Kincaid, Jamaica - Gay Wachman (review date 3 November 1997)

Gay Wachman (review date 3 November 1997)

SOURCE: “Dying in Antigua,” in The Nation, November 3, 1997, pp. 43–4.

[In the following review of My Brother, Wachman praises Kincaid's narrative voice and understated clarity, but finds shortcomings in Kincaid's understanding of homosexuality.]

To read Jamaica Kincaid's memoir, My Brother, is to re-experience her unforgettable narrative voice, revisiting Antigua over the three years that Devon is dying of AIDS, and re-characterizing the island, her mother and the child/adolescent self chronicled in her earlier books. The lucid, assertive, deceptively simple voice takes its time in fleshing out the figures of the memoir, both in their present and in the past, circling around Devon and the multiple meanings of his life, illness and death. The narrative loops between the United States and Antigua, contrasting Kincaid's “now privileged North American way” with the lives of...

[The entire page is 1556 words long]

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