). Bakhtin further avers that “the grotesque body is cosmic and universal. It stresses elements common to the entire cosmos: earth, water, fire, air; it is directly related to the sun, to the stars. It contains the signs of the zodiac. It reflects the cosmic hierarchy. This body can merge with various natural phenomenon, with mountains, seas, islands, and continents. It can fill the entire universe” (317). It merges with “natural phenomenon,” but denaturalizes itself and the geographical terrains of “nature” itself in its productive, recombinatory mergings. The grotesque body is, for Bakhtin, not one body alone, solo or in isolation, but a body above all in relation to other bodies; it is even a relational point of contact between life and death, live bodies and those necrotic. As Bakhtin writes, it “consists of orifices and convexities that present another, newly conceived body. It is a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception” (317). While for conceptual purposes, Bakhtin maintains a formal if not actual (or hard-fast) distinction between inside and outside—or depth and surface—the theorist’s conceptualizations of the grotesque body radically complicate these purely or precisely formal

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distinctions: “[T]he grotesque ignores the impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and completed phenomenon. The grotesque image displays not only the outward but also the inner features of the body: blood, bowels, heart and other organs. The outward and inward features are often merged into one” (317). Paralleling, yet preceding by decades, Mary Douglas’s theorizations of “dirt” in Purity and Danger (1966) and Julia Kristeva’s theorizations of the “abject” in Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980) (Powers of Horror [1982]), Bakhtin theorizes “a special concept of the body as a whole and of the limits of this whole” (315). Yet one feels compelled to ask: Are not all bodies beautiful and grotesque? in flux and motion, yet at times morbidly static? Are not all bodies surface effects of infolded interiorities and outfolded exteriorities? Are not all bodies alternately (even simultaneously) generated and degenerated by the perpetual, contradictory, life- and death-giving processes or movements of eating, drinking, fucking, defecating, urinating, bleeding, flowing, solidifying, and expectorating? both liquescent and solid? What Bakhtin argues—and following him, what feminist cultural critics such as Mary Russo in The Female Grotesque (1995) argue—for the “grotesque” body (in all its cosmic, yet partial and fragmented, gendered, sexualized, racialized, nationalized, and diasporized forms), I would like to extend to corporeality itself. Yet, does not Devon’s body also defy the organizations and divisions of inside and outside, orifice and projection, concave and convex? Ambivalent about Jacques Lacan’s linguistic structuring of the subject (that reifies anatomy even as it disavows it), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari resist territorialized (or “organized”) understandings of the body as organism with organs, suggesting instead a corporeal spatium of desiring production, or the body without organs (corps sans organes). Proposing a schizosocial project in which desire is understood as machinic, social, and schizoanalytic (rather than as psychological, subjective, and neurotic), Deleuze and Guattari’s AntiŒdipe (1972) (Anti-Oedipus [1977]) thus inaugurated a forceful dismantling of Lacanian thought in French academia through a schizosocial theory of desire.2 In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari forcefully extend desire beyond the Freudian family, specifically examining the links between a neurotic Oedipalization and capitalism as a machine-désirante (“desiring machine”). Whereas capitalism deterritorializes the state apparatuses of feudal or hierarchical structures, desire is reterritorialized into a commodity form—an Oedipalization that individualizes desire in the psychoanalytic (and neurotic) subject. In schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari assert, this reterritorialization (or postdeterritorialization, or “Oedipalization”) does not occur.3 Desires are fragments functioning in social machines; bodies are without organs; bodies are spaces of forces, energies, and desires. For Deleuze, the psychoanalytic model reduces all desire to the “polymorphous pervert” of Oedipus who is castrated and who ignores all desires

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that do not conform to this model—such as fellatio. The Deleuzoguattarian model shifts desire away from organized erotogenic zones to intensities along a disorganized, intense corporeal spatium or the intensive Corps sans Organes (CsO) (“Body without organs,” BwO). Unlike Lacanian desire that is phallocentric, desire for Deleuze and Guattari passes in intense waves or lines across the “body without organs.” It is not phallocentric, but rather, it displaces corporeal organization based on false notions of center and margin, inside and outside, concavities and convexities. No one organ, then, is given erotogenic primacy and the power of psycholinguistic and subjective structuring (as its organizing principle). Devon’s body-in-flux and the moving boundaries of flowing orifices and swollen, tumescent, pustulant members enter into zones of becoming (or become a body without organs) with other life forms. For Deleuze (and Guattari), “le désir est révolutionnaire parce qu’il veut toujours plus de connexions et d’agencements. Mais la psychanalyse coupe et rabat toutes les connexions, tous les agencements, elle hait le désir, elle hait la politique” (97) (“desire is revolutionary because it always wants more connections and assemblages. But psychoanalysis cuts off and beats down all connections, all assemblages—it hates desires, it hates politics” [79]). Luce Irigaray conversely speaks of organs without bodies to diagnose the specular economy of heteromasculine discourses that occlude women’s bodies. In doing so, she contrasts the specular feminine (feminine) from the excessive feminine (feminine), the former mirroring masculinist economies of desire, knowledge, and thought with the latter exceeding those speculative frames. Elaborating on Irigaray’s ideas, Judith Butler also positions the excessive feminine as outside of phallogocentric and heteronormative discourses. What these feminist-queer theorists argue for the “feminine” also has salience and relevance for other sexually marginal subjects. Grosz similarly reorganizes and reimagines the relationship between bodies and technologies by thinking about how modes of inscriptions (tattoos, clothes, hairstyles, piercings, prosthetics) actually produce bodies and materialize them. Butler, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” further suggests that nature and culture are so thoroughly discursively intertwined that we have no direct access to matter or materiality that is not always already imbedded within the cultural constructions of those terms in philosophy, literature, art, history, and other disciplines. In Bodies that Matter, Butler also proposes that bodies are not fixed objects of thought. Bodies, Butler writes, “indicate a world beyond themselves, . . . [a] movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself” (ix). This “movement of boundary,” Butler reasons, actually is “central to what bodies ‘are’ ” (ix). Such a statement offers a provocative theoretical frame for thinking about bodies, boundaries, and movements. Butler further explains that matter is not a prediscursive given but rather, “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce

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the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (9). This “process of materialization” is both discursive and performative, yet it emphasizes restrictive, interpellated norms over the creative movements of energy, force, desire over spatial fields in this process of materialization—creative movements that are integral to the textual, visual, performative, and spatial fields of texts and bodies. Grosz, in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, writes that “puncturings and markings of the body do not simply displace or extend from already constituted, biologically pregiven libidinal zones; they constitute the body in its entirety as erotic” (139). What, then, is the body? Or more appropriately, What are bodies? What defines the myriad queered or performative relations among bodies, embodiment, subjectivities, and identities? Is the body a natural raw material? Or is it the site of multiple, even contradictory social, historical, and cultural codes that define and are defined by gender, sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion? Bodies and the experiences of embodiment are, of course, manifold, contradictory, and metastable: oppressed, marginalized, eroticized, exoticized, scrutinized, racialized, transgressive, prohibitive, well-behaved, performative. Bodies are also sites of cultural negotiation. Feminists, queer theorists, critical race theorists, and postcolonial and performance scholars all differently problematize the notion that gender is cultural, while bodies are natural. Rather, bodies (or corporeality) are sites that are also culturally constructed and must be understood through social, historical, political, and cultural lenses. Yet we must remain cognizantoo of Grosz’s insight. Bodies are not raw material givens that inexorably become variable (and malleable) sites for cultural inscriptions and performative praxes: inscriptions “produce” bodies, performatively articulating them and constructing differences. Let us consider bodies further: Bodies are curvaceous, soft, hard, wet, dry, fat, thin, abled, disabled (or differently abled), wrinkled, fresh, soiled, delicious, at times repulsive (or even all of these at once), but bodies are rarely known, rarely exact, rarely self-evident. Bodies are sentient and meaningful or dormant and lacking; yet senses, experiences, feelings, elisions of thought and time, orgasms somehow escape knowing, elude empirical knowledge. Bodies are never prediscursive material sites of inscription; rather, as Grosz writes in Volatile Bodies, bodies are “not only inscribed, marked, engraved by social pressures external to them but are the products, the direct effects, of the very social construction of nature itself” (xii). For Grosz, “these representations and cultural inscriptions quite literally constitute bodies and help to produce them as such” (xii). Bodies then need to be examined as lived, experienced, socially proscribed, performed, pleasurably enjoyed (or not) in relation to the often conflicting and conflictual (but always intersectionally overlapping) fractures of gender, class, race, sexuality, nationality, and diaspora. These epistemological categories inform how bodies are constructed

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within different cultural, political, historical, and (yes!) material locations. Writing elsewhere, I theorize the complicated terrains of skin as “an enfolded, convoluted site or surface for transgressive deteritorializations of the corporeal,” explaining that skin defies the demarcations of interior and exterior: it is both inside and outside. It is contiguous with sub-epidermal layers of flesh; it is also the sensate and bodily surface through which we dwell in our bodies and in our worlds. Orifices also defy dichotomization—inside, outside. Or as Deleuze notes in Le Pli, orifices are not invaginations, but rather folds; orifices are highly charged erogenous zones that are interior/exterior. [. . .] skin with its multiple folds, surfaces, orifices and pores is a field for erogenous energies, forces and desires that constitute the body as body. If sexed gender normativity is heterosexually defined through overly-codified sexual-anatomical difference—i.e., orifices and protrusions, or cunts and cocks—such folds can also be unfolded, refolded, surfaced, resurfaced, inscribed, reinscribed. (Braziel “In Deams” 2003) Skin can also be queered or even anatomically altered and surgically reconfigured. Skin—as the surface-boundary between body and world, but also as body itself—complicates the easy divisions of self and others, self and texts. Skin, after all, is the embodiment of languages and the textualization of bodies. Skin writes the meanings of the bodies; skin is legible to the world, even if its signs are contradictory and mixed. Or as Kincaid registers meaning in, on, through, and beyond Devon’s skin, which she notes, “looks as if it were a piece of precious fabric covering a soft surface (the structure that was his face), and if this fabric were to be forcefully pressed with the ball of a finger, it would eventually return to its smooth and shiny surface, looking untouched by experience of any kind, internal or external” (93). Skin : face. Surface : depth. Inside : outside. Devon’s skin and face enter into convoluted and involuted folds, fabrics, and soft surfaces, skeins of entangled being, becoming, and meaning. Bodies are also messy things, forever in flux and metamorphosis. And Kincaid continually underscores the putrefaction and filth and yet stark beauty of Devon’s wasted body. Bodies are performative matrices, grotesque yet also spectacularly beautiful vectors of movement and “machinic assemblages” of “desiring production” or “molecular” relations (to again evoke a few Deleuzian terms): disorganized parts and organized systems, orifices and surfaces in continual flux, in-out sites and molecular reactions of food, water, blood, bile, gastric acids, excrement, saliva, sweat, sexual fluids, and other animate and inanimate solid objects (are we experiencing a Nietzschean “eternal return” to Hippocrates and other pre-Socratics here? we tentatively

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wager a provisional perhaps), which does not mean that linguistic, cultural, political, and historical differences (or language, gender, sexuality, race, nation, diaspora) do not actively figure and disfigure bodies. They undeniably do, and often in violent and repressive ways. Devon’s body reveals all these tensions, contradictions, and ideological strictures. His body is a war zone of politics and power, meaning and repression. Ideological inscriptions or historical striations that “produce” bodies as such (as normative or as excessive) are, as Deleuze and Guattari might suggest, the “organs” or “organized” (and inherently tyrannical) systems of the organism, which is why they prefer the body without organs, which should not be understood as a prediscursive (or prehistorical) material given, but rather a deterritorialized (or aspirant posthistorical) remainder. Bodies without organs are then necessarily utopic refigurations of corporeal spatiotemporal continuities and may pose their own perils (as all utopias almost invariably do). Irigaray’s critiques of bodies without organs as a reification of organs without bodies (a corporealized reorganization, even disorganization, yet for her, a reassertion of phallocentrism) remains instructive here, though others disagree, finding Deleuzoguattarian thought immensely useful to and for feminist and queer politics. There is thus nothing inherently liberatory about bodies without organs (or organs without bodies). I remain interested, though, in this model as one that ruptures the archaic yet residual or lingering idea of the closed, discrete body and as one that repositions bodies as sites of performative constitution, ludic playfulness, volatile conflict, and open or public forms of contestation. Having theoretically complicated the ideas that bodies are natural givens, biological designs, or metaphysical essences, and having conceptualized bodies rather as complex sites of materialization as dynamic fluctuations and myriad becomings, I would thus like to examine the textual interrelations of two narrative or discursive bodies as constructed in the memoir My Brother, that of the AIDS-infected brother Devon Drew, the hypercorporeal or bodyin-flux, and his sister Jamaica Kincaid, the “elided” or ethereal textual body of the author herself. In the memoir, Kincaid’s botanical tropes are body becomings that serve as philosophical and material-corporeal reflections on life, death, creation, and destruction, particularly as mediated by Devon, the author’s brother. In the analyses that follow, I organize my literaryphilosophical analyses around Kincaid’s depictions of Devon’s homoerotic and HIV-infected body as marked by a creative tension between nonprocreative and productive (or generative) forces; in the second half of this chapter, as a counterpoint, I explore the author’s portrayals of her mother, Annie Drew, as an apocalyptic force of destruction—quite literally a cosmological force of nature who destructively creates (or causes) natural disasters and who destroys everything in her wake—passion fruit vines, soursop trees, okra bushes, parasitic insects, red ants, young adult novels soaked in kerosene and then consumed by flames on her stone heap, and even her own children.

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Devon’s body is treated more ambivalently. Devon’s body marks a tension between nonprocreativity (even a pathological portrayal of Caribbean gay identities as illness-ridden dead-ends of roads) and other forms of production or generation, specifically botanical, symbiotic, if also parasitic or viral. In the memoir, Kincaid compares Devon’s body—and specifically, his penis, or sexual organ—to a “flowering rod” (to allude to H. D.’s Trilogy), but also to a house (constructed, yet ultimately decaying) and as a cloth or plastic bag (sewn, stitched, sutured, irremediably closed) in death. I begin by discussing these three ambivalent portrayals of Devon’s body—body/fleur, body/house, body/bag—deferring a discussion of Annie Drew as a destructive force of nature or bringer of natural disaster until the end of this chapter. Kincaid’s own body becomes incarnated and disincarnated in the memoir My Brother as the “elided” textual-corporeal spaces of the creative demiurge, the alterdivine, the “life-giver,” the biographer, the author. In the memoir, Kincaid often portrays Devon’s body as an “unproductive” body. On one of her return trips to Antigua to visit Devon and to take him the temporarily life-sustaining AZT cocktail from her Vermont pharmacist, Ed, Kincaid recalls her youngest brother’s articulation of dreams and desires within the frames of capital, production, and reproduction: she remembers how Devon told her that “he wanted to settle down and start a family. . . . He told me of a plot of land that was bare, available, for sale; he was going to buy it and build a house there and raise a family there”; “why should I tell him just now when he sounded so full of promise, so full of happiness, that a family of the kind he wanted, a woman bearing his own children, was not ever going to be possible?” (57). Later in the memoir, Kincaid reiterates the idea of Devon as “unproductive” postcolonial subject, lamenting: He doesn’t make anything, no one depends on him, he is not a father to anyone, no one finds him indispensable. He cannot make a table, his father could make a table and a chair, and a house; his father was the father of many children. This compulsion to express himself through his penis, his imagination passing between his legs, not through his hands, is something I am not qualified to understand. (70) After Devon’s death, Kincaid suggests that his life unfolded before me not like a map just found, or a piece of old paper just found, his life unfolded and there was everything to see and there was nothing to see; in his life there had been no flowering, his life was the opposite of that, a flowering, his life was like the bud that sets but, instead of opening into a flower, turns

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brown and falls off at your feet. And in the unfolding were many things, all contained in memory (but without memory what would be left? Nothing? I do not know). (162–63) Although in this passage, Kincaid portrays Devon as the aborted bloom, the arrested bud that never opens, this depiction is elsewhere contested and complicated in the memoir by images of Devon’s body as “flowering” that directly defy her judgment here that “in his life there had been no flowering.” In ways viscerally and intellectually disconcerting to those of us researching and writing at the intersections of critical race, feminist, and queer theoretical perspectives, however, Kincaid seems to unconsciously reinforce the idea of Devon’s body, life, and identity as “unproductive”: for her readers, Kincaid creates a lyrical refrain in which Devon’s “non-procreative” body metonymically stands in for the failures of U.S. pharmaceutical research in retro-viral treatments of the AIDS complex, the capitalist and intellectual property laws that prohibit adequate distribution and prescription of these antiviral medications outside of North America, Europe, and other parts of the so-called developed world, the failures of Antiguan society in its homophobic responses to patients with AIDS, and the presumably closed genealogical line of homosexual subjects. And while some queer black and Caribbean scholars have understandably responded rather negatively to Kincaid’s negative portrayals of Devon as “unproductive,” I would like to make a counterargument that analytically assays contextualizing these portrayals—however ambivalent—within Kincaid’s writings on history, historical violences, botany as a colonialist enterprise, and gardening as a form of historical stealing of the master’s tools. Within this larger botanicalgardening context of Kincaid’s literary, autobiographical, and biographical oeuvre, Kincaid’s delineations of her brother Devon’s body actually mitigate against capitalist forms of commodifications of the body, production, and bourgeois reproduction. Kincaid offers an alternative model of “production”—precisely that of gardening or cultivation—that disrupts not only capitalistic, bourgeois, and heteropatriarchal models based on procreation or reproduction within the family but also those of history and botany as grounded in violence and appropriation. Kincaid offers alternative ways of conceptualizing productivity and production, as generation, outside of the rigid heteropatriarchal parameters of family and capital precisely through Devon’s nonnormative cultivation of plants and other botanical species. His relation to life, death, creation, and destruction are alternatively embodied forms of relating that defy colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy in Antigua and in the Americas. Gardening metaphors of Devon’s body as “productive,” radically interrupt and alter earlier codings of her brother’s body as “unproductive.” In the opening section of

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My Brother, Kincaid intersplices her discovery of Devon’s illness (and her first seeing his disease-ridden body) with reflections on Russell Page’s Education of a Gardener, which becomes a significant intertextual structuring device in the memoir written to commemorate her brother’s life and to remember his death. Throughout the memoir, botanical imagery in her Antiguan homeland (and more specifically, her family’s backyards) marks sites for understanding the multiply layered codes of power politics and for reflecting on the imbrications of life and death. And while we should remain vigilant of Leo Bersani’s queer-critical caveats (in “The Anal Rope” and “Is the Rectum a Grave?” from Homos) about ineluctably, reductively, and pathologically collapsing the gay erotic drive, gay male bodies, and death, or the grave, Kincaid does offer a powerful refiguring of Freud’s too easy opposition between eros and thanatos, though admittedly traversing minefields of historically scarring notions about homosexuality. Devon’s body is a conduit for both eros and thanatos. Remembering “that her brother was in great pain” (138), Kincaid also resists idealizing that body in pain (Scarry). Kincaid’s philosophical complications of the terrains of life and death, being and nothingness, as discussed in the second half of this chapter, parallel the author’s psychoanalytic disruption of the Freudian binary eros and thanatos, or the life drive and death drive. For sexually stigmatized queer subjects, for patients living with AIDS, and perhaps especially for patients dying with AIDS, as most Third-World patients are, the discrete bifurcation of eros, or the erotic, and thanatos, death, is theoretically complicated, at best, and impossible, at worst. Kincaid reminds her readers that some sexual minorities are as if already marked for death in homophobic cultures that foster hate crimes, repressive legislation, violent acts of aggression or hostility, and open acts of discrimination; within repressively homophobic, heteropatriarchal, or heteronormative cultures (and I would include both Antigua and the United States in this category), particularly when accompanied by underdevelopment and first-world dependency, as is the case in Antigua, the bureaucratic and institutionalized inattention to the medical or pharmaceutical needs of patients with HIV/AIDS is the norm, not the anomaly. Such is the case not only in Antigua but also throughout the entire Caribbean region, as well as throughout the majority of countries in Asia and Africa. Pharmaceutical treatment of HIV/AIDS, and the welcome but still largely economically determined phenomenon of patients living with AIDS remains, unfortunately, primarily a First-World privilege. Thus, for Devon, the odds of “living with AIDS” proved insurmountable, even with a diasporic “First World” sister acting as transnational, pharmaceutical intercessory. Eros, or the erotic, thus remains almost inextricably bound to thanatos, or death, for most Third-World HIV-positive patients. And for patients who have acquired the autoimmune deficiency syndrome though homoerotic sex acts that are still culturally, socially stigmatized as already inherently pathological—deadly—the

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psychoanalytic Freudian dichotomization of eros from thanatos represents not only a false divide but also one that is incessantly criss-crossed by the imbricate relations of desire, sexuality, and identity. AIDS itself—as a “sexually transmitted” disease that currently has no cure and that ends fatally for all individuals who acquire it, though some more slowly than others—also inherently and seriously troubles the Freudian theoretical bifurcations of eros and thanatos. Desire does not diminish with diagnosis, nor does it diminish with disease. Desire persists until death: eros accompanies individuals through diagnosis, onset of disease, and even unto death, or thanatos. And Kincaid’s memoir underscores the writing of death into life, death drive into life force, thanatos into eros. In Antigua, as recounted in the memoir, Kincaid attends several AIDS workshops organized by Devon’s physician, Dr. Prince Harold Ramsey, to teach Antiguans about sexually transmitted diseases, prevention, and effects. Kincaid must grapple with her own feelings about sexuality and death as she grapples with Devon’s. Sex and death, eros and thanatos, painfully intermingle for Kincaid during the AIDS workshops and their graphic discussions and depictions of both, which included photographs of “sexual organs looking so decayed the viewer could almost smell the decay” (158). After seeing “[t]hese images of suffering and death [that] were the result of sexual activity, and at the end of Dr. Ramsey’s talk,” Kincaid pointedly confesses, “I felt I would never have sex again, not even with myself” (38). Despite Kincaid’s misgivings about sex and its relations to death for AIDs patients—and indeed, perhaps also for all people, but particularly for AIDS patients in so-called Third World or “developing” countries where the welcome phenomenon of living with AIDS is not yet fully a reality—Devon cannot (and does not) experience the demise or death of his sexual desire simply because he has been diagnosed with the HIV virus and sickened by AIDS-related illnesses. In fact, Devon’s desire for sex and sexual partners persists postdiagnosis, and his refusal to wear a condom, to practice safe sex, or even to disclose his HIV status to sex partners frustrates both his sister-biographer, as openly and angrily expressed at several points in the memoir, and his physician and nurses. As AZT improves his health, Devon becomes convinced that he no longer has AIDS and will thus no longer infect future sexual partners. When Kincaid chastises her brother about not practicing safe sex and for not disclosing his positive HIV status, informing Dr. Ramsey of his refusals, and making herself quite literally her “brother’s keeper” (as one interviewer intimates), Devon claims that he is incapable of remaining abstinent for more than two weeks and even disputes his HIV status, asking to be retested. Further imbuing eros with thanatos, Kincaid likens Devon’s sexually risky behavior (to himself and to others) with murder, writing, “Powerfully sexual men sometimes cause people to die right away with a bullet to the head, not first sicken and slowly die from disease” (67). Witnessing Devon’s

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decline into death, Kincaid speculates about her brother’s life and about what her own life and future might have been had she herself never left Antigua: “And I began to wonder what his life must be like for him, and to wonder what my own life would have been like if I had not been so cold and ruthless in regard to my own family, acting only in favor of myself when I was a young woman” (68–69; italics added). Kincaid recalls her own childhood as sexually repressive and repressed. This disclosure should not surprise readers of At the Bottom of the River (especially the opening short short narrative “Girl” with its censuring catalogue of maternal admonitions), Annie John, and Lucy, which marks the daughter’s break with her homeland, her mother, and sexual repression. Kincaid impassively writes, “I grew up alienated from my own sexuality and, as far as I can tell, am still, to this day, not at all comfortable with the idea of myself and sex” (69). Sister : brother :: eros : thanatos. While I examine these entangled, even borderline incestuous, interrelations more extensively below, I first examine the poetic and philosophic blurring of the liminal alterrains of eros and thanatos as portrayed in Devon’s very body in the memoir My Brother.

Body / Fleur: Devon’s Flowering Death Throughout the memoir, Kincaid stresses Devon’s dying, his deteriorated body, and the fatal autoimmune illness that places (placed) his body and being in a liminal, if also seemingly perpetual, state of “impending death,” a line that echoes and resounds in the narrative (101, 102). Kincaid lyrically writes of Devon’s “dying” (101), how her brother lingered “in a state of almost dying for a long time” (101), the limen of AIDS as illness and “his just dying,” “my brother dying” (102). She realizes that “he had been dead for at least a year before the breath left his body” (101). Author-narrator-biographer (and thus life giver) also volubly laments “the futility, the emptiness of the thing called life, the thing called living” (105). Pained by illness, and by fraction within the family, Devon’s dying body houses the decay and ruin of the Drew house/family, those in Antigua (the older brothers, Dalma and Joe, and the mother, Annie Drew, or “Mrs. Drew” as her sons disaffectedly and coolly call her, except for Devon, who at the end calls her “Muds”),4 those already passed on (the father and stepfather, Mr. David Drew), and those in diaspora in Vermont (the “girl” Elaine Potter Richardson-cum-author Jamaica Kincaid). Kincaid reflects, “When I saw him for the last time still alive, though he looked like someone who had been dead for a long time and whose body had been neglected, left to rot—when I had last seen him and he was still alive, I had quarreled with him” (106). Though Kincaid and Devon quarreled during their last visit together, the memoir My Brother ultimately becomes the sister’s anguished memorial for

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her brother, and as biographer (or “life giver”), Kincaid ambivalently accepts her vexing role as priest administering last rites, author bestowing textual immortality, and even god-daemon breathing life back into dusty corners of rotting houses. As such, Kincaid lyrically, poetically, and philosophically imbues Devon’s death with life, his dying with living, his passing with revenant or (narrative) return. Even as Kincaid, sister-biographer, notes how Devon “declined amazingly into death,” she describes her youngest brother as suspended between life and death, “living while being dead” (181). And the sister-biographer poignantly writes, “He lived in death. Perhaps everyone is living in death, I actually do believe that, but usually it can’t be seen; in his case it was a death I could see” (88). For Kincaid, Devon embodies living death, and dying life: he exists at the limen, or threshold, between states of being and becoming that are too frequently and too inadequately counterpoised or contradistinguished one from the other. In Devon, the sister-biographer sees life, sees death, discerns the death that is life and the life that is death. Kincaid portrays Devon’s body as a flowering, spawning hummus for other life forms. Two tropes reside within Kincaid’s materialbotanical portrayals of her brother’s body as fleur: Devon’s body itself as a dying blossom; and Devon’s body as gardener and cultivator of plants (specifically, a lemon tree and a banana plant). I discuss each of these tropes, beginning with Kincaid’s portrayals of her dying brother’s body as a blossom or wounded yet flourishing flower, an image that lyrically evokes the gay erotic writings of midcentury French writer-outlaw Jean Genet. Evoking the eroticized lyricism of Genet (in Notre-Dame des Fleurs, Miracle de la Rose, and Journal de Vouleur), Kincaid rewrites Devon’s wounded body as a complex erotogenous zone pulsing with both eros and thanatos, erotic life and death, bloom and violence. Glancing at and actively reinscribing her brother’s body, Kincaid sees both wound and flower, musing that “his penis looked like a bruised flower that had been cut short on the stem” (91); not only “bruised flower,” with crushed petals and cut stem, Devon’s penis is also humus and soil and loam and earth and compost—“covered with sores and on the sores [. . .] a white substance, almost creamy, almost floury, a fungus” (91) that grows on his moldering flesh, spreads over decaying skin. Bruised epidermis in decay: sustaining compost for other life forms: dynamic alterrains of simultaneity for being and becoming, life and death, eros and thanatos. Phallic registers of eros and thanatos are intermingled with anal and oral economies of desire-death that rupture the fixed or sealed body with the disruptures of flow. Kincaid pointedly and imagistically portrays Devon’s body as one in flux between eros and thanatos, life and death. She graphically recounts how “[a] stream of yellow pus flowed out of his anus constantly; the inside of his mouth and all around his lips were covered with a white glistening substance, thrush” (138). Recall Bakhtin’s discussion of the grotesque body as one that is territorialized by “productive” sites, such

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as the mouth, the anus, the penis, and other points of influx-outflux that resist the simple logics of solidity and the divisions of inside-outside. Later in the memoir, Kincaid further elaborates on Devon’s body as an open site that is abjectly if also porously traversed: “[F]luids of different textures would pass out of his anus, and these fluids did not have a fragrance, they had a smell, and only someone trained to ignore it (a nurse, a doctor) or someone who knew him deeply (his mother) could tolerate it” (150). Devon’s body is both dirt (Douglass) and abject (Kristeva). Abjection, fluid excess, pus, anal discharge, pustulant sores, exudant orifices, yeasty epidermis: Devon’s body quite literally marks the often indistinct or indiscernible boundaries between subject and objects, as Kristeva theorizes in the Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Throughout the memoir, Kincaid underscores the abject poverty and austerity of Devon’s body, even as she alludes to its life-sustaining support to other life forms: from abjection and deterioration, rupturing life and alternative forms. It is as if Devon blooms death, dying “[f]or the sickeningly floriferous thrush growing in his throat” (106). Devon’s body, face, flesh is so denaturalized by the ravages of illness and suffering that they become artifice itself; and Kincaid first compares the devastations of Devon’s face to a death mask: His mouth so white, abloom with thrush; his lips so red, glowing, shiny from fever; his skin blackened as if his normal quotient of pigment (normal in a way unique to him, he was descended from Africans mostly) had increased from some frightening source: his face was like a mask, and this was while he was still alive; or still amounted to something called being alive. (149–50) And finally, she compares his face to something purely imagined and imaginary, something that remains a figment of her own imagination: “And after he died, the whiteness of his mouth, the redness of his lips, the unusual blackness of his skin, his very suffering itself began to seem sometimes as if I had made them up, though not his death itself” (51). Devon’s ruin: alterrains of new becomings. If Devon dies, other lives flourish in his dying body; and while Kincaid laments his loss, she also sees how his life recycles into other ones. “And in the unfolding were many things, all contained in memory (but without memory what would be left? Nothing? I do not know)” (162–63). Kincaid thus depicts Devon’s body as a dying yet living materiality that spawns other life forms even as he deteriorates and degenerates bodily. As thrush flourishes in Devon’s mouth, on his lips, tongue, and up and down his throat, Devon becomes the living-dying humus supporting the thriving of other species. When Kincaid first lays eyes on her brother in Antigua, she remembers how “[h]is lips were so scarlet and covered with small sores

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that had a golden crust” (9). Images of Devon’s thrush-covered body are so palpable in her mind and in her memory that the sister-biographer reiterates the visual portrayal of Devon in decline, even as yeasts infiltrate and burgeon over his fleshly membranes: “When I first saw him, his entire mouth and tongue, all the way to the back of the inside of his mouth, down his gullet, was paved with a white coat of thrush” (15). Kincaid consciously reflects on the imbrications of living-dying and troubles the dichotomized boundaries of life and death through the symbiosis of dying self and flourishing living objects as supported by Devon’s body, in which “a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems able to satisfy and stop” (19–20; italics added). Devon literally “births” death—his own—even as he spawns new living forms within his flesh: this process, though, is one of pain and loss, and she recalls that “when I first saw him, the thrush had made it so difficult for him to swallow anything that the pills had to be crushed before he could swallow them” (35) and that “his throat had ulcers growing on the surface and they went all the way down his esophagus” (46). Kincaid not only highlights the living forms flourishing in Devon’s dying body—which itself seems to serve as a humus or nurturing soil for other seedings, spawnings, and growths—but the author also draws parallels between her youngest brother’s body and living/dying forms in the natural environment of the Antiguan landscape. We must remember, however, that for Kincaid nature can never be severed from culture or the natural from its multiply coded cultural constructions: it is only within language, ideology, power relations, history, and ultimately, within culture that we can apprehend nature; there is no pure relation. Recalling one afternoon when the couple strolled through Antigua’s Botanical Gardens—a favorite childhood haunt of the “girl” and her stepfather, David Drew, as she memorably and multifariously recounts in Annie John, in Lucy, and in My Garden (Book)—Kincaid remembers how she and Devon happened upon a half-living, half-dying, just-emerging-from-dormancy tree on the periphery of the garden grounds. For Kincaid, “It was a tree, only a tree, and it was either just emerging from a complete dormancy or it was half-dead, halfalive. My brother and I became obsessed with this tree, its bark, its leaves, its shape; we wondered where it was really from, what sort of tree it was” (79–80). Like all plants, this tree has history: it bears history, reveals historical scars. Like all things Antiguan, Kincaid intimates that its origins must lie elsewhere, that it must have originated elsewhere, before being transplanted here to this small island place, and thus she also subtly reminds her readers that Antigua is ineluctably part of what Édouard Glissant has perceptively described as a “diasporized landscape.” In the lines, Kincaid also strikingly (and metonymically) juxtaposes Devon’s flesh (and even her own) with the tree’s trunk as the two ponder “its bark, its leaves, its shape”: it is as if body and branch, arms and limbs, toes and leaves are metonyms in creative,

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undulating relation—a strange relationality (or poetics of relation, to again evoke Glissant) of deferral and différance in which corporeal and botanical enter into a dynamic, molecular zone of immanent becomings (devenirs à la deleuzien). Yet the author openly resists the strictures or confines of metaphor and metaphorical relation that are totalizing and that manifest a symbolic registering of body and botany as instantiations of the same (and thus, symmetrical and interchangeable): rather, the alterity or alterrains of each—body and botany, blossom and dormancy, origin and history—are provocatively and contrapuntally syncopated in the offbeat rhythms of life, death, and the intermezzo spaces in-between where boundaries meet, merge, creatively fuse, and ultimately, dissolve and create new lines or alternate routes of being and becomings. Kincaid, though, suspends the spaces of belief and disbelief, symmetry and asymmetry, similitude and difference, by allowing the possibility for Devon to enter into and entertain (or not) the imports of symbol, simile, and metaphor. She writes, “If it crossed his mind that this tree, coming out of a dormancy, a natural sleep, a temporary death, or just half-dead, bore any resemblance to him right then and there, he did not say, he did not let me know in any way” (80). Kincaid thus imagines (without avowing or disavowing) Devon’s creative interpretations of life and death, nature and culture, decay and efflorescence, dormancy and rebirth, within the open alterrains of metonym and (as) metaphor. Punctuating the opening recollections of Devon in the memoir My Brother are passages quoted from Russell Page’s gardening book: “And when I picked up that book again, The Education of a Gardener,” Kincaid intimately and evocatively writes, “I looked at my brother, for he was a gardener also” (11). Yet she also regrets that “[t]he plantsman in my brother will never be, and all the other things that he might have been in his life have died; but inside his body a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems able to satisfy and stop” (19–20; italics added), to reiterate a line from the memoir that I quoted earlier. Devon, in Kincaid’s rendering, literally “births” death: his bare life body harbors death, bears it and brings it into being, a “flowering upon flowering”; his body is erotically feminized, given fruit (death) to bear, and even described as an insatiable life-death giving force or vortex that “nothing seems able to satisfy and stop.” I evoke Giorgio Agamben’s phrase bare life from the book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and the Bare Life (a phrase explicitly grounded in a philosophical and epistemological distinction between zoe¯, zw– and bios, b√oV) to suggest that within the alterrains of Kincaid’s “biographical autograph”—figured as the “gift of death” to life and life writing—zoe¯ also deconstructs the contours of bios. Devon’s dying body reproductively births: in dying, he creates bare life (from zoe¯, zw–) to mitigate and even radically rail against the forces of more dominant or hegemonic conceptualizations of political life (from bios, b√oV).

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Kincaid, as sister-biographer, also rhizomically roots Devon’s livingdying body into molecular becoming with actual plants that he cultivated as a gardener: “Behind the small house in which he lived in our mother’s yard, he had planted a banana plant, a lemon tree, various vegetables, various non-flowering shrubs” (11). Freeston, an HIV-positive gay man on the island of Antigua, is also affiliated with cultivation, flowers, gardening, and “a beautiful garden full of zinnias and cosmos and some impatiens and all sorts of shrubs with glossy and variegated leaves” (147). An avid gardener herself, Kincaid is stunned that this cultivation of plants so preoccupies not only herself, but also her brother Devon and her mother, Annie Drew, the “original” source of the “garden”: “When I first saw his little garden in the back of his little house, I was amazed at it and asked him if he had done it all himself and he said, Of course (‘How you mean, man!’). I know now that it is from our mother that we, he and I, get this love of plants” (11). Devon enters into a botanical poetics of relation and relationality with the lemon tree and the banana plant that he cultivates in his mother’s yard, as well as other plants: a fern hand transplanted and imported by Mrs. Drew from Dominica that her son stole from his mother for drug money to feed his addiction, trees in Antigua’s Botanical Gardens (mahogany, tamarind, and the dormant tree the brother and sister observe on the periphery of the grounds), and also trees (willow trees and “an old half-dead flamboyant tree” [11]) growing on the lawn of the Holberton Hospital where Devon is being treated for AIDS-related medical complications when he is first diagnosed with the virus. As destroyer, and death bringer or life slayer (a thematic addressed in greater length later), Annie Drew insensitively chops down the lemon tree, which for Kincaid would have persisted postmortem as a living death remainder and as palpable trace memories of Devon on earth and in the earth after he dies; for the mother, however, the tree is merely a nuisance, something to be rid of once and for all, like her own children (or at least as recorded in the alterbiographical narrative tellings of the oldest child), as I discuss later. Yet Devon’s corporeal traces rhizomically spread and botanically return—despite his mother’s chopping down the lemon tree he planted in her yard—in the banana plant, which has a seasonal cycle of blooming, fruiting, dying, and then self-propagating anew. Kincaid recalls being at first bemused by the reproductive habits of the plant, about which she asks her mother, and eventually, but only eventually, tells of the plant’s seasonal reproductive cycle: There are twelve banana plants in the back of his little house now, but years ago, when I first noticed his interest in growing things, there was only one. I asked my mother how there came to be twelve, because I am not familiar with the habits of this plant.

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She said, “Well . . .” and then something else happened, a dog she had adopted was about to do something she did not like a dog to do, she called to the dog sharply, and when the dog did not respond, she threw some stones at him. We turned our attention to something else. But a banana plant bears one bunch of fruit, and after that, it dies; before it dies it will send up small shoots. Some of my brother’s plants had borne fruit and were dying and were sending up new shoots. (19) For Kincaid, Devon’s “unproductive” body becomes productive in death and through gardening; his body blooms death. Devon’s dying, homoerotic, unprocreative body is radically refigured by his sister-biographer as generative, creative, productive, even in dying (like the banana plant). After Devon dies, Kincaid herself (as gardener-cultivator-writer) purchased several rhododendron plants while traveling and book touring for The Autobiography of My Mother that had to be transported by airplane, first lugged through the airport and then carried onto the plane. Memory, plants, indigeneity, and transplantation—as vectors of power and colonialist histories—are all foregrounded in the short passage about the rhododendrons: “those rhododendrons, native to a part of the world, New Guinea, that was foreign to me but has shaped my memory all the same” (177). After returning to her home in Vermont, Kincaid laments that the rhododendrons became infested with pests, bloomed, and then suddenly died: the rhododendrons were “plants that would make prosper a population of annoying small flies in my house and then die, and nothing I could do, no remedy in any of many plants encyclopedias I have, could save them” (177). Memorably, Kincaid disconcertingly yet beautifully evokes Devon’s life and death in describing that of the pest-infested rhododendrons: “They bloomed beautifully and then died, dying, as always, being so irreversible” (177). For this gardener-sister-biographer and writer, the parallel poignantly, if also starkly and alienatingly recalls the parasitic cycles of life and death, pests and autoimmune viruses, plants and bodies, rhododendrons and her brother Devon.

Body/House: Carpentry, Construction, Production, Decay, Rotting Earlier I noted a passage in the memoir in which Devon expresses his desire for a “plot of land” in order to “build a house,” examining the ways in which Kincaid complicates the bourgeois and heteronormative codes of production and productivity: this passage is also significant (particularly when paralleled and comparatively analyzed with other passages in the memoir that underscore carpentry, construction, and production, as well as their inverse processes: decaying, deteriorating, and rotting) in that it foregrounds a relationality

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between body and house, corporeality and carpentry as artistic constructs. In several passages, Kincaid directly juxtaposes Devon’s “rotting” flesh and the “rotting” boards of his house, but I argue that this juxtaposition is more one of metonymic than metaphoric relation; in fact, the memoir meditates extensively on the failures of language as representational, transparent, and realistic, while also disavowing the presumed knowability of likeness (resemblance or similitude) as traditionally expressed (and known) through simile and through metaphor. While Kincaid does actively entertain the ideas of similitude, affinity, even verisimilitude, even engaging in a proximity to metaphor or simile, she ultimately refuses the closures of expressive, comparative language. She approximates these literary elements, however, in juxtaposing Devon’s deteriorating body and his dilapidated house that was built in the back corner of Annie Drew’s property. Visiting Devon’s house in 1986, ten years before his death from AIDS-related illnesses in 1996, Kincaid vividly remembers a moment with her youngest brother in his house, as she reclined on his bed and looked up at the ceiling: The little house was then old, or at least it looked old; the beams in the roof were rotting, but in a dry way, as if the substance of wood was slowly being drawn out of it, and so the texture of the wood began to look like material for a sweater or a nightgown, not something as substantial as wood, not something that might offer shelter to many human beings. (113) Fabrics and the fragility of clothes draping bodies, as in “Biography of a Dress” (1992), stand in metonymic relation to body: arms, legs, trunk, torso, neck, and head. Desiccated yet decaying—not dissolving in a fluid outflux of bloody anal discharge, yeasty and pustulant sores from thrush, as with her brother’s AIDS-infected body—the beams are perhaps more like the thinly threaded and worn sheets on his hospital bed than they are, in almost any regard, the proximate likeness or quasisimilitude of Devon’s abjectly yet fluidly traversed body that is marked by an excess of corporeal discharge, not dryness. In the passage, Kincaid thus both coyly suggests—while structurally and stylistically disavowing—explicit metaphoric relation between Devon’s dying body and his own rotting house: using nuanced, negating, and negative language (in the theological and atheological senses) language that simultaneously gestures toward positivist signification even as it eludes definitive closure, Kincaid apophatically disclaims: Looking up at the roof then, rotting in that drying-out way, did not suggest anything to me, certainly not that the present occupant of the house, my brother, might one day come to resemble the process

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of the decaying house, evaporating slowly, drying out slowly, dying and living, and in living looking as if he had died a very long time ago, a mummy preserved by some process lost in antiquity that can only be guessed at by archaeologists. (113; emphasis added) Approximation of metaphor (body : house) is ultimately reversed and distantiated in equivocal words that pry the two (body ; house) apart: “did not suggest”; “certainly not that the present occupant of the house, my brother”; “might”; “one day”; “come to resemble”; “the process of the decaying house”; “some process lost in antiquity”; “can only be guessed at” (emphasis added). Yet the author does later seem to affirm—the possibility, at least, of—symmetry and similitude, noting “the beams of his ceiling that would eventually remind me of his dry, rotting, shriveling body” (117). In contrast with metaphoric relationality, body and house here actually enter into near metonymic collapse as the perceived smell of the rotting house is later correctly identified as the putrefaction of Devon’s flesh. Upon entering her mother’s house, Kincaid is consternated and disquieted by the horrible and overpowering odor emanating as if from the house itself: “The house had a funny smell” (90). Since her mother has always been “the immaculate housekeeper” (90), Kincaid is especially confused by the odor. “It was only after he was dead and no longer in the house and the smell was no longer there,” Kincaid realizes, “that I knew what the smell really was” (90): Devon. Later in the memoir, Kincaid reiterates this troubling awareness, writing, “My mother’s house after he was dead was empty of his smell, but I did not know that his dying had a smell until he was dead and no longer in the house” (177). Metonymic relationality of body and house transcends—if immanently—death itself. And the author’s “elided” textual body presences in a scene in which Annie Drew and her daughter walk through the Dead House together. While caring for Devon during his dying in Antigua, Kincaid insists that she and her mother visit the cemetery and the Dead House in order to locate her stepfather’s, David Drew’s, gravesite—which was unmarked and ultimately proves impossible to find—so that her brother may be buried alongside his father. In passing through the door of the Dead House, Kincaid feels the embodied presences of the dead moving in her path. She recalls: We passed through the door of the Dead House, she and I together, and as we did so, my own complicated and contradictory feelings about the dead came up and lay on the ground before my feet, and each step I took forward they moved forward, too, like a form of shadowing; all my feelings about the dead, determinedly unresolved

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and beyond me to resolve, lay at my feet, moving forward when I moved forward, again like a form of shadowing. (121) Annie Drew acts, like Baron Samdi and his wife, Gran Brigitte, in Haitian Vodou, as guardian of the dead and, like Papa Legba, gatekeeper of the nether, liminal realms between “the quick and the dead,” and her daughter moves with the dead who “lay on the ground” before her feet, who step as she steps, who move as she moves. The dead become the daughter’s shadow self, recalling the passage from Annie John in which Kincaid writes: “For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world” (107). Once more: Annie Drew’s shadow, like the shadow of death, hangs over her daughter as they together traverse the boundaries of the living and the dead in the cemetery. Viscerally present, corporeally manifest, if not quite visible, still palpable, spirit “shadow lines,” the dead dwell with the living, walk along with them, and the daughter-initiate-writer can only obsessively repeat the refrain: The dead never die, and I now say this—the dead never die—as if it were new, as if no one had ever noticed this before: but death is like that (I can see); it happens every day, but when you see mourners, they behave as if it were so new, this event, dying—someone you love dies—it has never happened before; it is so unexpected, so unfair, unique to you. The dead never die, let me just say it again. (121–22) Obsessively, hauntingly, the refrain “the dead never die” powerfully evokes the late Faulknerian lines from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Act 1, Scene III). Devon : House. Dead : Dead House. Kincaid’s own “elided” textual body moves within these lyrical refrains, hides concealed within her own auto/biographical, or alterbiographical lines. Searching futilely—and ultimately in vain—for David Drew’s burial site, Kincaid discovers that “the graveyard looked like everything else in a place like that, as soon as you turn your back, everything will collapse into a state of dry decay” (123). Although Kincaid had earlier walked with the dead in the Dead House—or rather, the dead had walked with her—the sister-biographer feels that Devon’s death is her true and first experience: “It was in that funeral home in which he lay that I first encountered the dead” (182). And looking at her youngest brother in the pine box, for which she paid Mr. Straffee, the undertaker, in traveler’s checks, Kincaid realizes that coffins are really only “houses for the dead” (193). Houses, sites for ontological dwellings as Heidegger understood, become not just receptacles for bodies, but their very embodiments and disembodiments: from crib to coffin.

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Body/Bag: “Open” Orifices, “Sewn,” Sutured Surfaces In addition to portraying Devon’s body as fleur (or flower) and as house, Kincaid also depicts Devon’s body as a bag, and here the two metonyms creatively merge postmortem as body bag. In these vivid, even graphic portrayals of Devon’s postmortem body—or corpse—the sister-biographer underscores the troubling vacillation between the open and the sutured body. After Devon’s death, Kincaid asks the undertaker, Mr. Straffee, to delay preparing her brother’s body for burial until after she observes him in his death mask: his eyes open, mouth agape, orifices unsutured. Kincaid explains: “I wanted to see what he looked like when he was dead and so I had asked the undertaker not to do anything to his body before I arrived. Only now, a little more than a year later, I wonder how I knew to say such a thing, for I am grateful (only because I would have wondered, been haunted by it, and so now my interest is satisfied, even as it raises another kind of interest, another haunting)” (177–78). Devastation of Devon’s body is not wrought by closure, but by openness. Although the cadaver is shockingly exposed in its bare life (from Agamben’s meditations on zoe¯, zw–), Devon’s remains have been placed inside a plastic body bag. Kincaid’s memory, as recounted in the memoir, is evocative and spare and yet unsentimental. I quote the passage at length: He was in a plastic bag with a zipper running the length of its front and middle, a plastic bag of good quality, a plastic bag like the ones given to customers when they by an expensive suit at a store that carries expensive clothing. The zipper coming undone, like a dangerous reptile warning you of its presence; oh, but then again, it was so much like the sound of a zipper, just any zipper, or this particular zipper, the zipper of the bag which held my brother’s body (for he was that, my brother’s body). He looked as if he had been deliberately drained of all fluids, as if his flesh had been liquefied and that, too, drained out. He did not look like my brother, he did not look like the body of my brother, but that was what he was all the same, my brother who had died, and all that remained of him was lying in a plastic bag of good quality. His hair was uncombed, his face was unshaven, his eyes were wide-open, and his mouth was wide-open, too, and the open eyes and the open mouth made it seem as if he was looking at something in the far distance, something horrifying coming toward him, and that he was screaming, the sound of the scream silent now (but it had never been heard, I would have been told so, it had never been heard, this scream), and this scream seemed to have no break in it, no pause for an intake of breath; this scream only came out in one exhalation, trailing off into

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eternity, or just trailing off to somewhere I do not know, or just trailing off into nothing. (178–79; italics added) Once again lyrical refrains (wide-open and trailing off) establish Kincaid’s most salient points: Devon’s body is a liminal alterrain between the realms of life and death, an open circuitry of desire diminished, energy traversing, a conduit of lost breath and thought and sound and silence, but an open alterrain to where? “Trailing off into eternity, or just trailing off to somewhere I do not know, of just trailing off into nothing.” In stark contrast to the ineffability of unanswered ontological questions, Kincaid also muses that Devon might “have found his death—his lying in the plastic bag of good quality, his mouth open, his eyes staring into something, a void that might hold all of meaning, or staring into nothing in particular—funny, but only if it was happening to someone else. I do not know” (180). Kincaid’s juxtaposition of weighty philosophical questions—of belief and disbelief, being and nothingness, life and death, meaning and ineffability, gnosis and agnosis—with absurd humor, or the displaced humor of the macabre—is truly unsettling. Even more unsettling and haunting, however, are the shocking contrasts between the immediately postmortem and the postembalmed states of Devon’s body. Images of Devon’s wide-open body with its as yet unsutured orifices markedly contrast with the postmortem, postembalming cadaver that Kincaid views in the pine box coffin at his open-casket funeral. She recalls that when I saw him next again, lying in the coffin made of pitch pine, the wood which Mr. Drew, his father, my mother’s husband, a carpenter, used mainly to make all sorts of furniture, his hair was nicely combed and dyed black—for how else could it have gotten to such a color—his lips were clamped tightly together and they made a shape that did not amount to his mouth as I had known it; and his eyes had been sewn shut, sewn shut, and I have to say it again, sewn shut. And so he looked like an advertisement for the dead, not like the dead at all; for to be dead young cannot be so still, so calm, only the still alive know death to be still and calm. (180–81; emphasis added) Unlike Devon’s unprocessed, necrotic body—“open eyes, open mouth”—his embalmed body is “clamped” and “sewn, dyed,” and coiffed. Devon’s postembalmed body is a sign advertising the stillness and calmness of death to and for the living. In death, Devon’s body becomes metaphor, arrives at the closed door of the metaphoric: “like an advertisement for the dead.” Kincaid remarks how Devon’s body seems undead, almost living, lifelike. Articulating the feelings of her entire family, Kincaid remembers thinking that

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the body in the coffin was of someone we did not know, the body lying there would never become familiar to us, it would have no likes and dislikes, it would never say anything memorable, we would never quarrel with it, he was dead. The undertaker went among the mourners asking if we wanted one last look before the coffin lid was put in place, and after that all views of him on this earth would be no more.” (181–82) Kincaid’s passage resonates with the finality of death—the “no more” that was Devon, his life, his illness, his earthly presence. The body is not Devon.

Ethical Aporias, Ethical Economies: Gifts, Debt, Death, or, Death, Time, and the Other It is not necessity but its contrary, “luxury,” that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems. [. . .] On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess; the question is always posed in terms of extravagance. —Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share

In Essai sur le don (1923–24) (The Gift), Marcel Mauss examines primitive gift giving in order to theorize how le don (or the gift)—giving, receiving, returning—structures both symbolic forms of exchange and social relations in terms of power, debt, and obligation. For Mauss, the giver maintains a powerful hierarchical position in relation to the recipient of the gift, who is then indebted or obligated to return the gift; if the gift cannot be returned, then the power relations are maintained. In order for social harmony to exist, reciprocity must also exist. Gifts, death, and debt also form complex ethical and symbolic economies of exchange in the memoir My Brother. Despite Devon’s open protestations that he no longer has AIDS, and even that he is no longer HIV positive, given his dramatic improvement in health following treatment with AZT, which his sister-biographer bought at her local pharmacy in Bennington, Vermont, illegally brought into her homeland, Antigua, and then gave to her brother as a “gift,” Kincaid herself remains cognizant of the cycles of gifts and debts binding her brother and herself. Kincaid also adamantly underscores this relation, writing, “I was convinced that he was HIV-positive, so convinced that I had gotten myself into debt trying to save his life” (68; emphasis added). While Devon becomes indebted to his diasporic sister-biographer, Jamaica Kincaid, she herself enters into cycles of debt relation that are inherently tied to gift giving and reciprocity

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in the Maussian sense. Kincaid writes of her local pharmacist Ed: “[N]o matter how much I owed him, he always gave me the medicines that had been prescribed to ease my brother’s suffering and prolong his life” (104; emphasis added). The three—pharmacist, sister, brother, or Ed, Kincaid, Devon—are locked within a triangulated circuitry of gift/debt/death. Kincaid is indebted to the pharmacist, Ed; Devon is indebted to his sister; and Kincaid becomes, quite literally in a biblical and in an ontological sense, her “brother’s keeper.” The memoir’s fastidious “accounting” or careful “calculus” of illness, death, dying, living, credit, and debt are evoked again and again. Debts cycle from past into present and from present backward into the past, as Kincaid recalls that Devon’s: illness and death reminded me again and again of my childhood: this living with credit, this living with the hope that money will come reminded me of going to a grocer whose name was Richards, not the one who was a devout Christian whom later we went to, for the grocers named Richards, whether they had religious conviction or not, charged us too much anyway and then forced us to pay our debts no matter how unable my parents were to do so; my parents had more children than they could afford, but how were they to know how much food or disease, or anything in general, would cost, the future never being now; only it actually comes, the future, later. (107; emphasis added) Reinscribing the familial relations of poverty, debt, credit, and cycles of giving and paying, Kincaid underscores that the current context of Devon’s illness has yet again brought to the surface tensions surrounding financial impoverishment, as well as the typically unreciprocal relations that too often swirl about gifts, debts, and repayment, however driven those cycles may be by the need for reciprocity, acknowledgment, and exchange. Gifts form matrices of power relations that are as much about debt and indebtedness as they are about reciprocity. In this section, I return to the nexus of eros and thanatos, sex and death, to assay understanding how these interlocking forces actively form and alternately deform the relationship between Devon and Kincaid, his sister-biographer. I do so by drawing on the early twentieth-century anthropological writings of Mauss (from The Gift) and how his writings shaped the midcentury and late-twentieth-century philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas (particularly in the philosophical texts Time and the Other and God, Death, and Time), primarily, and Jacques Derrida (in The Gift of Death and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas), secondarily. I start by analyzing the Maussian relationality of gifts and debt as exemplified in Kincaid’s memoir My Brother, before examining Kincaid’s relationship to Devon through the

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theoretical lens offered by the Levinasian conceptualizations of alterity and infinity as manifest in the face of the Other and then probing how Devon’s “gift of death” restructures the relation of brother to sister, other to self, alterity to subjectivity, and even infinity to totality by drawing on Derrida’s philosophical texts on le don de la mort (“the gift of death”) or the existential and ontological process of donner la mort (“giving death”). Mauss’s Gift was an extremely influential anthropological essay that served as one of the key foundations for poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theorizations of the term symbolic. Two examples suffice: for Slavoj Žižek, the influence of Mauss followed a specific intellectual trajectory via Claude LéviStrauss and Jacques Lacan; for Jean Baudrillard, in contrast, the influence of Mauss followed a different intellectual trajectory via Georges Bataille. LéviStrauss extends (and makes more explicit) Mauss’s conceptualization of the “gift” as formative of social relations, arguing that the gift operates through “symbolic exchange” (i.e., exchanges resonant with symbolic valences or meanings, and not simply reducible to economic value). Like Lacan, LéviStrauss was influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics. Lacan brings de Saussure’s insights from Cours de linguistique générale (“Course on General Linguistics”) (1915) together with those of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss on the gift and modes of symbolic exchange. According to Dylan Evans (in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis): Lacan takes from Lévi-Strauss the idea that the social world is structured by certain laws which regulate kinship relations and the exchange of gifts (see also Mauss, 1923). The concept of the gift, and that of a circuit of exchange, are thus fundamental to Lacan’s concept of the symbolic (S4, 153–54, 182). Since the most basic form of exchange is communication itself (the exchange of words, the gift of speech; S4, 189), and since the concepts of law and of structure are unthinkable without language, the symbolic is essentially a linguistic dimension. (201) Whereas Lévi-Strauss offered a psychosocial-linguistic and structuralist extension of Mauss’s “gift” and notions of “exchange” that culminate in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories of language, desire, Law, and symbolic order, Bataille foregrounds a “materialist dialectical” extension and complication of Mauss’s “gift” and “exchange” that Baudrillard later furthers. Writing in the early post–World War II years and directly drawing on The Gift, Bataille articulated a theory of expenditure and excess that resisted the efficiency of both Hegelian productive synthesis and of capitalistic production. Three texts are crucial for understanding Bataille’s anti-Hegelian reworking of The Gift: “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic” (1932), coauthored with Raymond Queneau and published in

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the journal La Critique Sociale; “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933), also published in La Critique Sociale; and the book La part maudite (The Accursed Share) (1947–49).5 In “The Notion of Expenditure” (wherein potlatch and the gift are first discussed) and in the book The Accursed Share, which elaborates on his earlier discussions, Bataille extends Mauss’s notion of “reciprocity,” arguing for a general system of exchange based on “excess” rather than “scarcity,” dearth, or lack. For Bataille (interpreting the potlatch as excessive giving driven by a will to power within a general system of exchange), gifts are always given excessively in order to structure power relations: excess always trumps reciprocity. Unlike Lévi-Strauss, Bataille also develops Mauss’s thought on “gifts” given by man to the dead and to deities: that is, death or “sacrifice.” The effect of Bataille’s reading of Mauss’s Gift is four-fold: it shifts from lack to excess; it shifts from production to consumption; it shifts political economy from a particular focus on economic exchange to a general economy of nature and expenditure; and it revalues forms of exchanges that are symbolic or noneconomic (i.e., not capitalistic). For Bataille, and later for Baudrillard, desire and social production always have an irreducible remainder, an excess. This is in direct contrast to Lacanian notions of lack. Even within Lacanian thought, however, a remainder in excess of the Symbolic persists, which is precisely the domain of the Real. In general, Bataille’s framework is anti-Hegelian and more specifically focuses on the excessive elements that defy and trouble the rational logic of the dialectic, predicated on Enlightenment, reason, efficiency, reproduction: thus, Bataille’s interest in darkness, irrationality, waste (even excrement), erotic perversion. It is also important to note that while equally driven by excess as philosophy, the theoretical Bataille is strikingly different in style (if not in ideas) from the scatological, cosmological, pornographic literary Bataille, as in the “Solar Anus,” The Eye, and elsewhere. The literary (anal-defecatory-anacephalic) Bataille, though, has also been profoundly influential (on writers such as William S. Burroughs, Samuel Delaney, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and William Self), while also influencing scholarly writers such as anthropologist Alphonso Lingis, who, in the brief preface to Excesses: Eros and Culture, wrote, “There are excesses in sexuality; indeed the libido is the name Freud, Nietzsche, and Bataille have taught us to use to cover the excess in the artifices of life” (xi). Bataille theorizes in The Accursed Share (in contrast to some readings of The Gift) that power, rank, and privilege are accrued not through accumulation or production, but rather precisely through excessive consumption, expenditure, or waste. According to Bataille, a sustained period of accumulation of energy/resources (i.e., “growth”) will inevitably result in catastrophic forms of “expenditure” (war, holocaust, nuclear armament, etc.). In this sense, Bataille’s notions of expenditure, excess, and waste may also have influenced Paul Virilio’s theorizations of technology, technological production, and

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structurally inherent forms of catastrophe (for Virilio: every technology has its accident always already built in, so to speak). Bataille further explains poverty not as a contradiction to the “basic fact” of expenditure and excess, but as a consequence of the unequal distribution of the world’s excess. Even class struggle or revolution, then, is explained as “expenditure” of energy and resources. What Bataille’s analysis lacks, though, is precisely a sustained and explicit theorization of power (or will to power) in relation to expenditure (except as adopted from Mauss: i.e., that greater expenditure leads to greater power, privilege, or rank), though it is implicit. Bataille’s ideas are thus also influential in Baudrillard’s La Société de consommation (The Consumer Society) (1970). The logical extension of Bataille’s thought, of course, is that in that capitalism has rendered human beings into objects (as labor; labor as commodity), only human sacrifice can transform the object to subject; and indeed, Bataille was interested in human sacrifice and not just in the historical preoccupation of ancient forms but with the present possibility and need for it! Having glossed Bataillean notions of excess, expenditure, and erotic energy, I “sacrifice” further elaboration here. One could generally speak, then, though with some confessed reservation, of a first intellectual trajectory, a Lévi-Straussian and Lacanian intellectual trajectory that is a structuralist, rational extension of Mauss and, conversely, of a second intellectual trajectory, a Batillean and Baudrillardian intellectual trajectory that is a poststructuralist, irrationalist deconstruction of Mauss’s thought. But it is a third trajectory that most interests me and preoccupies me in my literary analyses of Kincaid’s memoir My Brother: the intellectual “gift” that Mauss’s theorizations of the “gift” (or le don) and reciprocity extend to the philosophical conceptualizations of le temps (time) and la mort (death) in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, primarily, though I also secondarily discuss the writings of Jacques Derrida in response to Levinas’s philosophical ideas. Mauss’s le don inflects and structurally shapes Levinas’s conceptualizations of alterity as reciprocity and also informs Derrida’s philosophical deconstructions of le don de la mort (“the gift of death”), which also owes a debt to Levinas. For Kincaid, an ethical encounter (as Levinas philosophically conceptualizes it as first ethics) is possible with the youngest brother, Devon, even if it is impossible with the mother, Annie, as I explore in the analyses that follow. First, I explore the face-to-face ethical relation to alterity that comes to Kincaid through the “death of the other,” the death of her youngest brother from AIDS-related illnesses. To conclude, I examine Annie Drew as a destructive and elemental force of nature, a “natural disaster,” who brings ravage, ruin, wreck, destruction. She is a divine maternal force who annihilates through death and who eclipses her own children ontologically: they are her fallen angels.

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Devon’s “Gift of Death”: Facing Death, Embracing Alterity, Writing Biography For his sister-biographer, Devon’s “face was like a mask, and this,” Kincaid writes, “was while he was still alive; or still amounted to something called being alive” (149–50). Even in his dying, even in his illness, Devon opens the door onto the experience of death à venir, “to come.” For Levinas, the death of the other is manifest in the becoming nonexpressive of the face, in which “sickness is already a gap between those expressive movements and the biological ones” (11); and for someone who dies, Levinas explains, the “face becomes a masque” and “expression disappears” (God, Death, and Time 12). In a passage from My Brother, Kincaid recalls a moment of seeing Devon as if lying upon his deathbed in the Holberton Hospital in St. John’s: the stark, austere depictions of Devon’s face and body ominously foretell the state of his body in actual death—“eyes open, . . . mouth open”—before Mr. Straffee, the undertaker, cosmetically and chemically prepares his body for burial: He was lying in his bed with the thin sheets on top of him, his eyes open, wide-open, as if they had been forced to be that way, his mouth open, as if it had been forced to be that way; he was lying in his bed, and yet he was somewhere else. When I saw him that time, the last time before he died, and he was lying in bed, his hands were invisible; they were beneath the sheets, the sheets were not moving up and down; his eyes were open, and his mouth was open and his hands were not visible. And that was exactly the way he looked when the undertaker unzipped the plastic bag in which he lay when I went to see him at the undertaker’s. (88–89; emphasis added) For Kincaid, it is Devon’s face, its devastation and waste, that conveys a sense of time in abeyance and yet as always already transpired: the present narrative moment of dying (and the witnessing of death and dying) is suspended in relation to the future (avenir) moment of the actual death to come (à venir). It is through the death of the other—or through Devon’s death—that Kincaid experiences or glimpses, if not knows (as totality), the gestures and movements of alterity, time, and infinity. Devon’s face also gestures or signs both sin and beatification, worldly experience and saintly redemption to his sister: like the death mask his face becomes in Straffee’s Funeral Parlor at end, Devon’s face, as Kincaid confronts it in the Holberton Hospital—an ethical face-to-face, or vis-à-vis, encounter between brother and sister—is described as “sharp like a carving” or “like an image on an emblem”: yet again, metaphor surfaces in Kincaid’s proximity and approach toward death, not because it signifies through language “like an image on an emblem” or

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because it registers meaning and epistemological significance, but precisely because it fails to do so. Metaphor covers and cloaks and masks meaning, renders it unknowable, just as death is unknowable or ineffable. Metaphor, which literally means to “bear” or “carry” “across,” fails to do so; metaphor thus becomes a form of apophatic evasion, an evading or fleeing of meaning, and not merely a veiling of it. Yet Kincaid glimpses in Devon “the face of someone who had lived in extremes, sometimes a saint, sometimes a sinner” (83). And Kincaid’s depiction of Devon—as saint and sinner—recalls the dying words of Addie Bundren in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: “[S]in and love and fear are just sounds that people who have never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words.” To further elucidate Kincaid’s provocative confrontations with Devon’s death precisely through her corporeal encounter with her brother’s diseased body and her face-to-face encounter with his dying, I turn to Levinas’ ethical philosophy: for Levinas, ethics precedes ontology, and both begin not in a confrontation of one’s own impending death, one’s mortality, as in Heideggerian thought, but in a facing of the other, an experience vis-à-vis (or, for feminist French philosopher Luce Irigaray, corps-à-corps). In Levinas’ revisions of Heideggerian thought, the experience of being is absolutely relational, an ontology of l’autre, alterity, or autrui, others, and one phenomenologically experienced in the face of the Other. For Levinas, being must be both an experience of alterity and one of altruism, predicated on the radical and irreducible transcendence of the other. For Heidegger, “death individualizes Dasein, makes Dasein truly be its being”; for Levinas, “death is not my own, not therefore the ‘possibility of impossibility,’ as Heidegger would have it, but the ‘impossibility of possibility.’ ”6 Further, for Levinas, death does not offer a rupture from the immanence of Dasein; this rupture can only be experienced in the transcendence of the other, and precisely through the other’s face. In Totality and Infinity, considered by many to be his most incisive and important philosophical contribution, Levinas works within the system of metaphysical dualism to establish key terms within his thought: self and other; interiority and exteriority; sameness and alterity; synchrony and diachrony; Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death) and la mort de l’autre (the death of the other); being and otherwise than being; totality and infinity. Although the second element in every set is revalorized by Levinas and positioned dialectically in relation to the first (and within the history of philosophy, the more dominant term), the second always exceeds mere opposition or difference defined through opposition. For Levinas, l’autre (the other) possesses a radical alterity that always already exceeds the soi-même (the self-same), the latter of which is defined ontologically—as being—through interiority and temporality in its grappling with the possibility of its own impossibility,

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nonbeing or nothingness, which Heidegger understood as being-towardsdeath: this ontological self-knowledge is totality, all that may be known and thus assimilated. As Derrida explains in Donner la mort (The Gift of Death), “the objection that Levinas constantly makes in relation to Heidegger, that, through the existence of the Dasein, he privileges ‘his own death’ ” (42). One of Levinas’s most salient critiques of Heidegger is, in fact, as Derrida reminds us, his “analysis of death as possibility of the impossibility of the Dasein” (The Gift of Death 46). According to Derrida, “Levinas not only reproaches Heidegger for the fact that the Dasein is argued from the privileged position of its own death (‘La Mort et le temps,’ 42) but because it gives death as a simple annihilation, a passage to nonbeing, which amounts to inscribing the gift of death as being-towards-death within the horizon of the question of being” (The Gift of Death 47). Levinas thus shifts from ontology to ethics, from Dasein to l’autre or autrui. L’autre, or the other, in his or her radical alterity, is thus also the awareness, if unknowability, of exteriority (that which is unknowable, inassimilable, and absolutely exterior to the self), that calls the self into being as an ethical appeal or responsibility through the experience of the death of the other. This appeal is gestured through the face, and the death of the other signed through the nonresponse of the face, or its loss of expressivity upon death that—in its receding or pulling away from me, its transcendence or exceeding of me (moi)—gestures toward what cannot be known (in totality) or totalized by being (être): infinity and an otherwise than being. If being-towards-death manifests a totalizing synchrony, then the death of the other exceeds the self-same as an infinite diachrony, an ateleological deferral of time without actualization that must be experienced passively and patiently, or without anticipation, since it will never come. Infinity (infini) is thus the future (avenir) to come (à venir) but that never comes to pass. In Heideggerian terms, being is understood structurally and ontologically in relation to its own possible impossibility—nonbeing or nothingness. Levinas conversely insists that this structural interrelation of being and nothingness in Heideggerian thought is a direct consequence of the philosopher’s privileging of both ontology, or the ontological question, and the self, as being. For Levinas, death is not ontological negation, or nothingness, and it is not self-preoccupied: it is the death of the other, and not my own, that is primary, and the other’s death gestures not toward nonbeing or nothingness (or at least not toward a nothingness conceived merely as the inverse of being), but toward an otherwise than being. Levinas thus privileges the other over the self, and ethics over ontology, as originary or as “first” philosophy. Derrida, a student of Levinas who also “wrestles angels,” philosophically argues with the teacher’s teacher Heidegger and against his own teacher (whose thought the deconstructionist sees as bound up within an “economy” or “logic” of sacrifice) that donner la mort (to give death), or le don de la

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mort (the gift of death) can never be transferred, delivered, given, or taken for or in place of the other: “Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, ‘given,’ one can say, by death. It is the same gift, the same source, one could say the same goodness and the same law. It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility” (The Gift of Death 41). For Derrida, one can never truly give one’s life or one’s death for the other, because to do so is only to temporarily defer, momentarily replace, or partially save the other from a “particular situation,” but not from death itself that is ineluctable and certain. To assume or to presume to take upon oneself responsibility for the death of the other is, Derrida reasons, to remain within a “nonexhaustive exchange or sacrifice, an economy of sacrifice”; for, he writes, “I know on absolute grounds and in an absolutely certain manner that I will never deliver the other from his death, from the death that affects his whole being” (The Gift of Death 43). The gift of death is one’s assuming of death as one’s irreplaceability. As Derrida explains, If something radically impossible is to be conceived of—and everything derives its sense from this impossibility—it is indeed dying for the other in the sense of dying in place of the other. I can give the other everything except immortality, except this dying for her to the extent of dying in place of her and so freeing her from her own death. I can die for the other in a situation where my death gives him a little longer to live, I can save someone by throwing myself in the water or fire in order to temporarily snatch him from the jaws of death, I can give her my heart in the literal or figurative sense in order to assure her of a certain longevity. But I cannot die in her place, I cannot give her my life in exchange for her death. (The Gift of Death 43) Yet Levinas rebuts this dead-end line of inquiry. He does not argue that Moi (I) can assume la mort de l’autre, “the death of the other,” for the other, only that it is the “death of the other” that actually calls the self (soi), as être or “being,” into its being. Unique to Levinasian thought is the thinking of the face of the other, the visage de l’autre. In God, Death, and Time, Levinas likens his notion of the face to other philosophical ideas—Cartesian substance, Leibniz’s monad, Spinoza’s mode of thought, even Plato’s Ideas, while distinguishing the notion by arguing for a phenomenological, nonreified understanding of the face that resists the abstract reification of the soul: “That which Descartes makes a substance, all the while protesting against the image of the pilot in his vessel [nacelle], that from which Leibniz makes a monad, that which

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Plato posits as the soul contemplating the Ideas, that which Spinoza thinks as a mode of thought, is described phenomenologically as a face” (12). And it is in the death of the other, experienced in the becoming nonexpressive of the face of the other, that we come to understand time and being. This first relation is ethical, not ontological. The death of the other, the face of the other (first in its living expressivity, then in its ceasing expressivity, its becoming nonexpressive: in other words, his or her death) commands an ethical responsibility in relation to the other: thou shalt not kill. Levinas explains that the other “expresses himself in his nudity—the face”; and this facial expression is one of appeal, one “of placing himself under my responsibility” (God, Death, and Time 12). This appeal demands response: as Levinas writes, “Henceforth, I have to respond for him. All the gestures of the other were signs addressed to me. To continue the progression sketched above: to show oneself, to express oneself, to associate oneself, to be entrusted to me [m’être confié]” (12). Being is defined by the death of the other, the one who no longer responds: “My being affected by the death of the other is precisely that, my relation with his death. It is, in my relation, my deference to someone who no longer responds, already a culpability—the culpability of the survivor” (12; emphasis added). And it is the relation to the other, to alterity, that actually (and secondarily) creates the identity, subjectivity, and ontological being of the self: “The other individuates me in the responsibility I have for him. The death of the other who dies affects me in my very identity as a responsible ‘me’ [moi]; it affects me in my nonsubstantial identity, which is not the simple coherence of various acts of identification, but is made up of an ineffable responsibility” (12; emphasis added). Ethics is first, ontology second. The other, and not the self, is thus a priori. The self is only later called into being by the other’s appeal, which is an ethical call, the Ruf in Heidegger’s vocabulary. And while it is the face of the other who gestures or signs its appeal—thou shalt not kill—it is the end of the face’s gesturing, the end of his or her expressive gestures or signs of appeal, nonresponsiveness, or death, that creates the ontological rupture in the self in which being actualizes, or in which being comes into being: “Dying, as the dying of the other [l’autre], affects my identity as ‘I’ [Moi]; it is meaningful in its rupture with the Same, its rupture of my ‘I’ [Moi], its rupture of the Same in my ‘I’ [Moi]. It is in this that my relation with the death of another is neither simply secondhand knowledge nor a privileged experience of death” (13). And the meaning of the death of the other, as expressed in the nonexpressivity or becoming nonresponsive of the face of the other, is not nothingness—as in the Heideggerian dichotomization of being and nothingness experienced in one’s temporal relation to one’s own death or mortality: being-towards-death, or Sein-zum-Tode—though Levinas concedes, with Hegel, that there are as yet unthought ways of conceptualizing nothingness outside of its traditionally

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(or doxic) understanding as the inverse of being. As Levinas writes in his reflective commentary on Hegel’s “Remark 1: The Opposition of Being and Nothing in Ordinary Thinking” from Science of Logic, in which the eighteenth-century German philosopher reconceptualizes nothingness outside of the being/nothingness opposition and suggests the incalculability (literally: no accounting) or ineffability of pure nothingness: We cannot name any difference between being and nothingness; it is impossible to find a difference because, were there one, being would be something other than pure being: there would be a specification here. The difference therefore does not turn on what they are in themselves. The difference appears here as that which embraces them: it is in becoming that the difference exists, and becoming is only possible by reason of this distinction. But is death equivalent to this nothingness tied to being? Becoming is the phenomenal world, the manifestation of being. Now, death is outside this process: it is a total nothingness, a nothingness that is not necessary to the appearing of being [i.e., a priori ground of predication for being]. A nothingness that is obtained not by pure abstraction but as a kind of seizure. In death, one does not make an abstraction of being—it is of us that an abstraction is made. Death, such as it is appears, concerns and frightens and causes anxiety in the death of an other, is an annihilation that does not find its place in the logic of being and nothingness. It is an annihilation that is a scandal and to which moral notions such as responsibility do not come to be simply added on. (God, Death, and Time 78) While Levinas’s reflections on Hegel ultimately manifest yet again “wrestling angels” (to evoke the metaphor of Stuart Hall) or tackling demons—and a return always and rebuttal to his teacher Heidegger (Being and Time), and evocatively in passing also to his existentialist contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness), in the student’s ethical contestation of Sein-zumTode (“being-towards-death”) with an insistence on the alterity manifest in the face and the death of the other, not our own, the passage unsettles the very foundations of Heideggerian thought as it is ontologically grounded in the concepts ‘being,’ ‘time,’ ‘death,’ and ‘nothingness.’ The meaning of the death of the other, according to Levinas, as expressed in the nonexpressive face of the other, is an ineffable responsibility, a temporal deferral: the receding of the other into death (as revealed in the face’s nonresponse) defers time infinitely, and this deferral is our only relation to infinity. This experience of time as infinity, of self in the other, of being in alterity, is profoundly and radically one of passivity and patience: it

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has no object that would be its fulfillment, making it “knowable” and thus within the totalizing realm of the self-same or the subject. It truly exceeds the totality of the self as synchronically knowable; it is the ineffable, unknowable experience of the other who exceeds the self; and in that ineffability or unknowability, the other—and the other’s death, the other’s face—is experienced only in diachronic movement (as Levinas elsewhere writes, “diachrony and the other”) that transcends the self’s knowable or interior experience of time and that moves externally outward into infinity. Above all, for Levinas, the gift of death—to give death, or donner la mort—is not bound to a symbolic economy of debt or expenditure but rather an ethical economy of gift as relation and responsibility: “[T]he other who expresses himself is entrusted to me (and there is no debt in regard to the other, for what is due is unpayable: one is never free of it)” (God, Death, and Time 12; emphasis added). In this profoundly novel philosophical sense, Levinas radically diverges from Mauss’s understanding of the “gift” as “debt” or indebtedness; and it is in her relation to Devon that Kincaid ultimately frees herself from cycles of family debt that are “unpayable,” in Levinas’ words. At end, it is the face of the other, Devon’s face, that ruptures the interiority of subjectivity, Kincaid’s, with an exteriority and an infinity that exceed and transcend it. Kincaid’s writing of death as a “biographical autograph” into the memoir in memoriam for her brother Devon Drew parallels and philosophically returns to Levinas’s alterior complication of Heidegger’s Dasein as ontologically bound to its own mortality, death, and reflection on an a-ontological state of nothingness: death becomes life’s living, breathing stamp, its narrative mark of disclosure and refusal of closure in My Brother; and like Levinas, Kincaid too refuses the false philosophical divisions of life and death, being and nothingness, as abstractions; conversely, she imbues Devon’s death with life, his life with death, living with dying, and dying living through her “biographical autograph.” She does so precisely by figuring Devon’s dying as a burgeoning forth of other lives or alterrains of becomings, that are profoundly material or botanical, as discussed in the first half of this chapter. At first Kincaid seems to disavow the power, potency, and asubjective rupture that the face of the Other presents ontologically to the subject, its interiority, and its imagining of totality: she writes of her mother, Annie Drew, “[W]e sat there, not face-to-face at all” (74). Does this passage manifest a denial of Levinasian alterity, and the face of the other (the visage de l’autre)? The line is embedded within a longer passage reflecting on family, gifts, debt, theft, death, and dying; and it is within this literary scene of “memory” that the line must be contextualized and interpretively read. For Kincaid, there can be no ethical or symbolic exchange with her mother, no face-to-face encounter with alterity, precisely because there is no possibility for reciprocity, for returning the gift, and precisely because her mother is the annihilating force who destroys or eclipses all others: she is the Cain who slays all Abels. And Levinas imagines that the first relation of self-to-other

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may indeed be violent and not caring, but that possibility calls out even more urgently for an ethics grounded in alterity that is privileged above ontology. As Levinas philosophically queries, “Is death separable from the relation with the other [autrui]?” before deciding that “[t]he negative character of death (annihilation) is inscribed in hatred or the desire to murder. It is in the relation with the other that we think death in its negativity” (God, Death, and Time 8–9). Because Cain murdered Abel; because the Nazi regime systematically slaughtered millions of Jewish people during the Holocaust, Levinas himself only narrowly escaping this fate; because death is always already in relation to others, Levinas urges that we rethink the relations of self to others, of subjects one to another, of being to alterity (instead of merely aontologically in relation to nothingness), and of ontology to ethics. Annie Drew is the force of nature who annihilates and destroys: there can thus be no ethical encounter, only moments of ruin and devastation. For Kincaid, there is the possibility, however, for an ethical experience of alterity with her youngest brother, and it is Devon’s dying—his donner la mort (his “gift of death”)—expressed facially and corporeally and thus spiritually (if on purely immanent planes, or world-bound horizons of being-becomings) that Kincaid experiences time (temps), being (être), and infinity (infini). It is Kincaid’s adieu to Devon—his alterity that transcends and exceeds her, his infinity that she experiences as the patience of time—that leads to and constitutes her own being; for “the search for death within the perspective of time (of time not considered as a horizon of being, of the essence of being) does not signify a philosophy of Sein-zum-Tode [being-towards-death],” as in Heideggerian thought, but rather a philosophy of being-in-relation-to-others [autruis], which is also above all an ethical and ontological relation of time and alterity. As Levinas conjectures: Within the duration of time—whose signification should perhaps not be referred to the couple “being and nothingness,” understood as the ultimate reference of meaning, or everything meaningful and everything thought, of everything human—death is a point from which time takes all its patience; this expectation that escapes its own intentionality qua expectation; this “patience and length of time,” as the proverb says, where patience is like the emphasis of passivity. . . . death understood as the patience of time. (7–8)

Annihilating Deaths, Ontological Eclipses: Annie Drew as “Natural Disaster” Although Kincaid’s memoir is titled My Brother, many critics have noted that it might have been as aptly (or perhaps even more accurately) entitled

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My Mother, since it is the overpowering presence of Annie Drew in this extended nonfiction essay—as in so many of her daughter’s literary texts— that dominates. Mrs. Drew’s willful personality, her overbearing voice, her patois-inflected cadences, and her incessant provocation of her eldest child and only daughter are the real living, breathing, pulsing, if at times “cold heart” of this text. She lives as Devon dies; she persists as others perish; she destroys, even as she nurtures the ill and dying. For Kincaid, Annie Drew’s presence is a destructive, even apocalyptic, force-of-nature in the memoir. First, during Devon’s infancy, Annie and her infant son, while napping, were attacked by red ants because of okra plants seeded too close to the house and bedroom window (despite the chastising, maternal admonition not to plant okra too close to the house in the short story “Girl”); in retaliation, Annie whacks the okra plants to their roots and destroys them. A second scene, or mise-en-abyme, involves an adult Devon and the lemon tree he had planted in his mother’s yard, which she carelessly, thoughtlessly chopped down. A third scene involves plants and pests only, though Kincaid intimates or implies that Annie Drew’s children might easily fall from one axiomatic category, valued and cultivated plants, to a devalued one, parasitic and pestilential nuisance; and even plants are not necessarily spared the fall to postlapsarian state of expendable pests. Annie Drew’s children are fallen angels of a god without mercy, though what they earn from the fall—the experiences of love and fear and sin—belie the empty words of love and fear and sin spoken by their damning mother-god; or to again evoke the words of Addie Bundren from As I Lay Dying: “Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words.” In this third scene, Annie Drew destroys an entire microecosystem: parasitic insects, passion fruit vine, and soursop tree. A final scene involves a toddler Devon; his fifteen-year-old sister, Elaine; her small library of treasured books, mostly romance novels; an angry Annie Drew; and what becomes hardwired and then repressed as trauma at the stone heap. While only an infant sleeping in his mother’s arms, Devon’s body becomes the corporeal site for Annie Drew’s overly protective desires that result in destruction of other (alter-)life forms. Kincaid documents how [t]he red ants that attacked him when he was less than a day old had crawled up some okra trees that she had planted too near the house and the red ants went from the okra trees through a window onto the bed in which she and my brother lay. After she killed all the red ants that had attacked her child, she went outside and in a great fit of anger tore up the okra trees, roots and all, and threw them away. (11–12)

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Gardener, Mrs. Annie Drew, is also weeder and tiller and even botany destroyer: okra plants in Devon’s infancy, a lemon tree in his adulthood. When Kincaid first returns to Antigua to visit Devon after he has been diagonosed as HIV positive, she notices “that the lemon tree my sick brother had planted was no longer there and I asked about it, and she said quite casually, Oh, we cut it down to make room for the addition. And this made me look at my feet immediately, involuntarily; it pained me to hear her say this, it pained me the way she said it, I felt ashamed. That lemon tree would have been one of the things left of his life” (13). While Kincaid recognizes her mother’s brutality and ruthlessness, she also grants her capacity for “love” (if not experientially and alinguistically, or outside of the parameters of language, as Addie intimates, then in words and in signifying deeds). Kincaid thus acknowledges: But this too is a picture of my mother: When he was ill, each morning she would get up very early and make for her sick son a bowl of porridge and a drink of a fortified liquid supplement and pack them in a little bag and go to the hospital, which is about a mile away and involves climbing up a rather steep hill. When she set out at about half past six, the sun was not yet in the middle of the sky so it was not very hot. Sometimes someone would give her a lift in a car, but most often no one did. When she got to the hospital, she would give my brother a bath, and when she was doing that she wouldn’t let him know that she saw that the sore on his penis was still there and that she was worried about it. She first saw this sore by accident when he was in the hospital the first time, and when she asked him how he got such a thing, he said that from sitting on a toilet seat he had picked up something. She did not believe or disbelieve him when he told her that. After she bathed him, she dressed him in the clean pajamas she bought for him, and if his sheets had not been changed, she changed them and then while he sat in bed, she helped him to eat his food, the food she had prepared and brought to him. (15) Yet Kincaid troubles the meanings of such “mother love”: “She mourns beautifully, she is admirable in mourning” (131). Having briefly glossed the first two scenes, I focus more extensively on the final two moments of Annie’s apocalyptic or nihilistic destruction. Both involved triangulated circuitries of energies, desires, flows, dependencies, and emotions: parasite-passion fruit vine-soursop tree and Devon-Elaine-Annie, in ascending order. While the first triangulated circuit (parasites-passion fruit vine-soursop tree) is exclusively insectual and botanical, it refracts and reflects the intense triangulated circuit

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of familial and genealogical interrelations of mother-daughter-son, or AnnieElaine-Devon, in descending hierarchical order. Insects, plants, people make up two triangulated circuits: one intensive geographic site (from gaia, ga√a + graphia, graj√a): the mother’s stone heap, or what becomes inscribed as trauma at the stone heap. As Devon lay dying inside the house, Kincaid sees her mother outside in the yard, watches her as she does something ordinary, scale some fish under a tree, but then I noticed that the tree, which used to be a soursop tree, was no longer itself; all that remained of it was its charred trunk. [. . .] I asked my mother what had happened to the tree, and she, without paying any real attention to me, told me that the tree had become a nuisance to her and so she had set fire to it and burned it down. (124–25) Pressing her mother further, Kincaid—in her self-acclaimed “privileged North American way . . . voice full of pity at the thought of any kind of destruction, as long as my great desires do not go unmet in any way” (125)—desires to know the soursop tree’s history—its origin, its transplantations, its infestation, its destruction. Annie Drew tells her daughter the story of the soursop tree, the passion fruit vine that strangulated its branches, weakened its trunk, and made it vulnerable to infestation by pests: And it is in this way that the tree had become a nuisance to her: My mother had gone to visit some of her remaining relatives in Dominica, the ones who were not dead and were still speaking to her. While there, she ate a passion fruit and its flavor so pleased her that she pocketed its seeds, and when she returned to Antigua, she planted them and they grew with such vigor that they outgrew their first support, a trellis made of a bedstead and corrugated galvanize, and then leaped up into the soursop tree, which grew weak from this burden. The weakened soursop tree then became attractive to a colony of parasitic insects, and while living in the soursop tree the parasitic insects prospered and multiplied; this was not surprising at all, it was predictable. The parasitic insects, in their comfort and prosperity, expanded and began to infest the house. My mother tried to contain them with insecticides (imported from North America), insecticides with ingredients so toxic they are unavailable to consumers in North America. The parasitic insects could not be contained, they could not be eradicated, and that was what my mother wanted, that the parasitic insects should be eradicated. (125–26)

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Strikingly, Kincaid calls the burning of soursop tree, passion fruit vine, and parasites “this inferno”: “The soursop tree burned; its parasitic partner, the passion-fruit vine, burned also. I was not there to witness this inferno, the burning of tree and vine and parasitic insects” (126). Infernal destruction, mother-god who destroys elementally—by earth, by air, by water, and especially by fire—devastates her daughter. Kincaid bereaves Annie’s fiery destruction in two passages, revealing that her mother’s blaze may as well have burned the once-girl, now woman-writer herself to charred remains: “But I was plunged into despair, for I recognized again that the powerful sense my mother has of herself is not something I had imagined and I was grateful that only a soursop tree, a passion-fruit vine, and some insects had gotten in its path” (126); and “I did not see the soursop tree and its parasites (passion fruit, insects) perish in the blaze my mother caused; I could only imagine it” (127; italics added). As imaginer and creative writer, Kincaid vicariously lives the trauma, experiences it, and also imaginatively perishes along with the tree, the vine, and the insects. For Kincaid, her mother manifests an infernal and destructive force of nature. Yet hope remains: charred plants reseed and bloom again, fallen angels ascend earthly—if not celestial—heights; and “a lone seedling of a passion fruit sprang up. . . . And from the place I could look down at the stunted passion fruit—for it was that, stunted, unable to go on unable to go back, it could not yet die—I could no longer see the soursop tree, I could no longer see the remains of its charred trunk, only the blue sky above it” (127). Kincaid’s memory moves from insects and botanical plants to traumatic childhood memories: “[A] glance away from the charred soursop trunk is where my mother’s old stone heap used to be, and it was in this place that once my brother’s and my life intersected, and this now has a meaning only because my own life can make it have one” (128). While it is Annie Drew, the mother, who traumatizes—and the stone heap is the precise location marking that trauma as first indelibly inscribed and then subconsciously repressed within memory—it is Jamaica Kincaid, the daughter-biographer, who ultimately (and only) gives these memories and this place signification, meaning, definition, and textual representation. She writes memory and thus rewrites trauma, which she has experienced or known—like Addie Bundren—as if outside of language or codified meaning; she translates trauma into language and thereby resists maternal annihilation through textual creation. Botanical becomings and unbecomings metamorphose into familial trauma at the site of Annie Drew’s stone heap, where the mother not only launders soiled clothing and sets them out on the stones to sun dry but also sets fiery destruction to plants and parasites and books and dreams as well. Annie’s story of her infernal destruction of soursop tree, passion fruit vine, and parasitic insects palpably recalls a traumatic moment in her daughter’s

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coming of age in Antigua. When Elaine Potter Richardson was fifteen years old and her youngest brother, Devon, was just two years old, she was left in charge of his care in their mother’s absence. Given a long list of household chores to finish while also babysitting, Elaine forgot or neglected her assigned duties for the plaisir du texte, for the “pleasure of the text,” or the joys of reading; when the daughter realizes that the afternoon is dwindling, and her mother will soon return home, she finally sets aside the novel that has consumed her in order to quickly complete the chores before her mother’s arrival. Mindful of the sweeping and straightening, Elaine nevertheless forgets to change Devon’s soiled diaper. And when Mrs. Drew returns home to find her toddler sitting in his soiled diaper—a hardened stool inside—she becomes enraged. Suspecting that absentminded and bookish Elaine had been reading instead of caring for Devon, Mrs. Drew retaliates in kind, punishing her daughter’s neglect of the baby by setting her entire, if small, library of books on fire at the stone heap: [S]he gathered all the books of mine she could find, and placing them on her stone heap (the one on which she bleached out the stains and smudges that had, in the ordinariness of life, appeared on our white clothes), she doused them with kerosene (oil from the kerosene lamp by the light of which I used to strain my eyes reading some of the books that I was about to lose) and then set fire to them. (134) Kincaid affiliates trauma with abjection, book burning with bodily excrement, literary defilement with feces staining white undergarments: both expose the young “girl” to her mother’s searing eyes and caustic authority and elemental destructions, psychological and corporeal. A lyrical refrain, “the burning of my books,” marks her maternally inflicted wounds (or those of Elaine, the “girl”), yet the woman-writer Jamaica Kincaid exorcises the traumatic experience through narrative incantation and textual repetition: “the burning of my books . . . the burning of my books” (134); “the burning of my books . . . the burning of my books . . . my mother burning my books” (136); “the memory of my books being burned” (137). In earlier passages, another refrain dominates—“fury . . . fury” (131); “this fury” (134), affiliating Annie Drew with the Furies or classical forces of mother vengeance—and Mrs. Drew’s fury or rage is a “natural disaster,” a destructive force of nature, even an apocalyptic or annihilating cosmic energy. “In a fit of anger that I can remember so well,” Kincaid divulges, “as if it had been a natural disaster, as if it had been a hurricane or an erupting volcano, or just simply the end of the world, my mother found my books, all the books that I had read, some of them books I had bought, though with money I had stolen, some of them books I had simply stolen, for once I read

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a book, no matter its literary quality I could not part with it” (132; emphasis added).7 Annie Drew’s fury and destruction are experienced as annihilating, ontological erasures by her daughter, even though the daughter perceives her mother’s profound victory in eclipsing her: “my erasure at her own hands would have cost her something; my erasure now, my absence now, my permanent absence now, my death now, before her own, would make her feel regal, triumphant that she had outlived all her inferiors: her inferiors are her offspring” (131). Her offspring are not only her descendants (recall the hierarchical ascending and descending triangulated orders that structure this traumatic scene) but also her inferiors: Annie Drew is God; they are her fallen angels. Etymologically, the word disaster derives from the Latin prefix dis- and the root astrum, or “star,” and refers to a star gone astray, a fallen star, which also resonates with the figure of Lucifer in the autobiographical novel Lucy as a fallen star or angel. Although Annie Drew’s children are the fallen angels, or even the falling stars that are hurled away from her sun, it is she herself as the damning mother-god, a cosmological force of nature, that leads to their disaster, that leads to their disastrous becomings, from which they must recreate their own lives from fallen ruins. A fallen angel, a fallen star, the daughter-cum-author Jamaica Kincaid does so through her own writing of “new worlds.” And Kincaid intimates, “A cauldron of words, even a world perhaps, may have passed, but not between us” (133). Although Kincaid describes Annie Drew’s fury as “a fit of anger that I can remember so well,” she also confesses that the traumatic “event, my mother burning my books, the only thing I owned in my then-emerging life, fell into the common-place of a cliché, the repressed memory” (134–35). Memory only surfaces as wounds reopen: it is when Annie Drew visits the Shawn family in Vermont that Kincaid’s repressed memory erupts into her conscious mind, and only then when her mother tells a close friend “that if it were not for her vigilance, [Kincaid] would have ended up not in the home and situation that [she] now occupied but instead with ten children by ten different men” (135). Memory crystallizes as Kincaid also recalls how a young boy named Lindsay—who out of a shared love for literature used to visit young Elaine to borrow books—had been banished from the Drew property because he was falsely perceived by Mrs. Drew to be Elaine’s suitor or intended paramour. As Kincaid, the woman-writer, explains the experience of her girlhood trauma: “all these events in my life would come together: my brother dying, the memory of my books being burned because I had neglected my brother who was dying when he was a small child, a boy named Lindsay who might have been one of the fathers of my numerous children, the what really happened, the what might have really happened, and how it led to what was actually happening. And then again, and then again” (137). At the end of the memoir, Kincaid again evokes this apocalyptic and annihilistic denouement—manifest in the fourth and final

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scene—of her mother’s rack and ruin as a destructive force causing natural disaster. This meaning is the definitive one given to the traumatic event in the memoir, and Kincaid concludes: It was because I had neglected my brother when he was two years old and instead read a book that my mother gathered up all the books I owned and put them on a pile on her stone heap, sprinkling them with kerosene and then setting them alight; I cannot remember the titles of these books, I cannot remember what they were about (they would have been novels, at fifteen I read only novels), but it would not be so strange if I spent the rest of my life trying to bring those books back to my life by writing them again and again until they were perfect, unscathed by fire of any kind. (197–98)

6

Genre, Genealogy, and Genesis in Mr. Potter

“Another line was born . . .”:1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, Let there be light and there was light and God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day and the darkness he called night. —Genesis 1:1–5

[A]nd this [her absence] was followed by a large blank space of darkness and light, sometimes separated, the darkness and light, sometimes mingling, the darkness and the light, and this single blank space of only darkness and light—separated or commingled—was where Elfrida Robinson, his mother, stayed. —Kincaid, Mr. Potter

Kincaid’s Mr. Potter is the author’s most recent foray into the complex and challenging terrain of autofiction (a hybrid genre intermingling fiction and autobiography), or more precisely, alterbiography, a textual rending of autobiography through the inscriptions of alterity and difference.1 The novel is subtle, nuanced, lyrical, passionate, and literary. For those who know Kincaid’s work well and are committed to the ardor that reading her texts demands, it is not only an immensely rewarding read but also a new and unexpected episode in a literary drama that continues to unfold with breathtaking poetry and philosophical brilliance. Mr. Potter recounts the simple, 175

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sparse life of a chauffeur (who first works for an exiled Lebanese merchant and later for himself) on the island of Antigua, the place of Kincaid’s own birth. The story reveals the daily events of Mr. Potter’s life: his affairs and the numerous daughters (who all share his nose) that he birthed, but for whom he never provided and certainly never loved; his illiteracy and his humble attempts to make a life for himself, if not for his children. The novel is not just a biography of this man (who could not read or write) but also the autobiographical reflections of his daughter (the one who could read and write): Elaine Cynthia Potter. In the novel, Kincaid movingly tells of Mr. Potter’s abandonment and rejection of the young girl (born on May 25, 1949), after her own mother, Annie Victoria Richardson (then Drew), seven months pregnant at the time, left with his money that had been saved and hidden under the mattress and with which he intended to buy a car. Through his story, we discover that he too has suffered loss and abandonment: his father, Nathaniel Potter, refused to acknowledge his paternity of the boy Roderick, and his mother, Elfrida Robinson, committed suicide by walking into the sea when he was just a small child. The book is a painful account of loss and desire, and it memorializes the pain itself, as much as the man who suffered it and the man who in his own turn passed on this line of disinheritance it to his daughters, the legatees of his illegitimacy, anonymity, and illiteracy, save one: Jamaica Kincaid. Mr. Potter is a postcolonial, postmodernist creation myth—postmodern in its sensibilities (language constructs transitory truths), yet modern in its historical crises (the past haunts not only the fleeting moments of the present but also the future). In the novel, Kincaid engages her paternal genealogy, breathing life into anonymous ancestors and in-name-only fathers, without eclipsing maternal obsessions, which always recur in Kincaid’s writing of worlds. Genealogy, in the novel Mr. Potter, becomes the foundation for genre, as it does in Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother; genealogy inflects genre and the writing of genre; in this sense, genealogy is inseparable from genre. The inflections of genre imbue other historical and mythological relations—those of genesis and genocide, creation and annihilation. A knot is formed by the entangled threads of genre, genealogy, genesis, and genocide. For Kincaid, this knot is woven and unwoven, tangled and untangled in the genres of biography and autobiography—a Gordian knot not exclusively of mother, father, me; but more vastly, of lineage, language, history, and subjectivity. Throughout the text, a preoccupation and engagement with Genesis informs the narrative subtext, forms the backdrop for this humble narrative about a simple if not always honorable Antiguan man; yet genesis is also absolutely crucial to Kincaid’s philosophical framing of the novel. This chapter proposes a further inquiry into a phenomenon that I define as “Caribbean genesis,” reading Glissant’s theoretical writings in Caribbean Discourse alongside Kincaid’s engagements with genesis in Mr. Potter

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and in the essays from My Garden (Book); I also include, where germane, a discussion of parallel ideas in Walcott’s essays from What the Twilight Says. In this chapter, I have several interrelated objectives. First, I situate Kincaid’s preoccupation with genesis as myth and as a response to history. I outline what Glissant identifies as a Caribbean “quarrel with history,” discussing how Kincaid’s engagements with genesis are intimately related to this “quarrel.” Then, I examine genre and the writing of genre in relation to genesis—particularly as it relates to biography and autobiography, and more specifically in relation to the writing of biography as autobiography. Probing Kincaid’s aesthetic and philosophical play on genesis (and genocide) in the novel, I ask how these forces shape her alterbiographic writing. And finally, I analyze the presence and import of Kincaid’s biographical autograph in the novel Mr. Potter.

Genesis, “In the beginning was the Word . . .” (as light to darkness) “In the beginning . . .” Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word . . .” John 1:10 “And to start again at the beginning.” —Kincaid, Mr. Potter

“In the beginning”—so begins the book of Genesis, and so begins a world. The words reverberate across centuries and new myths of creation, history, and time, echoed anno Domini in the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word,” the creation of worlds in words for a new age. For Jamaica Kincaid, writing in the twenty-first century of the third post-Christian millennium, words and worlds remain imbued with creative power, if only transitorily, and the author as creator takes up her pen to write new lives and new worlds into being. In Mr. Potter, a novel that swirls around creations, Kincaid reiterates these biblical beginnings but forces creation and creativity to her will, wielding her pen to confront history and so-called divine orders (the fatal European belief in the “Great Chain of Being”). “And to start again at the beginning” (188), telling and writing (and creating) Mr. Potter and his story, if not history (or, History with a capital H), Kincaid laments, and yet embraces the fact that Mr. Potter was not an original man, he was not made from words, his father was Nathaniel and his mother was Elfrida and neither of them could read or write; his beginning was just the way of everyone, as would be his end. He began in a long day and a long night and after nine months he was born. (55–56; emphasis added)

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Kincaid’s portrait of Roderick Nathaniel Potter renders him an ordinary man, not original; a real flesh-and-blood—or as she later states it, “tissue, bones, and blood” (62)—man. Kincaid makes the man, her father, in words, and yet she claims here that “he was not made from words” (56; emphasis added). Working within, but also against Logos (both the principle of order in Greek thought, as well as divine word and its incarnation in biblical terms), Kincaid creates a portrait of her father. Here Kincaid’s tracing of genealogy evokes the begotten sons of biblical fathers; in Kincaid’s cosmogony, they are begotten and forgotten sons or more accurately, disinherited daughters. The passage is ambivalent, its movement twofold, its effect double—as Kincaid first renders her father humble and material, and then, second, creates his image in language even as she renounces the idea of transcendent ideas. Does Kincaid’s portrait of Mr. Potter evoke divine creation even as she renounces that possibility? Does Kincaid’s novel Mr. Potter mark a return to or a revenant of mythic beginnings or contrarily a creative writing away of all possibilities for divine creation, for definitive origins? In Kincaid’s engagements with genesis, she joins a Caribbean “quarrel with history” that is above all a preoccupation with genesis (origins, creation, filiation), even through its disavowal or a Caribbean turning away from the possibility of creative beginnings. In this sense, Kincaid joins other Caribbean writers such as Derek Walcott and Édouard Glissant in their poetic revisions of genesis, creation, and myth. Glissant returns again and again to notions of genesis in his pioneering work on Caribbean aesthetics, Caribbean Discourse, not to locate an origin and point of beginning but as a way of recreating past in present and future, even without origins. Walcott’s theoretical writings, especially “The Muse of History,” have borrowed from Christian mythological symbols: naming, creating, Adam in his ‘New World.’ Fred D’Aguiar has written eloquently about Walcott as Adamic creator, and Daryl Cumber Dance titled his collection of interviews with West Indian writers New World Adams. Genesis: as narrator, writer, daughter, Kincaid writes worlds into being and fills her worlds with mythic characters. A Potter descended from a long line of potters, she is the demiurge creating and destroying worlds at will. In the text, she is divine and diabolic, godlike and fallen, moving across spheres celestial, earthly, and infernal that she has created in words. Traversing genres, Kincaid’s mythos is at once epic and tragic, narrating the trajectories of modern diasporas (African, Lebanese, Czechoslovakian, Dominican, and finally, Antiguan) through the biographical and textual lives of Nathaniel Potter; Elfrida Robinson; Mr. Shoul; Dr. Samuel “Zoltan” Weizenger; his nurse and wife, Mae Weizenger; Roderick Nathaniel Potter; Annie Victoria Richardson; and their biological daughter, Elaine Cynthia Potter (Richardson). It narrates the epic movements of modernity and the

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cultural clashes that created a New World—so-called discovery, conquest, colonialism, indigenous subjugation, forced migration in the Middle Passage and then forced labor on the British Caribbean’s sugar cane plantations, the Second Middle Passage and Asian indenture. The stories are both intimate and abstract: Roderick Nathaniel Potter is both Caribbean everyman whose history began and ended, as Kincaid states, five hundred years ago in 1492 and the five-year-old orphaned boy (nicknamed Drickie) whose father, Nathaniel Potter, has never acknowledged him and whose mother, Elfrida Robinson, walked into the sea one day to deliberately drown herself. As in Genesis, Kincaid begins (and I thus begin) with a meditation on light and darkness, “sometimes separated . . . sometimes mingling” (83). From the very first page of Mr. Potter, Kincaid establishes a play on light and darkness that is both metaphoric and metaphysical, that is biblical, creating the contrasting boundaries that demarcate day from night and human being from human being in the novel. In the opening chapter, a contrast—as dark to light and night to day—is painted between the character Mr. Potter, the Antiguan chauffeur of African descent, and Dr. Weizenger, the exiled Czechoslovakian doctor who has newly arrived and who will be driven to his new home by Mr. Potter. Unaccustomed to the brilliant light of the Caribbean sun, Dr. Weizenger embraces the sun’s rays, while fearing the darkness (or absence of light): And Dr. Weizenger was thinking how beautiful light of any kind was, light that did not come from a furnace, a real furnace fed by the fuel of coal or human bodies; light, real light, with its opposite being darkness, real darkness, not a metaphor for the darkness from which Mr. Potter and his ancestors had come. (16) As a man escaping the Jewish Holocaust and fleeing European anti-Semitism, Dr. Weizenger remains plagued and haunted by images of annihilation: “And his own extinction had almost succeeded and how surprised he was by this, and how he would remain for the rest of his life” (23). Despite this near-death brush with genocide, though, Dr. Weizenger also remains unaware of other earlier historical genocides, oblivious to the same fatality suffered by others in the world; he experienced his confrontation with death and annihilation “as if such a thing had never happened before, as if groups of people, one day intact and building civilization and dominating heaven and earth, had not the next found themselves erased and not even been remembered in a prayer or in a joke by the rest of humanity; as if groups of people had not been erased from the beginning of life and human memory” (23). For Dr. Weizenger, his own exile in Antigua is like a “descent” into darkness, a darkness that borders on the metaphysical yet also remains

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too palpably physical or material: too visible, too epidermal. In his world view, Dr. Weizenger racializes the terrains of light and darkness, even as he maintains the distinction between metaphysical darkness and material darkness. He thus disallows the African Antiguans around him even the space of a negative ontology, an ontological negation: for him, they remain too earthbound, too physical even to ascend (or descend) to metaphysical absence (of light). Dr. Weizenger overwhelmingly feels that he has “vanished into darkness, yes darkness!” (33). Is Dr. Weizenger’s absorption into darkness annihilatory or life-sustaining? This darkness is mental as well as corporeal, and his experience of it is as if “a vast darkness had descended over many things he had known” (33). He finds this darkness indistinct, unknowable; he cannot quite describe it. It is “not a darkness like the night, and not a darkness that was the opposite of the light in which he was now standing, not a darkness that was the opposite of the light into which Mr. Potter had temporarily disappeared”; for Weizenger, it is a racialized darkness. It is “more like the darkness from which Mr. Potter and all he came from had originated” (33). Dr. Weizenger’s racism is made manifest again later in the novel when he insists that his young medical assistant, Annie Victoria Richardson, scrub the black children, his patients, before he will treat them. Ironically, although Dr. Weizenger feels himself absorbed into darkness and thus destroyed, his escape to Antigua, to the island’s “darkness” as he conceives it, saves him from an otherwise certain death at the hands of “white” German fascists who erroneously and homicidally proclaimed their own so-called enlightened world view. The passage remains, though, marked by a fundamental ambivalence: black absorbs white, darkness light. Does the passage reveal light returning to darkness? A darkness from whence it came? In the passage, Dr. Weizenger both (negatively) racializes darkness and strips it of potential metaphysical valence; yet this darkness persists as an a priori cosmic force, as if prior to creation (a divine force in and of itself). Contrasting with a priori darkness, light is substanceless, yet translucent, imbuing all objects on which it falls with “substance,” although light itself is without substance. The light has no spatially defining characteristics of its own; like water, it takes on the attributes of the object into which it streams or flows. Compare the line from Mr. Potter in which the biological grandfather, Nathaniel, likens light and water: “And there was the world of sky above and light forcefully illuminating and forcefully streaming through the sky and the awe of great bodies of water flowing into each other even as they remained separate” (37). In another passage, we see through Mr. (Roderick) Potter’s eyes, rather than those of Dr. Weizenger. Arriving at Dr. Weizenger’s new house in St. Johns, Mr. Potter opens the doors and then the windows. Struck by the light, Mr. Potter gazes through the window at the world outside the house (in this

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passage as in many others in Kincaid’s oeuvre, the house itself is a world contained). When Mr. Potter sees the light, he observes its translucence: [I]t was the light as he had always known it, so bright that it eventually made everything that came in contact with it transparent and then translucent, the light was spread before Mr. Potter as if it were a sea of water, it covered and yet revealed all that it encompassed; the light gave substance to everything else: the trees became the trees but only more so, and the ground in which they anchored themselves remained the ground but only more so, and the sky above revealed more and more of the sky and into the heavens, into eternity, and then returned to the earth. (19–20) Mr. Potter destabilizes the cultural privileging of light (over dark), without negating light’s beauty, its power, its translucence. Mr. Potter can sustain a world of light and dark intermingled, mixed, creating shadows, unlike Dr. Weizenger for whom the light and the darkness remain fundamentally separated (as if by divine decree; compare Genesis 1:4), or else one threatens to destroy and erase the other (thus, Dr. Weizenger’s fear and feeling that he has vanished into darkness!). For Dr. Weizenger, even though he inhabits the shadows (like Mr. Potter and Mr. Shoul who live in the diasporic shadows of new worlds), he remains part of the singular world (and world view) that cannot admit or “speak of the shadows” (114). Kincaid blurs the boundaries of created light and a priori darkness in the passage in which the young boy Roderick Nathaniel Potter (nicknamed Drickie) grieves for his dead mother (Elfrida Robinson), who committed suicide by drowning, a death by water, and abruptly left her son, from that moment on an orphan, to the world alone. The five-year-old boy naively awaits his mother’s hoped-for, but never-fulfilled return, craving a glimpse of her face, but “all this [expectation and desire] was followed by a large blank space of darkness and light, sometimes separated, the darkness and the light, sometimes mingling, the darkness and the light, and this single blank space of only darkness and light—separated or commingled—was where Elfrida Robinson, his mother, stayed” (83–84). Kincaid also writes genesis into the novel in other ways—first, in creating a life for Mr. Potter; second, in creating a life for herself through Mr. Potter’s story; and finally, through evoking biblical language throughout the novel in the creation of her own “chaosmos,” a world with constellations and infernal fires and geologic subterranean shifting plates. By writing genesis into the novel, Kincaid powerfully revisits Glissant’s idea that “Genesis legitimates genealogy” (Caribbean Discourse 140). I turn now to the Caribbean “quarrel with History” and Kincaid’s role in this quarrel.

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The Caribbean “Quarrel with History” Édouard Glissant’s Le discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) was a groundbreaking work for theorizing Caribbean identity, history, and literature in ways that resisted dominant colonialist paradigms. One of the most provocative ideas in Glissant’s text is the idea that History and Literature in the West have functioned as totalizing systems that consolidate grandiose ideals about Western civilization; for Glissant, “History (whether we see it as expression or lived reality) and Literature form part of the same problematics” (69). As Glissant further theorizes, “History (like Literature) is capable of quarrying deep within us, as a consciousness or the emergence of a consciousness, as a neurosis (symptom of loss) and a contraction of the self” (70). Critiquing the transcendence of History and Literature in the West, Glissant remarks on an Antillean “quarrel with History” in Caribbean Discourse, wherein he refigures the relations of history and literature and notes the colonialist imbrications of myth making and history defining (61). In a chapter entitled “The Known, the Uncertain,” Glissant displaces Western notions of history—what Glissant defines as History with a capital H—as grounded within a distinctly Hegelian frame. According to Hegel’s hierarchical, eurocentric, and racially determined parameters, Europe constituted the place of the Historical, Asia the prehistorical, and Africa the ahistorical. Glissant critiques Hegel’s world-historical model, explaining that “ ‘History [with a capital H] ends where the histories of those peoples once reputed to be without history come together.’ History is a highly functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone ‘made’ the history of the World” (64). The ahistoricity imposed on Africa in Hegel’s thought—and thus, in other Western discourses—passed over the black Atlantic, Glissant argues, through slavery and diaspora and also negatively defined the hierarchical plantation orders of the Caribbean, the site of a history characterized by ruptures and that began with a brutal dislocation, the slave trade. Our historical consciousness could not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment, as it were, as happened with those peoples who have frequently produced a totalitarian philosophy of history, for instance European peoples, but came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces. This dislocation of the continuum, and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, characterize what I call a nonhistory. (62) This “nonhistory” is one imposed by colonialism, enslavement, and diaspora. For Glissant, “the negative effect of this nonhistory is therefore the erasing of the collective memory” (62). Caribbean theorists and writers reenvision

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and recreate memory and history by writing future pasts into the present. “Because the Caribbean notion of time was fixed in the void of an imposed nonhistory,” Glissant explains, “the writer must contribute to reconstituting its tormented chronology: that is, to reveal the creative energy of a dialectic between nature and culture in the Caribbean” (65). Submarine histories displace a hegemonic sense of History (‘with a capital H,’ as Glissant writes), and trans-Atlantic stories chart submarine histories. In a section of Caribbean Discourse subtitled “History—Histories—Stories,” Glissant writes: The implosion of Caribbean history (of the converging histories of our peoples) relieves us of the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History that would run its unique course. It is not this History that has roared around the edge of the Caribbean, but actually a question of the subterranean convergence of our histories. . . . Submarine roots: that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its networks of branches, (66, 67) Kincaid also stages her own “quarrel with History.” She enters this Antillean “quarrel” in her numerous meditations on “history” in the West Indies in published interviews. In a 1990 interview with Selwyn Cudjoe, Kincaid noted how a childhood fascination with history remained an adult preoccupation, if not obsession, for her: “I read A History of England. [. . .] I read about the history of the West Indies, all different books, because I keep thinking that someone will say it happened differently. I can never believe that the history of the West Indies happened the way it did[:] . . . the wreck and the ruin and the greed” (223–24). Kincaid told Donna Perry in 1993, When I was little I had this great mind for history. And I never really understood it until I realized that the reason I like history is because I also reduce the past to domestic activity. History was what people did. It was organized along the lines of who said what and who did what, not really unlike how the society in which I grew up was organized. The idea that things are impersonal occurrences is very alien to me. I personalize everything. (137) In the interview with Perry, Kincaid also commented that she “personalize[s] everything”—even, or perhaps especially, her history and her heritage, and these elements are, of course, entangled with notions of genealogy, genesis, genre, and ultimately, even genocide. In a 1993 interview with Allan Vorda, Kincaid defines her history and heritage in a way that mirrors that of Xuela, the protagonist of The Autobiography of My Mother: “I’m part African, part Carib Indian, and part—which is a very small part by now—Scot. All of

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them came to Antigua by boats. This is how my history begins” (81). This engagement, or quarrel, with history, then, is very much an autobiographical venture; Kincaid explains how one “struggle[s] to make sense of the external from the things that have made you what you are and the things that you have been told are you: my history of colonialism, my history of slavery, and imagining if that hadn’t happened what I would have been” (83; emphasis added). Kincaid’s words reveal how one’s autobiography must necessarily be written within and against the parameters of history and those historical forces (such as colonialism, slavery, and genocide) that have shaped the Caribbean “New World.” To Perry, Kincaid attests this relationship of self to history, stating that “my history is so much about dominion; in fact we were called ‘the dominion,’ and all the colonies were ‘the dominions’ ” (134–35). The relationship of self to history, although intimately personalized in these quotes, is also abstracted and collectivized: it is the collective histories of colonialism, slavery, and genocide in the Caribbean that must be confronted within the autobiographical. For Kincaid, history is autobiography, and autobiography history. One cannot be disentangled from the other. It is in this sense that Kincaid writes history’s autobiography and deconstructs autobiography’s history. One of the most provocative and intellectually probing essays in My Garden (Book):, entitled “In History,” opens the parameters of the New World and its “discovery” to a rigorous theoretical critique. This history, Kincaid explains, has profound consequences for those who dwell in the Americas and for whom the personal legacies of that history are still unfolding. For Kincaid, the Americas remain bound within “this spell, the spell of history” (The Autobiography of My Mother 218). She begins the essay with a series of questions that strike at the heart of colonialism in the Americas and its impact for colonized persons: What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history? If so, what should history mean to someone like me? Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound with each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again and again, over and over, and is this healing and opening a moment that began in 1492 and has yet to come to an end? Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself? Why should I be obsessed with all these questions? (“In History” 153)

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Kincaid herself conjectures an answer to the questions she poses, and her initial response is direct, to the point, even as it absolutely echoes the consistent tone of almost every history of the West Indies written, a documented history that erases other histories: “My history begins like this: In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World” (153). Then, revealing the true complexity of this history, and how it has been woven into dominant constructions of truth and knowledge, she reflectively adds: “Since this is only the beginning and I am not yet in the picture, I have not yet made an appearance, the word ‘discover’ does not set off an alarm, I am not yet confused by this assertion. Discover is a fact that I accept; I am only taken by the personality of this quarrelsome, restless man” (154). To discover, Kincaid intimates, is to conquer and to appropriate as one’s own. Because she is interested in Columbus’s “personality,” as she says, Kincaid asks, “Who is he?” who is “this quarrelsome, restless man?” before writing a biomythography for this historical figure: His origins are sometimes obscure, sometimes no one knows just where he really came from, who he really was. His origins are sometimes quite vivid: his father was a tailor, he came from Genoa; as a boy, he wandered up and down the Genoese wharves, fascinated by sailors and their tales of faraway lands; these lands would be filled with treasures, all things far away are treasures. I am far away but I am not yet a treasure, I am not a part of this man’s consciousness, he does not know of me, I do not yet have a name. And so the word “discover,” as it is applied to this new world, remains uninteresting to me. (154) Kincaid thus creates a mythic biography for the great West Indian “discoverer,” just as his exploits created a history for her and those who look like her, revealing that his biography, like his “discoveries,” is not just history but history writ large as myth. She then returns to intellectual, philosophical inquiry, wondering to herself, “When did I begin to ask all this? When did I begin to think of all this and in just this way? What is history? Is it a theory?” (159). Kincaid knows, and she states, “I no longer live in a place where I and those that look like me first made an appearance. I live in another place. It has another narrative” (159). To unfold the narrative of her history, she once again turns to biography: this time, that of Carolus Linnaeus, whose name “Linnaeus is the Latinized form of the Swedish word lind” (161). She tells how Linnaeus’s own discoveries, botanical, were funded by George Clifford, “a rich merchant banker” (161), and here, Linnaeus’s narrative converges with her own. In giving Columbus, Linnaeus, and Clifford a biography and a genealogy,

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Kincaid reveals the imbrications of biography, genealogy, naming, and power and demonstrates how each of these forms of knowledges form the narrative weave or backdrop that is history; the history of the “New World”; her history; or as she states in an interview with Allan Vorda, “my history of colonialism, my history of slavery” (83; emphasis added). “George Clifford,” Kincaid writes, “long ago entered my narrative, I now feel I must enter his”; and she asks, “What could it possibly mean to be a merchant banker in the eighteenth century?” (164). As the director of the Dutch East India Company, Clifford was not, Kincaid asserts, “involved in the Atlantic trade in human cargo from Africa,” though he would have traded in “places like Ceylon, Java, the Cape of Good Hope,” where these colonial outposts were “emptied of their people as the landscape itself was emptied of” all it held (165). No, it was not through the Atlantic slave trade that Carolus Linnaeus or George Clifford enter her narrative, but rather, through the scientific system of binomial nomenclature: “It was in George Clifford’s greenhouse that Linnaeus gave some things names,” and “the Adam-like quality of this effort was not lost on him” (165). In another essay in My Garden (Book), “To Name Is to Possess,” Kincaid intimates that naming is the first act of possession and dominion; Linnaeus’s system of scientific naming, especially in the exotic botanical trade that accompanied other forms of commercial trade (spice, sugar, slave) during the early periods of British colonialism, reveals that the colonialist impulse to name is rooted in the desire to possess and to dominate. Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History that “the naming of the ‘fact’ [the “Discovery of America”] is itself a narrative of power disguised as innocence”; as Trouillot astutely demonstrates, “Naming the fact thus already imposes a reading and many historical controversies boil down to who has the power to name what. To call “discovery” the first invasions of inhabited lands by Europeans is an exercise in Eurocentric power that already frames future narratives of the event so described” (114).2 At the close of Kincaid’s essay “In History,” she again implores (of herself, of history itself, to its actors, and to those who had the power to write its scripts): “What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history? And if so, what should history mean to someone who looks like me? Should it be an idea; should it be an open wound, each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again, over and over, or is it a long moment that begins anew each day since 1492?” (166). Fictionally, Kincaid meditates once again on history and its profound (indeed devastating) effects on lives lived under its spell in the novel Mr. Potter. The year 1492, as a simultaneous point of historical beginning and ending, is reiterated in Mr. Potter, and in the novel, it is associated with genealogy, descent, and a search for origins. In the novel, Kincaid writes

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that “the sound of Mr. Potter’s voice, [was] so full of all that had gone wrong in the world for almost five hundred years that it could break the heart of an ordinary stone” (23). Mr. Potter’s voice rings with tragic “discoveries,” and his birth from a “motherless” mother named Elfrida Robinson descends from a long line or sentence of “motherless mothers.” Kincaid directs her readers in the imperative: See her as a small girl motherless, and see her mother before her motherless and that mother, too, motherless, and on and on reaching back not so much into eternity as into a sentence that would begin with the year fourteen hundred and nine-two; for eternity is the unimaginable awfulness that makes up the past and the unimaginable peace and pleasure that is to come. (72) History and genealogy are intertwined here, even if in broken lines; Roderick Nathaniel is born to Elfrida Robinson, a motherless mother who is herself the daughter of a motherless mother who is herself this motherless daughter. For the boy Drickie and his mother, Elfrida, this historical and genealogical disinheritance is a “sentence,” a damnation, a condemnation to ancestral anonymity; it is also a tragic consequence of European colonial history and its abominable enslavement of people of African descent. The year 1492 (“fourteen hundred and ninety-two”) thus marks a broken line of historical descent for people of African origins in the New World. Time, and the movement of time, is marked differently for those who are the victors and those who are the vanquished. In the novel, the Anglican cathedral, which stands on the spot at which Market Street ends on Newgate Street, is the temporal and spatial landmark of both victory and defeat: it has been built for the Anglican believers by the African slaves “from whom Mr. Potter could trace his ancestors” (177); the tower clock on the cathedral (“with four faces looking north, south, east, and west, making the cathedral seem as if it simultaneously captured and released time”) marks time for the victors, but for Mr. Potter (as for all who looked like him), “he was all by himself: a definition of time captured and released, released and captured” (177). The tower clock, Kincaid notes, was built “hundreds of years before,” by Mr. Potter’s ancestors: And Mr. Potter’s lifetime began in the year fourteen hundred and ninety-two but he was born on the seventh day of January, nineteen hundred and twenty-two, and his mother was Elfrida Robinson of English Harbour and his father was Nathaniel Potter, also of English Harbour, and the midwife who assisted his mother in bringing him into the world was named Nurse Eudelle. And all through this small narrative of this small life was the loud and harsh ringing of the

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church’s bell, and this loudness and this harshness was such a surprise to the people who had ordered the cathedral and its clock and bell that these two peoples agreed to call the harsh loudness a chime and the chiming of the church bells marking off time eventually became a part of the great and everlasting silence. (177–78) Time ultimately is measured not through the chiming of the church’s bell but rather in the “great and everlasting silence” of history and defeat and death. Mr. Potter’s death, his end (as if in a narrative; as if written by his daughter Elaine Cynthia Potter), is associated with this “great and everlasting silence” that is both temporal and eternal; however, “his end has a beginning,” a textual return: And Mr. Potter did not move with great hurry or inexorably toward his inevitable end, it was only that the end is so inevitable, his end was beyond avoidance, and yet like the hours trapped in a clock—let it be the clock on the top of the cathedral with its four faces, each facing a corner of the earth—the end of each hour is the beginning of the next, his end has a beginning and it rests in the small girls, each of them with his nose, and one of them can read and can write and perhaps this one shall remove him from the great and everlasting silence. (178) Mr. Potter’s movement toward death is monumental: a temporal entrapment (“hours trapped in a clock”), yet as each hour ends, it begins again in the new hour to which it gives birth. Mr. Potter’s end, his beginning: a narrative cycle of return and creative force: he creates the child—Elaine Cynthia Potter—whom he abandons and who creates his life (Mr. Potter) in narrative for eternal recurrence, removing Mr. Potter from the eternal and vast silence that is death and that is history. Kincaid shrouds her dead father in mythic layers, making him an artifact not only of history and literature but also of myth. Here, I want to return to a discussion of genesis in order to illustrate how the Caribbean “quarrel with History” is intimately bound to ideas about myth.

“Caribbean Genesis”: Writing “New Worlds” History and Literature, which Glissant argues “first come together in the realm of myth” (71), have operated in the West through an ideology of “dominant sameness” (70) that relegates diversity and difference to the peripheries of documentation or representation: according to Glissant, this dynamic is deeply embedded within the notion of Genesis. Caribbean writers’ contes-

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tations of history also mark their engagements with genesis. And Genesis (capital G), according to Glissant, is the foundational narrative for History (capital H) and Literature (capital L): “Genesis, which is the fundamental explanation, and ordering, which is the ritualized narrative, anticipate what the West would ascribe to Literature (that is almost divine creation: the Word made Flesh)—the notion of Genesis—and what would be the realm of historical consciousness (a selective evolution)—that of Ordering” (72). And “the encounter between genesis and ordering” in myth separates, opposes, and structures the relations between the realms of nature and culture (73). Within Western myths of genesis, Glissant argues that nature is almost always subdued to the ordering principles of culture and that “the control of nature, and of one’s nature, by culture was the ideal of the Western mind” (73). In genesis myths of the West, Glissant contends, “it is a matter of learning the natural Genesis, the primordial slime, the Eternal Garden, and embarking—even at the risk of condemnation (like the myth of Adam and Eve . . .)—on a journey to an ordering-knowledge” (73). This dynamic, according to Glissant, operates both within History and within Literature, manifest in History’s notions of evolution and progress and in Literature’s, particularly realism’s, privileging of the linear, chronologically ordered narrative: “the linear nature of narrative and the linear form of chronology take shape in this context” (73). Herein lies the idea that “Genesis legitimates genealogy” (140): for Glissant, time, history, and lineage all affirm myth’s quest for origins, legitimacy, and filiation. This hegemony of time and order in History and Literature, though, Glissant reasons, ends with the abrupt and discordant ruptures of modernity. Within modernist America (in the hemispheric, not nationalistic parameters), Glissant sees not a fixed time and history but rather a “longing for history” (79) that haunts the dis-ordered and nonlinear narratives of writers such as William Faulkner, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez and that conceals “the relationship between history and literature” (79). As Glissant explains, “The passion for or the preoccupation with history does not manifest itself in the writer as a need for a reserve of information to which he has easy access, not as a reassuring framework, but rather as the obsession with finding the primordial source toward which one struggles through revelations that have the peculiarity (like myth in the past) of obscuring as well as disclosing” (79). Although the modern hero has lost the capacity to seek a “primordial source” or origin (which is the domain of myth), myth “continues to haunt” through a “longing for history” (79). In the Americas, the desire for uncovering one’s history is frustrated by the impossibility of origins; nevertheless, American narratives reveal a frustrated desire for history: “The death of everything is in the knowledge of origins, and history is a painful way of fulfilling what has been said. The desired ideal of history is therefore in this case self-sustaining and is involved in

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devouring itself. The difficulty of knowing history (one’s history) provokes the deepest isolation” (82). Analyzing Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! both Sutpen’s desire for historical legitimacy and his son Charles Bon’s desire for genealogical legitimacy, Glissant notes that “it is a case of perversion of the original line of descent (that fundamental order): here man has lost his way and simply turns in circles” (80). For Glissant, Quentin Compson’s quest for knowledge in Absalom, Absalom! is a quest that questions history and historical consequence: “Knowing what happened (why—that is, for what ‘valid’ reason—the whites exterminated the Indians and reduced the blacks to slavery, and whether they will be held accountable) is the question that one (yes, that Faulkner) cannot afford not to ask” (80–81). For Glissant, as for Faulkner, “the important thing is not the reply but the question” (81). Reading another passage, this time from Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel Sally Hemmings that reflects on genealogy and descent (or its impossible, untraceable lines), Glissant remarks in a footnote that mixed races and creolized cultural heritages complicate the questions of genealogy and legitimacy, and “there we can grasp the difference that stretches between the West’s appropriation of history by establishing a line of descent and the longing for this ideal, ‘destined to remain a longing’ ” (81). The modern American hero, Glissant argues, “will have to return to the demands of the ‘here and now’ (which is, not the known, but the done), so renouncing, the beginning of history. . . . The literary work, so transcending myth, today initiates a cross-cultural poetics” (82). Does Kincaid also so renounce the “beginning of history”? Or does she pose the aporia of history and historical beginnings as her fundamental question? After all, as Glissant intimates, “the important thing is not the reply but the question” (81). Indeed, Kincaid’s Mr. Potter continually evokes the idea of “beginnings”: in the novel, she meditates on “my beginnings” (54); to tell Mr. Potter’s story, his history, she says that she must “start again at the beginning” (188); of the diasporic individuals (Mr. Potter, Mr. Shoul, Dr. Weizenger) living in Antigua, Kincaid notes that “they had to begin again, re-create their own selves, make something new” (194). In Kincaid’s tangled narrative, though, beginnings border on and merge with endings. Kincaid thus also paradoxically meditates on beginnings that end in Mr. Potter: writing about her biological grandfather, Nathaniel Potter, and his place on earth, Kincaid explains that “he was part of its mysterious and endless beginnings” (40); commenting on Mr. Potter’s death, Kincaid laments his end, but more hopefully articulates that “his end has a beginning” (178); she also grieves, though, that life with “its glorious beginnings end and the end is always an occasion for sadness” (184, emphasis add). Even endings are not final, and in the novel, endings almost always spill over into new points of becoming, into new beginnings: in a passage recounting

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Dr. Weizenger’s flight from Prague through Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Shanghai to St. Johns, Antigua, the exile recalls conversations about the “end of the world” (32) with “days of the world ending again and again, and within the very days were ends, as if the day did not constitute and define a limitation” (32–33; emphasis added). In Mr. Potter Kincaid sets a world spinning on its axis, creates a “chaosmos” of creative beginnings and tragic endings wrought through the forces of creation and annihilation, of genesis and genocide. Kincaid’s Antiguan chaosmos is one in which “the sun, a planetary body [is] indifferent to the significance of individuals” (140) and the world “in all its parts, was complicated, with plates beneath its surface shifting and colliding, with vast subterranean cauldrons of steam and gases mixing and then exploding violently through the earth’s crust” (125). This cosmos is not only planetary and geologic; it is also psychic and metaphysic, haunted and driven by the question to her father, “What am I to call you? [which] seemed to arrange not only a singular world but a whole system of planetary revolutions” (169). This world is volatile and changing, not static. Kincaid writes, “The world as we know it will from time to time do that, collapse, engulfed by a fire” (104). Unsurprisingly, Annie Victoria Richardson is a force (both divine and diabolic) in this world: she is sulfuric and volcanic, “flames in her own fire and . . . very beautiful” (135); she is an unstable archipelago, “herself already a series of beautifully poisonous eruptions, a boiling cauldron of strange fluids, a whirlwind of sex and passion” (141). Later, evoking the same language of infernal destruction, Kincaid takes on the fiery force of her mother, and the author sees her life “in a tunnel, ablaze with torrents of fire, . . . and at that time I glowed not like an ember surging toward ashes but like a stout log enveloped in flames” (165). To maternal fire, Kincaid contrasts paternal, oceanic flow: in the writer’s elemental engagements, father is likened to sea and sky, with “the end of his life itself rushing like a predictable wave in a known ocean” (194); his death deeply affects Kincaid (though she writes that her existence did not seem to alter him at all), and she mourns “that a source from which I flowed had been stanched” (185). On the day of his burial “the sun was blotted out, blotted out by an eternal basin of rain” (182). If mother is godlike, father is a lowly man, like his own father, Nathaniel Potter, “and their worlds, the one in which they lived and the one in which they existed, ceased, and the small irregular stumble that their existence had made in the vast smoothness that was the turning of the earth on its axis was no more” (55). Mother is to father as God is to man, as fire is to water. In Kincaid’s created world, readers bear witness to plagues and curses and prayers and betrayals and destructions that rival those of the Torah or the Old Testament. Kincaid’s paternal grandfather, Nathaniel, in this Caribbean cosmos, is accursed, cast out, among the banished: he becomes an Antiguan

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Job, a fisherman whose catch dwindles daily, finally to nothing, rather than increasing ten fold, and who curses God; he then is smote by the God he cursed, stricken with deadly, festering boils, “and when he died, his body was blackened, as if he had been trapped in the harshest of fires, a fire that from time to time would subside to a dull glow only to burn again fiercely, and each time the fierce burning lasted for an eternity” (47). Nathaniel suffers infernal destruction (hellfire and brimstone?), as one cast out, as if by God, to the margins of history and culture. Kincaid shocks our emotions, pulling us toward this “New World” Job and his dreadful reversal of fortune. One sympathizes with Nathaniel, not the God who dared to strike him down; feels pity for the man, not adoration for the God. Mr. (Roderick) Potter, like his own father, Nathaniel, who abandoned him, is not only a mortal inhabitant of this created world; his body is the world itself. Mr. Potter’s heart is not only corporeal, but also a human geography, a bodily map of Kincaid’s Antigua. Kincaid charts a cartographic journey across “the many interstices of Mr. Potter’s heart: valleys of regret and hope and disappointment; mountains of regret and hope and disappointment; seas of longing; plains barren of vegetation and plains full of dust; shallow gutters of joy; deep crevices of sorrow; a sharp ledge of awe” (152). Mr. Potter’s heart is the world that his lovers and daughters inhabit, although “all of this was a secret to him” (152): it “resembled the surface of some familiar but not yet found planet” (153)—his heart inhabited by the lovers (and mothers), girls (and daughters) that he abandons. The sorrow he creates for his abandoned lovers and disinherited daughters also creates new geographical alterrains (or alternative terrains): once deserted, each woman “was recomposed, not made new, only recomposed into an ordinary mother with her girl child, and their tears could make a river and their sighs of sorrow and regret could make mountains, and the pangs of hunger in their stomachs could make a verdant valley” (152). If for Glissant, the quintessential unconquered territory is the forest, for Kincaid it is the body of Mr. Potter and the worlds spawned in the sorrow he creates for those who love and lose him, for the girls he sires and then forgets.3 So what do Kincaid’s worlds create in their creation? Why does she engage genesis to write new worlds? Does she attempt in Mr. Potter to write new worlds destroyed by the myth of the New World? If European colonial history constructed a world view that subsumed all other worlds into its own, eclipsing alternative terrains (other histories, other peoples, the planets spawned in their imaginations) through a “dominant sameness” (Glissant 70), then Kincaid rends this singular and cyclopean world with textual worlds that were or might have been. Her creation is less a past remembering of worlds lost (is paradise lost ever regained?) than a future rememberance—creating for posterity what might have been, what will be (or the yet to become) in worlds of words—in honor of histories erased, if

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not in their stead. If European myths of creation (or genesis) obliterated and destroyed other worlds—those of the Africans forcibly deracinated from homeland and enslaved in new lands; of the Americans (such as the Taino, the Aruac, and Carib Indians) decimated under early Spanish colonial rule, and of the Asians exiled and indentured throughout the Caribbean, primarily by British colonialists—then Kincaid’s revisions recast the relations of encounter, contact, and power, reenvisioning those other worlds; she does so on a scale that is both cosmic and human, celestial and mundane. The so-called New World brought together—by force, if not by choice—peoples from across the globe; yet it established and echoed the hierarchical relations of the Old World. Rewriting genesis, and creating worlds (new and old, discovered or lost), Kincaid settles the scores of history: she evokes history’s wounds, its legacies of disinheritance for those who live in “the shadows,” for “the world would not allow them to . . . speak of the shadows in which they lived, the world would first shudder and then shatter into a million pieces of something else before it would allow them to do so” (114). In the final section, I examine how Kincaid’s engagements with genesis also manifest a concern with transmuting genres, particularly those of autobiography and biography.

Transmutations of Genre: Kincaid’s Biographical Autograph in Mr. Potter “And I, writing all this now, came into being just at that moment and I, who am writing all this now, came into being a very long time before that” (Kincaid, Mr. Potter 142). Kincaid’s self-creation in language, in words, both parallels and subverts divine creation (an extension of deity into language and flesh: “In the beginning was the Word”). In this section, I address the question of biography as alterbiography in Kincaid’s novel Mr. Potter, an alterbiographic text that decenters and deterritorializes the matrix of selfother-text. The novel displaces the autobiographical “I” and its referentiality into the biographical Mr. Potter, a fictional portrait of the author’s biological father yet a historical figuration of an African descendant of slaves in the Caribbean island of Antigua. In the novel, Kincaid confounds the referentiality of biographical texts and thus transmutes or alters our understanding of auto/biography; she writes alterbiographically. I plumb here Kincaid’s writing of autobiography as biography in Mr. Potter, focusing on the novel’s preoccupation with genealogy, genesis, and even genocide as frames for rethinking the boundaries of genre. Father and daughter are related not exclusively through genealogy but also through genealogical abandonment: each is marked at birth by “an empty space with a line drawn through it” where the father’s name should have been inscribed on their birth certificates (100). I will

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trace, then, “the line” that Kincaid believes is “drawn through me which I inherited from him, and this line drawn through me binds me to him even as it was very much meant to show that I did not belong to him” (161). I read this “line” as Kincaid’s biographical autograph. This autobiographical extension—the inscription of her biographical autograph in the text—is intensely linked (through genesis and genealogy) to her transmutations of genre in the novel Mr. Potter. The philosophical and textual transmutations of genealogy and genre inform Mr. Potter, a text in which Kincaid indelibly inscribes her biographical autograph. In the novel, Kincaid unequivocally links not only the story of Mr. Potter’s life to her own, through genealogy, but more intimately, through its biographical telling: “[H]e could not read and he could not write and he could not render the story of life, his own in particular, with coherency and I can read and I can write and I am his daughter” (130). The genesis of Mr. Potter’s story through language (wherein text is likened to “a bolt of cloth” and writing is figured as both weaving and dyeing) also borders on its unraveling or unfolding. Kincaid writes that “in this way I make Mr. Potter and in this way I unmake Mr. Potter and apart from the fact that he is now dead, he is unable to affect the portrait of him I am rendering here, the scenes on the bolt of cloth as he appears in them: the central figure” (158). In her telling and untelling, or making and unmaking, of Mr. Potter’s biography, genealogical and chronological order are reversed, as daughter gives birth to father. The writer speaks and names and creates two lives—her father’s and her own: “And I now say, ‘Mr. Potter,’ but as I say his name, I am reading it also, and so to say his name and to imagine his life at the same time makes him whole and complete, not singular and fragmented, and this is because he is dead and beyond reading and writing and beyond contesting my authority to render him in my own image” (193). This image—though seemingly based on self-sameness and similitude—is not metaphoric, but rather metonymic: it displaces self (daughter) into other (father), while inverting time, paternity, and knowledge (“reading and writing”), as well as gendered and biblical myths of genesis. Daughter divinely creates father in her own image, but this image is shifting; it is imagined, as all images ultimately are; and it is written. Kincaid reveals how “Mr. Potter’s life advanced and exploded on the page” that narrates his genesis (1999, 3). Reflecting on the novel (then in-process) in an essay entitled “Those Words that Echo . . . Echo . . . Echo through Life” and printed in The New York Times, Kincaid describes Mr. Potter’s home as “on the page, the white page, the clean white page,” an image evoking Xuela Claudette Richardson’s description of her own birth in the novel The Autobiography of My Mother: “I was new, the pages of my life had no writing on them, they were unsmudged, so clean, so smooth, so new” (214–15). The “page,” though, is

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not a metaphor for the autobiographical self; rather, it is the textual site of alter/biographical extension, of creative possibilities for genesis, of future and past becomings; it is the metonymic starting point for new autobiographical beginnings. Writing lives into being, Kincaid metonymically writes and rewrites her own lives. Writing biography, Kincaid enters autobiography. Throughout Mr. Potter, Kincaid incessantly comments on Mr. Potter’s illiteracy and her own ability to read and write; this difference between her and her father is profound. Because she can read, and because she can write, she can also write Mr. Potter’s story, his biography, and thereby save him from eternal loss. This difference is a difference of power. She can read; he could not; yet Kincaid desires to save her father, despite his paternal abandonment of her as an infant, from an unknown and unrecorded life. (One poignant memory vividly, if ironically, recalls the self-absorbed man waving a young Elaine away as she comes to him for money to buy a writing tablet.) Kincaid’s power, though, is surrendered in her generosity toward this man who, in part, gave her life. She writes, “because I am his daughter, for I have his nose, and because I learned how to read and how to write, only so is Mr. Potter’s life known, his smallness becomes large, his anonymity is stripped away, his silence broken. Mr. Potter himself says nothing, nothing at all” (189). Kincaid, the abandoned and renamed (self-named) daughter, “creates” a story for the illiterate Mr. Potter and so saves him from eternal oblivion and everlasting anonymity. Kincaid’s life is thus intimately connected to her father’s, even if she did not know him well during his lifetime: they share a line of “illegitimacy”—a line that joins father and daughter in name and in disinheritance, in life as in death. Kincaid writes that “he died and will never be heard from again, except through me, for I can read and I can write my own name, which includes his name also, Elaine Cynthia Potter, and like him and his own father before him, I have a line drawn through me, a line has been drawn through me” (191–92). Elaine Cynthia Potter, the disinherited daughter—later self-defined as Jamaica Kincaid—“creates” a story for Mr. Potter and in so doing “creates” her own narrative and rewrites herself: here the writing of biography becomes the writing of autobiography; the writing of other (father) becomes a reclamation of self (daughter). She thus breaks the “line” (of illegitimacy, of illiteracy, of disinheritance) in her alter/biographical reclamation. And Kincaid sadly notes that Mr. Potter “lived his life deliberately ignorant of my existence, as if I were in a secret chamber separated from the rest of the world and the world would never know of me, or suspect that I was in the world” (193). This secret chamber is a sepulcher of sorts, condemning daughter to genealogical death; yet the author bestows narrative life on Mr. Potter, freeing herself both from her father’s death and from the internal death that his indifference toward her created within the girl that she was. In writing Mr. Potter’s story, Kincaid

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is excavating the effigy of the child Elaine Cynthia Potter, “laid to rest in the pose of the newborn which is also the pose of the dead” (147). Life, death; daughter, father—both are entangled in “this borning and dying” (101) that becomes the alter/biographical writing of worlds. Herein lies Kincaid’s biographical autograph. Kincaid’s engagements with genesis are deeply imbricated with her profound “quarrel with History” and her radical critiques of historical consequence (material and political and cultural). Returning to broken points in severed genealogical lines, Kincaid rewrites the stories—indeed the histories—of her own genesis and that of her biological father (and her biographical protagonist), Mr. Potter. Kincaid’s alterbiographic engagements with genesis and genealogy in Mr. Potter also offer powerful literary transmutations of genre (or categories of division and difference): she textually and aesthetically erodes the boundaries dividing biography and autobiography, autobiography and history, just as she philosophically blurs the boundaries between self and other, life and death, light and darkness. Kincaid thus writes alternative histories (to contest the dominant forms of European colonial history in the “New World”): these created (and past-driven, yet future-oriented) histories are marked by different times, different points of geneses—creating new worlds for those who have suffered the erasures of historical time writ large in the Caribbean (slavery and genocide and colonialism). In closing, then, I return full circle, or to quote Kincaid: And to start again at the beginning: Mr. Potter’s appearance in the world was a combination of sadness, joy, and a chasm of silent horror for his mother (Elfrida Robinson) and indifference to his father (Nathaniel Potter), who had so many children that none of them could matter at all; and to the world he was of no consequence at all, for the world is filled with many people and each of them is like a second in a minute and a minute is in an hour and an hour is in a day and a day is in a week and a week is in a month and a month is in a year and a year is in a century and a century is in a millennium and a millennium is in the world and the world eventually becomes a picture trapped in a four-sided frame. (188)

Notes

Introduction 1. See Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract and Blackness Visible, as well as his chapter in Race and the Foundations of Knowledges. 2. See Ivan Hannaford’s brilliantly lucid Race: The History of an Idea in the West, especially chapter 7. 3. See Joseph Young and Jana Evans Braziel, “Race, Art, and Humanistic Disavowal: Unraveling the Historical Nexus of Race and Aesthetics, Refusing the Erasure of Public Memory,” in Erasing Public Memory: Race, Aesthetics, and Cultural Amnesia in the Americas, edited by Young and Braziel (Mercer UP, 2007). 4. Feminist literary scholarship on autobiography occupies an important place in contemporary autobiography studies. Scholars such as Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Laura Marcus, Margo Culley, Leah Hewitt, Domna Stanton, Shari Benstock, Bella Brodzki, Barbara Harlow, and Liz Stanley have all forged new paths in understanding the varieties and multiplicities (as well as “everyday uses”) of feminist autobiographical subjects. 5. Important gay, lesbian, and other queer interventions in autobiography studies have been made by an important array of diverse writers and theorists. Important queer autobiographies include those written by Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Monique Wittig, Dorothy Allison, and earlier narratives by writers such as Jean Genet and others. Theorists such as Biddy Martin, Julia Watson, Shirley Neuman, and Monique Wittig have sketched out the multiple spaces of lesbian subjectivity and autobiography. Gay critics such as Leo Bersani and queer transsexual and transgender theorists, such as Kate Bornstein, Judith Halberstam, and others have also critiqued the heterosexist, masculinist, and gender-normative limitations of the traditional autobiographical subject, opening new sexual spaces for sexual and gender “outlaws.” 6. Some of the most radical critiques of autobiography and post-Cartesian conceptions of subjectivity have emerged from postmodernist literary critics. Informed by French poststructuralist theorists, as well as by postmodern cultural (anti-)forms, critics such as Leah Hewitt, Leigh Gilmore, Jeanne Perrault, Paul de Man, and others have critiqued autobiography as a genre of the “Self” (capitalized), the postEnlightenment “I” that is autonomous, coherent, unified, discrete, and above all, self-determining. 7. A rich field within autobiography studies, African American autobiography has long occupied an important place within American literature, from Phyllis Wheatley to Frederick Douglas to Kwame Anthony Appiah. African American literary scholars, most prominently Nellie McKay, bell hooks, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, 197

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Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Houston Baker, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and others have asserted both the importance of African American autobiography to the genre of American autobiography and the critiques of American national identity that the genre registers. 8. Latino/a and Chicano/a critics, such as Ramón Saldívar, Lourdes Torres, Norma Alarcón, and Debra Castillo, have also critiqued the strictures and imperialism of American (national) identity within the broader “American” (à la Jose Marti and Édouard Glissant) landscape, while Latino/a autobiographers such as Richard Rodríguez, Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa write across these “American” borderlands. Other American “First Peoples” and native minorities have also critiqued and pluralized conceptions of the American autobiographical subject. Native American, or indigenous, autobiography has emerged as an important area within American literary studies. Writers such as Paul Gunn Allen, N. Scott Momaday, and Leslie Marmon Silko have emphasized the cyclical nature of indigenous writing and the woven textures of native subjectivities in autobiographical writing. Native American scholars, including Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Arnold Krupat, and Julia Emberly, also theorize nonlinear forms of native autobiographical writing. Another important area, sometimes referred to as “immigrant autobiography,” embraces the manifold cultures, languages, and traditions of American immigrant populations, from Jewish American to Italian American to Asian American to East European American to Arab American. Within area studies, Asian American studies has made significant forays into the field of autobiography studies; Cynthia Sau-ling Wong, Shirley GeokLin, Joy Kogawa, Frank Chin, and Maxine Hong Kingston, among others, have all shaped the field of Asian American (and Canadian) autobiography. 9. Most important from the standpoint of this study on alterbiography are postcolonial, Africanist, and African diasporic interventions in autobiographical studies. Extending critiques of the Western, post-Enlightenment “subject” through non-Western and postcolonial perspectives, scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt, Sara Suleri, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Caren Kaplan, Carole Boyce Davies, Françoise Lionnet, J. Michael Dash, Ali Behdad, Homi Bhabha, Leila Ahmed, and others have argued that traditional autobiography studies have valorized conceptions of subjectivity that are defined as masculine/male, white, affluent, and Western. Moreover, this “subject” is invariably defined in opposition to colonized “subjects”—defined and essentialized within colonialist rhetoric as dependent, inferior, savage, or primitive. Whereas the Western “subject” is thought to be an autonomous, self-determining and rational citizen of a larger, hierarchically ordered community or polis, the socalled colonized subjects are described (within colonial rhetoric) as slavish, weakminded, and irrational, the lowest strata within Western hierarchical political and social systems. 10. See Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) and Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. 11. Following the critiques of genre (genos), one could suggest the term autogenography (autos + genos + graphe), yet such a configuration (like autoethnography) leaves each element discrete, aligned, seemingly self-evident: an autogenealogy (how could it be other?) of an autos, its genos, through graphe. Also, this configuration, autogenography, inextricably weds writing—ideationally, abstractly, and as practice—to constructions of self and race. 12. See Levinas, Temps et L’Autre (1947) (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1979); Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité (La Haye, Nijhoff, 1961); Autrement qu’être

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ou au-delà de l’essence (La Haye, Nijhoff, 1974); and Éthique et Infini dialogues con Phillipe Nemo (Librairie Arthème Fayard Radio France, 1982). 13. See Chris Cuomo, The Philosopher Queen: Feminist Essays on War, Love, and Knowledge.

Chapter One. Alterrains of “Blackness” in At the Bottom of the River 1. Although At the Bottom of the River has been largely ignored by Kincaid’s literary scholars, the following contributions are important readings of the short story collection: Covi; Ferguson 1994, 7–40; Simmons 1994, 73–100; Timothy; and MacDonald Smythe. 2. See both Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952); translated as Black Skin, White Masks, by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1969) and Margaret E. Montoya’s essay, “Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/masking the Self While Un/braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse,” in Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, ed. Adrien Katharine Wing; foreword by Derrick Bell (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997) 57–67. Fanon states that “le Noir n’est pas un homme,” but rather “une zone de non-être” (26). However, Fanon also identifies the ontological space of le Noir with metaphysical subversion: “Il y a une zone de non-être, une région extraordinairement stérile et aride, une rampe essentiellement dépouilée, d’où un authentique surgissement peut prendre naissance” (26). Montoya writes that “presenting an acceptable face speaking without a Spanish accent, hiding what we really felt—masking our inner selves—were defenses against racism passed on to us by our parents to help us get along in school and in society. We learned that it was safer to be inscrutable. We absorbed the necessity of constructing and maintaining a disguise for use in public” (59). 3. Integral to an understanding of Irigaray’s early deconstructive work is the theme of homosexualité, the fundamental premise that phallogocentric discourse is founded on a monistic “Male” economy: this monosexual economy is based on a specularization of the Same/One (in the formal Platonic sense, “Male”) in which the Different/Many (i.e., the “Female”) is simply the inversion or negative opposition of the valorized element; therefore, Irigaray asserts that women are erased or obscured precisely where “Woman” is constructed within this hom(m)osexual—hommo, referring to the “male” in Latin; homo, referring to the “same”—economy. One of the themes developed both in Speculum: De l’autre femme. and her subsequent work is that of hom(m)osexualité: in this system of hom(m)osexualité, the female serves as a specular instrument intended to mirror the image of man, founded at least in Lacanian terms on the phallus; also female subjectivity is split with regard to loci—she is both within the system as the pole of “matter” and yet outside of the economy altogether, “ailleurs”; this ailleurs evades the specular economy by virtue of being located derrière tout miroir, in a space outside of the symbolic and therefore either mysterious or hysterical: in Irigaray’s words, mystérique. 4. Luce Irigaray, “Comment concevoir une fille?” de Speculum. De l’autre femme (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974), translated by Gillian C. Gill as “How to Conceive (of) a Girl?” in Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Hereafter cited parenthetically. 5. Robert Young, White Mythologies / Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).

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6. For an insightful analysis of this problematic, see especially Judith Butler, preface to Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routedge, 1993). 7. Qtd. by Sharpley-Whiting 25. 8. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998) 11. 9. Léopold Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). 10. In “The Muse of History,” Walcott continues this line of historical engagement and anticolonial critique, writing, “But to most writers of the archipelago who contemplate only the shipwreck, the New World offers not elation but cynicism, a despair at the vices of the Old which they feel must be repeated. Their malaise is an oceanic nostalgia for the older culture and a melancholy at the new, and this can go as deep as a rejection of the untamed landscape, a yearning for ruins. To such writers the death of civilizations is architectural, not spiritual: seeded in their memories is an imagery of vines ascending broken columns, of dead terraces, of Europe as a nourishing museum” (What the Twilight Says 42). 11. In an interview with Nemo, entitled “The Solitude of Being” and published in the volume Ethique et infini (1982), Levinas describes Temps et l’ature as a rejoinder to existentialist conceptualizations of solitude: “Solitude was an ‘existentialist’ theme. At the time existence was described as the despair of solitude, or as the isolation within anxiety. The book represents an attempt to escape from this isolation of existing, as the preceding book [De l’existent à l’existence (1947)] signified an attempt to escape from the ‘there is’ ” (57). As Levinas further elaborates to Nemo, “Sociality will be a way of escaping being otherwise than through knowledge” (“The Solitude of Being,” Ethics and Infinity 61). Nemo also affirms Levinas’ belief that “[t]he ethical relationship makes us escape the ‘solitude’ of being” (“The Glory of Testimony,” Ethics and Infinity 105). 12. Levinas further elaborates that Time and the Other was driven by a “thesis on transcendence, thought as dia-chrony, where the Same is non-in-different to the other without investing it in any way—not even by the most formal coincidence with it in a simple simultaneity—where the strangeness of the future is not described right-away in its reference to the present, where it would be to come [à-venir] and where it was already anticipated in a pro-tention” (“The Solitude of Being” 56). 13. See Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourses in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. 14. See Glissant’s Poétique de la relation (1990) (Poetics of Relation [1997]).

Chapter Two. Jablesse, Obeah, and Caribbean Cosmogonies in At the Bottom of the River 1. Richardson writes, “An account of ‘OBEAH TRIALS’ included in Edward’s History reports that, around 1760, ‘various experiments were made with electrical machines and magic lanterns’ upon some captured ‘Obeah-men’; one, ‘after receiving some very severe shocks, acknowledged that “his master’s Obi exceeded his own” ’ (92)” (190).

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2. Of all of Kincaid’s literary works, Annie John has been the subject of the most criticism. See Caton, Hodge, Karafilis, Murdoch, Nagel, Perry 1990 and 1998, Pigeon, Simmons 1992, Tapping, Timothy, and Yeoh. 3. There is a substantial body of criticism for Lucy; see, especially, Chick, Doyle, Ferguson 1993, Harkins, Ledent, Loe, Mahlis, Nagel, Oczkowicz, Ty. 4. See especially Timothy and Perry in Cudjoe, Caribbean Women Writers 1990. 5. For a discussion of the influence of Obeah on Kincaid’s use of the English language see Conal. 6. Kincaid and Okri both refuse the label of “magical realist,” insisting that the alternative (to Western) perspectives that their literary texts offer are simply different versions of the real (or, as Kincaid calls it, the “unreal”) in African and African diasporic spaces, such as Nigeria and Antigua, respectively (see Vorda 1993 and Wilkinson 1991). When asked about the influence of Latin American writers (such as Borges or García Márquez) on her writing, Kincaid replies, “The truth is, I come from a place that’s very unreal. . . . The place I come from goes off into fantasy all the time so that every event is continually a spectacle and something you mull over, but not with any intention of changing it. . . . It’s really the place I grew up in. I’m not really a very imaginative writer, but the reality of my background is fantastic” (Vorda “I Come” 88). Though Kincaid seems to disavow literary influences and to deny literary imagination, she—like magical realist writers—imagines and creates different worlds in poetic, imagistic words and often hypnotic cadences. 7. Ben Okri’s most influential and well-known novel is The Famished Road. For a discussion of the abiku in Okri’s writings, see Gates 1989 and Hawley 1995. 8. JanMohamed analyzes colonial literature—divisible into two categories, “imaginary” literature and “symbolic” literature, maintaining that the use of the term fetish describes the foundational aspect of “imaginary” literature. “In the ‘imaginary’ text,” JanMohamed proposes, “the subject is eclipsed by his fixation on and fetishization of the Other: the self becomes a prisoner of the projected image” (1985, 86). This “fetishization” of the other results in a “negation” of the colonial subject, produced “by the projection of the inverted image” in which the other remains present as an absence, “the presence as an absence can never be canceled” (ibid). 9. Internal allusion to Psychiatrie du médecin praticien (Paris: Masson, 1922) 164: “Bien-Mal, Beau-Laid, Blanc-Noir: tels sont les couples caractéristiques du phénomène que, reprenant une expression de Dide et Giraud, nous appellerons ‘manichéisme délirant’ ” (1952, 168). 10. Walcott writes, in “The Muse of History”: “In time the slave surrendered to amnesia. That amnesia is the true history of the New World” (39). Compare the words of Jamaica Kincaid: “My history is that I came from African people who were enslaved and dominated by European British people and that is it. And there is no attempt to erase it” (Simmons 1998, 67). 11. Kincaid 1988. 12. For a discussion of sorcerers and djablesses in francophone Caribbean literary texts, see Romero-Cesareo 1997. 13. Betsy Wing, in the glossary to accompany her translation of Édouard Glissant’s Poétique de la relation, explains that béké or bequé is a “Creole word used originally to designate the white planters but now also any of their (white) descendants” (xxi). Glissant, calling the plantation a “pyramid” structure, writes that “at

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the top of the pyramid were the planters, colonists, or békés, as they were called in the Antilles, who strove to constitute a white pseudoaristocracy” (64). Like Glissant, who writes eloquently of the Guadeloupen poet Saint-John Perse, Walcott also embraces the poetry of Perse, refusing what he sees as critical dismissal of Perse as a colonialist: “To celebrate Perse, we might be told, is to celebrate the old plantation system, to celebrate the bequé or plantation rider, verandahs and plantation servants, a white French language in a white pith helmet, to celebrate a rhetoric of patronage and hauteur; and even if Perse denied his origins, great writers often have this folly of trying to smother their source, we cannot deny him anymore than we can the African Aimé Césaire. This is not accommodation, this is the ironic republic that is poetry, since, when I see cabbage palms moving their fronds at sunrise, I think they are reciting Perse” (1998, 78). Of Saint-John Perse, Glissant writes, “He could not have tolerated playing colonial in the universe, as I long thought he had, nor being its vagabond, as Rimbaud attempted. He heightens the universal within himself, forging it from things impossible. These are the very reasons his universality has nothing to do with exoticism, severely criticizing it, instead, and serving as its natural negation” (1997, 38). 14. Kincaid, “My Mother,” in At the Bottom of the River 60. 15. This quote by Glissant, taken from the essay “A Rooted Errantry” (in Poetics of Relation), describes the orality of poetry in the writings of Saint-John Perse. 16. Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” in What the Twilight Says 65–86.

Chapter Three. The Diabolic as Diasporic in Annie John and Lucy 1. The title for this chapter, “Rooting for the devil,” is a phrase used by Jamaica Kincaid in an interview with Allan Vorda. The full statement reads: “It also turns out that there are recurring images of Lucifer, whom I apparently identify with, from Paradise Lost, which I did not know. I did not know how much I was rooting for the Devil” (94). See Vorda, “I Come from a Place That’s Very Unreal: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” 79–95. 2. See Braziel, “Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations” 118–19; internal citation is to Derrida 1996, 13. 3. Recalling the names of Mr. Potter’s daughters in her most recent novel Mr. Potter, Kincaid similarly writes: “These daughters had ordinary names like ordinary people: Jane, Charlotte, Emily, but I was not yet born and so none of these were mine” (120). 4. Enid Blyton (1897–1968) was a popular and prolific children’s writer who authored almost seven hundred books and was most famous for several book series she authored: The Adventure series; The Famous Five series; The Secret Seven series; the Noddy series; and three series about girls in British boarding schools—the St. Clare’s series, the Mallory Towers series, and The Naughtiest Girl series. During the 1950s and 1960s, Blyton’s books were criticized for racism, sexism, and classism, as well as for promoting bad behavior and a simple vocabulary, and British librarians led a temporary, unofficial ban against Blyton’s books, refusing to order them for their libraries. Blyton’s popularity, though, continued to be strong throughout this short period of censure, and she remains a bestseller.

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5. The omitted section reads: “When I was quite young and just being taught to read, the books I was taught to read from were the Bible, Paradise Lost, and some plays by William Shakespeare. I knew well the Book of Genesis, and from time to time I had been made to memorize parts of Paradise Lost. The stories of the fallen were well known to me, but I had not known that my own situation could even distantly be related to them” (152–53). 6. Of all of Kincaid’s literary works, Annie John has been the subject of the most criticism. See Caton, Cousineau, Curry, Ferguson 1994, Hodge, Karafilis, Murdoch; Nagel, Perry 1990 and 1998, Pigeon, Simmons 1992 and 1994, Tapping, Timothy, and Yeoh. 7. Translation from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). 8. For a more extensive scholarly, historical analysis of the figure of Satan, see Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. I found chapter 2, “The Social History of Satan: From the Hebrew Bible to the Gospels” (pp. 35–62), addressing the pseudiephigraphic apocryphal and Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly illuminating. 9. As Dino S. Cervigni notes, “Virgil’s proclamation echoes Pilate’s ‘Ecce homo’ (Jo. 19:5)” (“Dante’s Lucifer: The Denial of the Word,” Lectura Dantis 3 (Fall 1988); Cervigni’s article is available as an electronic file online through Lectura Dantis at the website for Italian Studies at Brown University: . Cervigni also offers a trenchant interpretation of Virgil’s proclamation as theologically significant: The two antithetical constructs—“Ecce homo” vs. “Ecco Dite”—point up the essence of the Word Incarnate vis-à-vis Lucifer. The homo whom Pilate is showing to the crowd is silent, though he is the Word of God. Thus He is the “unspeaking Word” or the “Verbum infans,” which is a common theme from Augustine, patristic writings, and medieval theologians (Ong 187). Since he is the Word of God, His silence further emphasizes the power of his words. Conversely, Virgil’s “Ecco Dite” announces a creature who was created as a seraph, namely, ardens (Isid. Etym. 7:24) and whose task it was to proclaim God’s sanctity (“Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus, Deus exercituum” Is. 6:3). The Incarnate Word’s silence in front of Pilate and the crowd becomes more communicative than speech itself and establishes a direct rapport with His power of communication. Lucifer’s silence in front of the two wayfarers parodies these two aspects of Christ, at once Verbum but also Verbum infans. In brief, Lucifer’s silence is un-communicative and parodies Christ as both the “unspeaking Word” and the “speaking Word,” whom Lucifer sought in vain to overturn. Furthermore, Virgil’s “Ecco Dite,” though inscribed in a specific context, is nevertheless timeless, since the phrase lacks a verbal tense, just as the referent is eternal and his condition is destined to eternal immutability. Lucifer denies the Word, not only qua Word but also in what pertains to Him most essentially, Love. Lucifer’s threefold inability to communicate parodies the Word’s essential quality; Lucifer’s ability to create a wind, which freezes the infernal lake, Cocytus, parodies his original nature as a seraph, or ardens.

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10. According to Jay Twomey, “Satan, and sin, in the Inferno, [are] . . . almost entirely passive, something suffered. Satan chews his grotesque meal forever, but simply stares into nothingness like Yeats’ Sphinx. And doesn’t respond at all when used as a ladder. So I’m not sure I’d buy the idea that he’s creative in Dante. The ice too is an indication of incapacity. If anything, he’s more an object in a teleology than the subject of an ontology—as creative as a dangerously falling stone.Interestingly also, it’s not Satan’s head that creates the bridge, but his ass. He’s head up in hell, but hell itself is upside down from the perspective of Paradise, or Purgatory at least” (email correspondence: October 29, 2005). 11. The Singleton translation adheres to a more syntactically direct reading of the Italian. 12. Diabolos is also an adjective meaning “slanderous, backbiting” and an adverb denoting “injuriously, invidiously” (Liddell and Scott, eds. Greek-English Lexicon). 13. Diasperein was also used by Xenophon to denote profligacy, or “to squander” (Liddell and Scott). 14. See Lee, “Lucifer: A Fantastic Figure.”

Chapter Four. Genre, Geneaology, and Genocide in The Autobiography of My Mother 1. “However,” Donnell counterargues, “for those who have read something of Kincaid’s own ‘autobiography’ as revealed in interviews, details of the narrative persuade us to take up the claim that this is the auto/biography of her mother more literally—to read the text as the story of her mother’s life which seeks to remember her own dead mother. Indeed the historical moment of the novel, although not specific, is more that of Kincaid’s grandmother who, like the dead mother of this narrative, was a Carib from Dominica” (1999, 127). 2. Compare “To Name Is to Possess,” from My Garden (Book). 3. “Talk of the Nation” (Audiofile, 98 minutes). National Public Radio. Interview with Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Enrique Fernández by Ray Suarez. . Date accessed: April 8, 2002.

Chapter Five. Death and the Biographical Autograph in My Brother 1. Diana Davidson’s “Writing AIDS in Antigua: Tensions between Public and Private Activisms in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother” analyzes the material disparities between “developing” and “developed” countries in terms of the AIDS epidemic and the availability of antiretroviral drugs and forms of treatment available with an explicit focus on Kincaid’s memoir as an “AIDS memoir,” one that reflects and exposes the sufferings of Patients with AIDS (PWAs) and that also probes colonialist and slave legacies in postcolonial conceptions of sex, sexuality, and gender identities in Antigua. Davidson’s interview with Felicity Aymer, the Antiguan AIDS secretariat (“AIDS, AIDS Activism, and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother”) also offers some brief but engaging comments on the impact of the biographical memoir on AIDS activism within her home country and within the larger Caribbean. Sarah Brophy, in “Angels in Antigua: Diasporic Melancholy in Jamaica Kincaid’s My

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Brother,” also analyzes gardening motifs and biography in relation to mourning as a way of understanding Kincaid’s own autobiographical relations to alterity and death and as a theoretical intervention in debates about race and melancholy (David Eng, Anne Cheng, E. Patrick Johnson) and postcolonial melancholia (Paul Gilroy). While Brophy examines gardening motifs as elements of authorial mastery as related to trauma, autobiographical writing, and psychoanalytical theorizations melancholia (Freudian, Lacanian, and post-Lacanian), I offer an alternative reading of those motifs in relation to the embodied alterities of death and the faces that confront us with ethical responsibility for the other as conceptualized within Levinasian and Derridean philosophical frames. Louise Bernard’s “Countermemory and Return: Reclamation of the (Postmodern) Self in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and My Brother,” offers an interesting and compelling comparative analysis of postmodern textual strategies for deconstructing notions of self and subjectivity within the genres of autobiography and biography. Jane King’s “A Small Place Writes Back” offers a scathing and polemical critique of Kincaid’s literary portrayals of Antigua and Antiguans, drawing comparisons between the author and her Caribbean contemporaries Derek Walcott and V. S. Naipaul (particularly as related to English language, Creole, and geographical locatedness or displacement from the Caribbean region). 2. Commenting on the elaboration of the schizoanalytic project of Capitalism et Schizophrénie in Mille plateaux, Bogue notes the following differences of the second volume from the first volume, L’Anti-Œdipe: “In place of the opposition of molar and molecular in Anti-Oedipus, one finds a triad of molar, molecular and nomadic, to which correspond three ‘lines’: ‘the molar or hard segmentary line, the molecular or supple segmentation line, [and] the line of flight’ (MP 249)” (124). 3. Bogue explains that schizoanalysis is not a celebration of schizophrenia, but a social troping of it to examine the body and its parts in relation to social machines; according to Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari regard the individual not as subjective but rather as a heterogeneous aggregate of parts functioning in relation to other social and institutional machines. 4. As Kincaid explains, “My brother who was dying (and he was dying; there were times when he seemed sick, just sick, but mostly he was just dying), he too before he got sick called her Mrs. Drew, but as the life of his death overwhelmed him, he came to call her Mother, and then only Muds” (116). 5. Both “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic” and “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933) are reprinted in Visions of Excess. 6. Cohen, “Introduction,” Time and the Other. The introduction precedes Cohen’s English translation of Le Temps et l’Autre. 7. In another passage, and again evoking the images and language of disaster, Kincaid writes, “I was sent away to help a family disaster that I did not create” (150; italics added).

Chapter Six. Genre, Geneaology, and Genesis in Mr. Potter 1. The quote in the paper’s title, taken from Mr. Potter (148), reveals the importance of alter/biographical writing to the author’s creation of self and to the process of autogenesis.

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2. In the longer passage from Silencing the Past, Trouillot continues, “Contact with the West is seen as the foundation of historicity of different cultures. Once discovered by Europeans, the Other finally enters the human world” (114). 3. Conquering space and territory within the Americas—quintessentially for Glissant, the forest—is also the quest of the American hero; however, “this is not the Eternal Garden, it is energy fixed in time and space, but which conceals its site and its chronology. The forest is the last vestige of myth in its present literary manifestation. In its impenetrable nature history feeds our desire” (82–83).

Bibliography

Primary Literature: Writings by Jamaica Kincaid Books Authored At the Bottom of the River (1983). New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000. Annie John (1985). New York: Noonday Press, 1997. A Small Place (1988). New York: Farrar Straus, Giroux, 2000. Lucy (1990). New York: Farrar Straus, Giroux, 2002. The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). New York: Plume reprint, 1997. My Brother (1997). New York: Noonday Press, 1998. My Garden (Book) (1999). New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001. Talk Stories (2001). New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002. Mr. Potter (2002). New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003. Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. New York: National Geographic, 2005.

Books Edited The Best American Essays 1995. Ed. Jamaica Kincaid. Series Ed. Robert Atwan. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1995. My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998. New Travel Literature The Best American Travel Writing, 2005. Ed. Jamaica Kincaid and Jason Wilson. New York: Houghton, 2005.

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Index

Texts by Kincaid At the Bottom of the River (1983), 1, 21–52, 53–77, 88, 113, 114, 121, 143, 199n1, 202n4 Annie John (1985), 1, 2, 5, 7, 56–57, 68, 74–77, 80, 85–88, 112–14, 121, 143, 146, 152, 201n2, 203n6 A Small Place (1988), 1, 205n1 (ch. 5) Lucy (1990), 1, 2, 5, 7, 56, 77, 79–100, 113, 120–21, 129–30, 143, 146, 173, 201n3 “Biography of a Dress,” 2, 3, 19, 121, 150 The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), 1–3, 6–7, 20, 42, 49, 73, 101–27, 149, 176, 183–84, 194, 205n1 (ch. 5) My Brother (1997), 1–3, 41, 52, 85, 108, 113, 121, 129–74, 204–05n1 My Garden (Book) (1999), 1, 7, 80, 86, 113, 118, 121–22, 123, 146, 177, 184, 186, 204n2 (ch. 4) Talk Stories (2001), 1 Mr. Potter (2002), 1–3, 19–20, 70 , 94, 175–96, 202n3, 205n1 (ch. 6) Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005), 1

Key Words AIDS, 1, 130, 138, 140–43, 148, 150, 155, 159, 204–05n1 Abiku (spirit-child) [Yoruban], 58, 201n7 Alfred Richardson, 101, 114, 118, 119, 122

Alterbiography, 3, 8–20, 35, 175, 193, 198n9 Anglican Cathedral (St. John’s, Antigua), 187 Annie Drew, 130, 138–39, 143, 148, 150–52, 159, 166–67, 167–74 Annie John, 2, 56, 74, 75, 80, 85–88, 112–14 Annie Victoria Richardson, see also: Annie Drew, 176, 178, 180, 191 Annihilation, 3, 24, 37–38, 103, 121, 130, 162, 165, 167, 171, 176, 179, 191 Antigua (Antiguan, adj.), 1–2, 15, 20, 35, 53, 55–56, 58, 60, 64, 65, 71, 76, 79–85, 93, 105, 112, 116, 118, 130, 132, 139–43, 145–46, 148, 151, 155, 169–70, 172, 176, 178–80, 184, 190–91, 192, 193, 201n6, 204–05n1 (ch. 5) Antiguans, 142, 180, 205n1 (ch. 5) Auto/biography, 20, 106, 193, 204n1 (ch. 4) Autobiography, 1–20, 23, 31, 35, 42, 49, 57, 60, 96, 101–28, 103, 105–06, 109–12, 114–16, 120–21, 124, 126–27, 130–31, 175–77, 184, 193, 195–96, 197n4, 197n5, 197n6, 197–98n7, 198n8, 198n9, 204n1 (ch. 4), 205n1 (ch. 5) AZT, 139, 142, 155, Béké (bequé), 60, 67, 69, 201–02n13 Bible, 1–2, 81, 88–93 (Isaiah 14: 12–14), 203n5, 203n7, 203n8 Biography, 1–20, 23, 105–06, 109–10, 113, 129–74, 175–96, 205n1 (ch. 5)

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“biographical autograph,” 41, 108 Blackness, 12–13, 21–52, 58–59, 64, 68, 145, 197n1, 200n8 Caribs, 3, 100, 103, 108, 116, 118, 121–24 Christianity, 91, 95 Corpse, 130, 153 Creation, 2–4, 19, 21–22, 35, 37–39, 43, 49, 57, 71, 77, 80, 82, 85, 90, 94, 96, 131, 138, 140, 171, 176, 177–78, 180–81, 189, 191–93, 205n1 (ch. 6) (procreation), 140 (self-creation), 82, 193 Daffodils, 7, 98, 202n2 (ch. 3) David Drew, 143, 146, 151, 152 Death, 1, 3, 6, 10, 11, 15, 19, 25, 36–37, 40–41, 46, 50, 52, 58, 66–67, 82, 92, 101–03, 104, 107–09, 113, 114–16, 119, 121, 122, 124, 126, 130, 131, 138–41, 142, 144, 145–49, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 160–67, 167–74, 179, 188–89, 195, 200, 205 as “absolute negation” [Levinas], 40, 162, 165–67 as annihilation, 179 as avenir, à-venir (future, to come) [Levinas], 40, 160 “being-towards-death” (Sein-zumTode) [Heidegger], 25, 84, 161–65 as “biographical autograph,” 41, 129, 165 body and/as house in relationship to (in My Brother), 149–53 body/bag and (in My Brother), 153–55 and bodies (necrosis), and bodily functions (in My Brother), 133–34, 139, 149 “borning and dying” (in Mr. Potter), 196 botanical tropes for (in My Brother), 131, 140–41, 142, 145–49 dead and undead, 154 death, race, and melancholy, 205n1 (ch. 5)

“the death of civilizations” [Walcott], 200n10 “the death of the other” (la mort de l’autre) [Levinas], 25, 41, 160–66 Death by water (Elfrida Robinson in Mr. Potter), 181 Death mask, 145, 153, 160 Desire and, 131, 142, 144, 153 Debt and, 131, 155–67 of Devon Drew, 129–74 embodied alterities of, 205n1 (ch. 5) dying and, 142, 144 eros and, 141–42, 156 and “face of the other” (visage de l’autre), 161, 164–66 face-to-face (vis-a-vis) encounter with, 161 fidelity of (as opposed to infidelity of life), 51 gay erotic drive and (in My Brother), 141 genealogy and, 195 gift of (“gift of death”); donner la mort, “to give death,” 147, 157–59, 160–67 as historical defeat, 188–89 as history, 188–89 HIV/AIDS and (in My Brother), 1, 141, 150 homophobia and (in My Brother), 141 ineffability of, 161 internal death, 195 as “impossibility of possibility” [Levinas], 161 living in, 144, 147 living death (dying life), 133–34, 144, 147–48, 166, 205n4 (ch. 5) of mother (in The Autobiography of My Mother), 6, 101–09, 113–16, 122 mother as death-bringer (in My Brother), 148, 152, 167–74 Mr. Potter’s death, 190–91, 195 “my death” (Kincaid’s, as possibility, in My Brother), 173 “near-death” (escape from genocide in Mr. Potter), 179

INDEX

one’s irreplaceability in [Derrida], 163 as ontological negation or nothingness (in My Brother), 162, 165–67 as not ontological negation or nothingness (in My Brother), 162, 165–67 as “possibility of impossibility” [Heidegger], 161 as postlapsarian state, 92 as radical alterity [Levinas], 103, 121, 126, 161 as sacrifice, 158 sex (sex organs) and, 139, 142, 156 shadow of, 152 signature of, 13 temporary-death (half-death), 147 thanatos (death-drive) (in My Brother), 10, 141 and time, 159 writing of (in My Brother), 3, 124, 129, 141, 148, 165 Death-drive, see thanatos Decay and bodily discharge, 149, 150 of civilizations [Walcott], 76 of house and body, 139, 143, 149–52 of sexual organs, 142–43 of skin, 144, 147 Destruction apocalyptic, 138, 169 divine or infernal, 94, 171, 191–92 elemental force of nature, natural disaster, 159, 191 and historical erasure, 11 of the mother (Annie Drew), 85, 168, 170–73, 191 as opposed to creation, 2, 19, 43, 57, 75, 131, 138 racist, 126 war and, 44 Devon Drew, 3, 129–30, 138, 166 Djab, see jab Djablesse, see jablesse Dominica (Dominican), 56, 74, 101, 102, 104, 112–13, 121, 148, 170, 178, 204n1 (ch. 4) Drake, Francis, 124

235

Dr. Ramsey (in My Brother), 142 Dr. Samuel “Zoltan” Weizenger (in Mr. Potter), 178–82, 191 Duppie, 67 Elaine Potter Richardson, 1, 86, 130, 143, 172 Elfrida Robinson, 175–76, 178–81, 187, 196 English Harbour, 187 Eros, 130–31, 137–38, 141–43, 156–58 Es gibt („there is“) [Heidegger], 26, 39–40, 65 Faulkner, William, 20, 123, 152, 161, 189–90 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 130, 134, 141–42, 158, 205n1 (ch. 5) Genesis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 16, 19, 21–22, 35, 47, 49, 56, 57, 71, 77, 80, 93, 108–09, 121, 124, 126, 175–81, 183, 188–96, 203n5 (ch. 3) autocosmogenesis, 3 autogenesis, 7, 84, 205n1 (ch. 6) digenesis [Glissant], 126 Genealogy, 2–4, 13, 16–17, 19, 32, 75, 103, 108, 110, 111, 115, 116, 118, 120, 123–27, 176, 178, 181, 183, 185–87, 189–90, 193–94, 196 Autogenealogy, 198n11 Genocide, 2–4, 7, 19, 45, 48, 73, 100, 102–04, 108, 110, 116, 120–27, 176–77, 179, 183–84, 191, 193, 196 genos, 4–5, 10–11, 13, 120, 124, 198n11 Genre, 2–6, 8–16, 19–20, 30–34, 46, 72, 103, 105, 110–12, 115–17, 120–21, 124, 126–27, 129–31, 175–78, 183, 193–94, 196, 197n6, 198n7, 198n11, 205n1 (ch. 5) “the mark of genre” [Wittig], 13 “the law of genre” [Derrida], 31–32 Generations, 32, 120, 124 Glissant, Édouard, 8, 20, 34, 61–62, 65, 67, 71–72, 75–77, 122, 126,

236

INDEX

Glissant, Édouard (continued) 146–47, 176–78, 181–83, 188–90, 192, 198n8, 200n14, 201–02n13, 202n15, 206n3 Hawkins, John, 114, 124 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 20, 33, 42, 61–62 anti-Hegelianism, 42 HIV, 132, 138, 141, 142, 148, 155, 169 Holberton Hospital, 148, 160 Il y a (« there is ») [Levinas], 26, 39–40, 65, 103 Indian Warner, 114 interracialism, 122 Jab, 55 jablesse, 55, 53–78, 81, 88, 95–100, 201n12 Jacques and Lise La Batte (in The Autobiography of My Mother), 102, 114, 119 Judaism, 81 Jumbee (jumbie), 67 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 10, 20, 45–46 Lemon tree (in My Brother), 131, 144, 148, 168–69 Life, ?????????? Lise Labatte, 102 Lucifer, 56, 77, 79–100, 130, 173, 202n1 (ch. 3), 203n9, 204n14 Lucy Josephine Potter, 86, 99 Ma Eunice (in The Autobiography of My Mother), 7, 102, 114, 119 Mae Weizenger (in Mr. Potter), 178 Mariah (in Lucy), 85, 97–99, 120 Milton, John, 80–81, 92 Mr. Drew, see also David Drew, 154 Mr. Gishard (in At the Bottom of the River), 60, 68–69, 76 Mr. Potter, 1–3, 19–20, 70, 94, 175–96 Mr. Shoul (in Mr. Potter), 178, 181, 190 Mr. Straffee (in At the Bottom of the River), 60, 66, 152, 153, 160

Nathaniel Potter, 176, 178–79, 181, 187, 190–91, 196 New Yorker, 1, 22 night-soil man (in At the Bottom of the River), 60, 63, 65, 69–70 Obeah, 35, 53–59, 64–68, 76, 81, 95, 112, 200n1, 201n5 Paradise Lost, 56, 79–80, 84, 92–95, 202n1, 203n5 Philip Bailey (in The Autobiography of My Mother), 102, 119 Philip Warner (in The Autobiography of My Mother), 114 Race, 1, 4–16, 24–25, 27–28, 30–33, 46–47, 60, 70, 104–05, 119–20, 122, 124, 127, 136, 138, 140, 190, 197n1, 197n2, 197n3, 198n11, 199n2, 205n1 (ch. 5) racism, 109, 118, 180, 199n2, 202n4 racialization, 4–5, 25, 30 Revelations, 2, 80 Rhizomes, 96, 202n2 Roderick Nathaniel Potter (in Mr. Potter), 178–81 Roland (in The Autobiography of My Mother), 103, 114 Roseau, 102 Satan, 81, 86–87, 94, 203n8, 204n10 Sex-drive, see eros Slavery, 3, 4, 46, 55, 67, 73, 103, 120, 123, 125–27, 182, 184, 186, 190, 196 Soucouyant, 56, 59–60, 63–66 Soursop tree, 72, 130, 138, 168–71 St. John’s, 118, 160 Thanatos, 10–11, 130–31, 141–43, 156 Vermont, 81, 139, 143, 149, 155, 173 Walcott, Derek, 6, 20, 71, 80, 202n16 Wesley, John, 114 Whiteness, 12, 25–26, 30–31, 33, 35, 123, 145 Wordsworth, William, 5

INDEX

Xuela Claudette Desvarieux (in The Autobiography of My Mother), 101, 103–04, 107–08, 112, 114, 116

237

Xuela Claudette Richardson (in The Autobiography of My Mother), 3, 6, 101, 103, 104, 107, 110, 114–15, 122, 194

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