Week 13: Contextual Research Presentation

Jamaican Kincaid was born on the island of Antigua in the British West Indies. She lives with her mother and stepfather. Her stepfather is a carpenter. At first she was the only child of her mother, and she had a close relationship with her mother, but when she was 9 years old, her mother began to give birth to three sons, and her relationship with her mother changed forever. She began to be despised by her mother, and even treated roughly. As the eldest daughter, she was of course arranged to take care of the three younger brothers below. This was a life she did not intend to want, but she had no choice. Doing her job for her family did not make her feel resistant. Her resistance came from her mother’s total neglect of her life and crude interference. The situation is as she wrote in her article: “My mother and stepfather have envisioned an excellent life for their children. All three of my brothers will be successful in the future. One will be the prime minister, a doctor, and a minister or something. I haven’t heard anyone think about my future. My future is nothing but a nurse. I don’t have a great future. In fact, my education was halted indifferently, and my life can be indifferent. Anything to interfere and destroy, this can be to get me out of school or something. If I don’t build my life or lift myself out of this muddy water, I can be assigned to do anything.”

Her mother’s neglect of her is reflected in the following incident. Since childhood, Qin Kaide has been extremely fond of reading and reading novels, and she wants to get all the books she has read. She finds books by all means, buys them with pocket money, and even steals them. Through various channels, she gradually accumulated some books, for a girl from a poor family, that is her darling. However, once her mother went out and asked her to look after her two-year-old brother. She was completely fascinated by the novel while she was taking care of her, and did not change the diaper for her brother. When her mother came back, she saw a bag of shit in her brother’s diaper. Her punishment for her daughter was to find all her books to burn.
Kincaid has always been a good student with the highest grades in the school, but her mother didn’t care about it at all. When Chin Kade was 15 years old, her mother asked her to suspend her studies suddenly and go home to take care of the family. When she was 17, she was sent to New York by her mother to work as a nanny, hoping that she could earn money to support the family. In her mother’s heart, Jinkaid has no own needs and no future. She can only tie her life to the crumbling ship of the family. (At that time, her stepfather was sick and could no longer support the family, and the family’s population increased.)
Kincaid said: “I don’t know if it was because of the birth of other children in the family that it was the reason that changed everything-maybe this should have changed as I grew up. However, our family’s income has not changed. But it turned out that more people wanted to eat and dress, so everything became scarce, not just material shortages, but also spiritual shortages. Those good spiritual things disappeared. Then I got Things that I didn’t have in the past, such as rudeness and contempt. After the situation has passed, this is irrelevant, but when I first started young, it was extremely important to me because I didn’t know what happened… If I didn’t write, I I don’t know what will happen to me, writing becomes a kind of self-salvation.”
Kincaid’s self-salvation began when she left her family to New York. She didn’t intend to let herself be manipulated blindly. She does not reply to her mother’s letters, nor does she read letters from her mother. She lived alone in New York, while working as a nanny, while attending night school. She entered the “New College” in New York to study photography. After three years, she received a full scholarship in another college and continued her studies, but after one year of study, She left the school because she felt that she was too “old” to be a student. She returned to New York to start looking for a writing job, and changed her name from Elaine Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid (Jamaica Kincaid). This was to separate her from the past, and she wanted to start her life again.
She began to write articles for a youth magazine in New York. Her writing style was greatly appreciated by William Shawn, the senior editor of The New Yorker. Shawn’s discovery and appreciation of her became a turning point in her life. She later said in an interview that it was Shawn who let her know what her own voice is, what her own thoughts and feelings and unique methods belong to. Those are the most important, and it is those things that make up literature.
She wrote for The New Yorker for a long time from 1976 until 1995. Become an excellent writer for the “The Talk of the Town” column. She later married Shawn’s son (a musician) and had two children. The family has been living in Vermont, north of New York. Her first novel “At the Bottom of the River” was published in 1983, followed by “Anne John”, “My Brother”, “Lucy” (1990) and “My Mother’s Autobiography” (1996). She has received many awards for writing, and she is currently teaching writing at Burlington College and Harvard University while writing.

Susan Sontag said: “Among contemporary English writers. I don’t want to read many of them. Only the works of Jinkaid are what I always want to read.” I have to admit that if there is no such thing as Sontag’s In other words, I would never read this novel by Jamaican Chinchade-“The Autobiography of My Mother”. There are two reasons: 1. For an author who is completely unfamiliar, I am not sure whether her works are in line with my taste. When people reach middle age, they read more for their own liking. Books with wrong tastes no longer need to force themselves I read it for various reasons; 2. The book review of The Washington Post said that this is a novel written in “beautiful prose style”

Here’s the link about her book: https://podcast.lannan.org/tag/the-autobiography-of-my-mother/