What I Have Been Doing Lately | At the Bottom of the River: Mystical (De)coding
In the following excerpt, Ferguson offers an
interpretation of Kincaid’s ‘‘What I Have Been
Doing Lately,’’ and claims that the story is ‘‘a
discrete narrative about a child growing up in a
world where psychological, physical, and political
dominations seem the order of the day.’’
By her own admission, Jamaica Kincaid views her first publication, At the Bottom of the River (1983), as the text of a repressed, indoctrinated subaltern subject: ‘‘I can see that At the Bottom of the River was, for instance, a very unangry, decent, civilized book and it represents sort of this successful attempt by English people to make their version of a human being or their version of a person out of me. It amazes me now that I did that then. I would never write like that again, I don’t think. I might go back to it, but I’m not very interested in that sort of...
[The entire page is 667 words long]
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