[In the following excerpt, Ferguson views colonialism as a central theme of the stories in At the Bottom of the River.]

I can see the great danger in what I am—a defenseless and pitiful child. Here is a list of what I must do.

I looked at this world as it revealed itself to me—how new, how new—and I longed to go there.

—At the Bottom of the River

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 expression any more.”¹

I want to argue that Jamaica Kincaid through diverse discussions of mothers sets up a subtle paradigm of colonialism that enables these repressions to be heard; the text, that is, masks and marks the role that colonialism plays in educating colonized people against their interests. For Kincaid herself, the project was a failure for the colonizers.

At the Bottom of the River takes place on the island of Antigua, where Jamaica Kincaid was born, a geographical and psychic reality that constantly serves as backdrop. Kincaid represents the experiences of a child growing up in Antigua during the 1950s. Sometimes she mentions the fact of colonial life through intertextual references but rarely head-on, while the child's biological mother seems to double occasionally as an anticolonial target. The section entitled “Wingless” is saturated with colonial tropes, typically nineteenth-century British. Winglessness denies legitimate ontological status, deprives the narrator emotionally, and enforces limits.

The section opens on a classroom where small children “are reading from a book filled with simple words and sentences. ‘Once upon a time there was a little chimney-sweep, whose name was Tom’” (p. 20). Thus does the narrator explicitly draw from The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley's political allegory about nineteenth-century British industrial poverty and child abuse that foreshadows everyday situations in twentieth-century Antigua.² This narrator longs for the same drastic transformation experienced by the protagonist, Tom, a psychologically and physically abused chimney sweep who becomes a water baby. But she also fears that she might become an oppressor: “Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery, and perhaps after I have made my great discovery I will be sent home in chains” (p. 21). The narrator and Tom could become the exiled Christopher Columbus, victim of sorts of Francisco de Bobadilla, second leader of the conquistadors, for no one is immune to corruption. Resembling the narrator in his feelings of alienation and idyllic longings, Tom miraculously has his (unconscious) wishes granted and, as a water baby, he is “adopted” by a loving mother figure named Mrs. Do As You Would Be Done By.

Consumed like Tom with a transcendent desire for change, the narrator craves her elementary teacher's attention, “that large-bottomed woman … I gave up my sixpences [for] instead of spending for sweets” (p. 21). Underscoring a daily life steeped in vestiges of colonialism, Kincaid refers to old British coinage (sixpences), British idiomatic usage (“sweets” for “candies”), and the ambivalence of the colonized (desiring the teacher's attention). Mimicry and insurrection uneasily interact. Descendants of freed slaves, the children are instructed in scarcely disguised postcolonial values as Antigua nominally moves toward independence.

Flashes of self-scrutiny—“Am I horrid?”—conjoin with an intimation of other subjectivities. She feels like the abused and lonely Tom though she recognizes that Tom's circumstances caused his self-deprecating and socially demeaning identity: “a defenceless and pitiful child.” Announcing that she also (like Tom) swims “in a shaft of light, upside down and I can see myself clearly through and through, from every angle,” she hovers on the threshold of discovery. More importantly, she is someone who does not see the authentic relationship of herself as a historical subject:

I am not yet a dog with a cruel and unloving master. I am not yet a tree growing on barren and bitter land. I am not yet the shape of darkness in a dungeon.

Where? What? Why? How then? Oh, that!

I am primitive and wingless.

(p. 24)

This water is clear and it moves: “Clear waters … produce fleeting and facile images.” It takes on almost anthropomorphic qualities, echoing one critic's assertion that “the stream, the river, the cascade then have a speech that men understand rationally.”³ The narrator's longing to be free explodes through her sadness, but winglessness prevents her from taking off. Rather pointedly, this section about the need to soar heralds a singularly nuanced anticolonial interrogation between a teacher-mother (country) and a (colonized) student:

“Don't eat the strings on bananas—they will wrap around your heart and kill you.”

“Oh. Is that true?”

“No.”

“Is that something to tell children?”

“No. But it's so funny. You should see how you look trying to remove all the strings from the bananas with your monkey fingernails. Frightened?”

“Frightened. Very frightened.”

(p. 24)

Thus the narrator links her own colonial situation to Tom's imaginative transformation that enables him to escape a brutal apprenticeship with the vile Mr. Grimes. Wrestling for sexual power interlaces with the complex monkey trope that populates all Kincaid's texts. The monkey functions both as a trickster who can retaliate against exploitation and as a traditional symbol of the Eurocentric gaze. Mr. Grimes's name signifies the same filth that characterizes the dead ashes she rubs her toes in.⁴ Everyone, the narrator states, is so on edge that black and white teachers are collectively startled (or feign being startled) when a black child succeeds. Discussing one of her former teachers, Jamaica Kincaid talked of this situation in a recent interview. If she wrote a good essay, the teacher would proclaim: “At last one of you did it right.” In A Small Place, she also mentions the fact that the headmistress of the girls' school where she was a pupil told “these girls over and over again to stop behaving as if they were monkeys just out of trees. No one ever dreamed that the word for any of this was racism.⁵

This section in “Wingless” connects to another critical moment when the narrator remarks that no one compliments her father and goes on to describe him as a vain man who orders a brown felt hat from England every year. She represents this purchase as an act of colonial mimicry that in turn is metonymically and inversely linked to the headmistress's dread of the other. A fantasy of personal-colonial patricide follows in which “the woman I love” (the mother) reacts to a frightening man who is dressed in sticks and tree bark. Not coincidentally, the imperialists who arrived in the Caribbean were associated with bark, the fabric of their ships and a sign of their mobility: “Instead of removing her cutlass from the folds of her big and beautiful skirt and cutting the man in two at the waist, she only smiled—a red, red smile—and like a fly he dropped dead” (p. 25).

This self-critical and doubled use of language—who is mimicking whom?—this hybrid form and the self-knowledge implied in growing up fragmented yield a decolonizing of the narrator's outlook. She claims the right to what Edward Said calls “the audacious metaphoric charting of spiritual territory usurped by colonial masters.” She internalizes the postcolonial impulse.⁶ Issues of class, sexual difference, and race intersect with attentiveness to the mother-daughter relationship. More generally, these issues are connected to the condition of growing up in Antigua before black Antiguans with independence from the British and precipitate an uneasy alliance between a black Antiguan government, the people, and a disenfranchised ex-colonial Anglo-Saxon class.

Two other critical, imperial signs appear in subsequent references to an Anglican hymn and to night-soil men. First, the speaker in the section “The Letter from Home” alludes to “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” This hymn is an emblem of a nominally Anglican colonizing culture that is rhetorically featured in the book she is reading, its title An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Butterflies and Moths: “I leaf through the book,” she says, “looking only at the pictures, which are bright and beautiful” (“Holidays,” p. 29). The hymn renders corruption and human degradation invisible, or at least hints at it very gently:

The cold wind in the winter,
The pleasant summer sun.
The ripe fruits in the garden,
He made them every one.
He gave us eyes to see them,
And lips that we might tell
How great is God Almighty,
Who has made all things well.

Since her experiences growing up militate against that view, the speaker mocks the idea that the beauty of the world is evidence of God.⁷ From the point of view of politically dominated people, the world cannot be beautiful as long as an unequal dynamic of power obtains. This allusion not only glosses her recognition of and resistance to cultural indoctrination but it further records her fascination with the word thorax because of its symbolic significance: “From my looking through the book, the word ‘thorax’ sticks in my mind. ‘Thorax,’ I say, ‘thorax, thorax,’ I don't know how many times” (pp. 29-30). An insect's body or middle section between the neck and abdomen, enclosed by the ribs is the place where the narrator “exists” for the expropriating colonizer-parasite. The narrator is an alienated being, an unwilling host. More ironically, however, recent entomological research prefers to talk of the insect as divided into fourteen segments and not to talk in terms of the head-thorax subdivision.⁸ So to talk of thorax is to talk of artificial separation such as the daughter experiences from the mother. Kincaid later elaborates on another form of artificial separation in “Ovando.” This deadness at the nerve ends is partly explained by references elsewhere, notably in “Wingless,” where the narrator highlights the suppressed conditions of a takeover culture. Through the chaos of images around insects, what the narrator-representative does and does not have is subtly suggested.

Second, her discussion of the night-soil men describes their imaginative and physical impact on her life. Hard workers, they represent colonial neglect of an adequate sewage system. Underscoring their mythical as well as concrete physical presence, she discursively links them to a woman who removes her skin in a reenactment of a voodoo priestess's spiritual ritual.⁹ The people's culture is still vital, despite a colonial presence. She follows this with dreams about her father, then a separate mother-love fantasy. This admixture implies that the biological and colonial layers of the narrator's life are inextricably interrelated. The narrator closes with a claim that she will marry a “red-skin” woman and live in a mud hut by the sea, invoking prehistoric allusions to caves and reptilian life.¹⁰ The narrator is neither afraid of unconventional behavior nor too callow to perceive it as such. During this episode while the men remove feces, the narrator wet-dreams of a baby and a lamb being born and bleating, emblems of degradation and exclusion. Mud, moreover, in Gaston Bachelard's formulation, is the dust of water. It lacks clarity and forges mystery. The mud around water is an imagination, as it were, struggling to free itself. Michelet argues along comparable lines that maternal feelings emanate from mud and slime because that form of water is elemental.¹¹ Viscosity of water links to maternality. This introduction of water marks a critical intervention in Kincaid's texts: water suggests a preoedipal state.

One of the things the happy but fantastically married female child-pair will do in “In the Night” is “put on John Bull masks and frighten defenseless little children on their way home from school.” John Bull masks signify carnival gaiety. Conventionally, the person wearing this masks has horns and a rope tied round him or her and is pulled by another disguised person. Uncle Sam's blood cousin, John Bull also stands for Britain and patriotism, as well as British values, ethnocentrically conceived. Unsure who they are—for in that age how could two women marry?—they appear to mock the insensitive British colonists who rule Antigua.¹² The speaker's complacent and rebellious side imaginatively fuse here; with the mask she creatively expropriates the colonists' power.¹³ By invoking a feminocentric paradigm, she contests male colonial power. Echoing the mother's fervor, the narrator proudly proclaims: “This woman I would like to marry knows many things, but to me she will only tell about things that would never dream of making me cry; and every night, over and over, she will tell me something that begins, ‘Before you were born.’ I will marry a woman like this, and every night, every night, I will be completely happy” (p. 12).

The narrator veils but dialogizes her beliefs: her mask reveals her concealment.¹⁴ In the next section the narrator recognizes the connection of her own angst to a pervasive colonial malaise. This section, “Holidays,” takes the form of a letter in which another letter is embedded.

She sits facing the mountains on a visit to her grandmother's house in Dominica. These mountains together with Kincaid's autobiographical writings about Dominica suggest that this is the island in question. The narrator checks herself physically, seeking a basic security that still eludes her: “I sit on the porch facing the mountains. The porch is airy and spacious. I am the only person sitting on the porch. I look at myself. I can see myself. That is, I can see my chest, my abdomen, my legs, and my arms. I cannot see my hair, my ears, my face, or my collarbone. I can feel them, though” (p. 31).¹⁵

She tries but she cannot write her name in dead ashes with her big toe; perhaps she does not accept the renaming that accompanied colonialism. When her body is being metaphorically mutilated and she has to write with a toe in the embers of her environment, she cannot identify herself. Ash, in addition, links metonymically to fire and to the sun that denies water. Perhaps even more to the point, in Bachelard's view mud and dust are connected.¹⁶ She cannot find who she is or how she functions in this history or any other history. She tries to rectify the situation by attaching her sense of being soiled to a colonial symbol. In this way she can displace the “dirt” it engenders: “I try to clean by rubbing it vigorously on a clean royal-blue rug. The royal-blue rug now has a dark spot, and my big toe has a strong burning sensation” (p. 30). No matter where she turns, colonialism remains; the dark spot—the despoiling of the land and its people—stains the royal-blue colonial map. An antiphoenix, she wants to script her name in the embers of a dead colonial ruling class. She will help define imperial disintegration. Not by coincidence, she then tries to suppress an involuntary matricidal desire that presses in on her, born of a different kind of history and knowledge. Her reaction also suggests her resistance to fighting back: “I remove my hands from resting on my head, because my arms are tired. But also I have just remembered a superstition: if you sit with your hands on your head, you will kill your mother. I have many superstitions. I believe all of them” (p. 31).

But her senses and her memory of indigenous culture retaliate. She remembers (and reinvokes?) obeah practices against the enemy—the so-called mother country that can eventually be destroyed. Affirming her belief in cultural practices coded by westerners as superstitions, she signals decisive opposition to the invaders through her commitment to the land and the people. Nonetheless, the mother's identity remains ambiguous. On the one hand, the narrator could be talking about a physical mother. On the other, Kincaid clearly opens the door to plural readings. This explicit letter—“Holidays”—differs considerably from the inserted letter in “Holidays” that she imagines writing. It comprises an attempt to boost her self-image even as it comments on the division between life and art she has already explored. Is the condition of her life worth memorializing? The answer seems to be yes, because it is not only a personal life but a representative history. Thus it is important to record that life and transform it into art and history. The colonizer's version of events and history must be challenged. This interior letter embryonically foreshadows her revelation at the end.

In reaction to alienation, the speaker cherishes feeling, yet is shaky enough to doubt her right to language: “Oh, sensation. I am filled with sensation. I feel—oh, how I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel. I have no words right now for how I feel. … It is midday. Did I say that? Must I say that? Oh me, oh my” (p. 30). Her doubled letters, exterior and interior, her jumpiness and unsureness are efforts to identify herself—however tentatively—through language. Her claim to speech intersects with a traditional femininity, replete with disclaimers and apologies, that remains an unresolved conflict.

As well as assaulting colonialism obliquely as a corrupt motherland, Jamaica Kincaid also focuses on a central mother-daughter unit that functions at the very least as a politically ambiguous relationship. She does so specifically in a section entitled “Girl,” which opens the volume. In a continuous, one-sentence near-monologue of six hundred and fifty words or so, a mother intones instructions to a daughter about how to act as she grows up in Antigua. Sometimes the directives are domestically oriented, at other times they address sexual behavior: “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in the hot sun … on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming” (p. 3).

By opening At the Bottom of the River, her first text, with a section on a seemingly unproblematized biological mother, Kincaid temporarily suppresses the doubled meaning of mother. Besides, according to her own testimony, she was scarcely aware of the layered political implications.

During this litany, the mother insistently assumes that the daughter will act loosely in the future—certainly not to the mother's satisfaction—suggesting some apprehension about her present behavior. Sexual difference, as the mother perceives it, features critically in how to conduct oneself: “This is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don't squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don't pick people's flowers—you might catch something” (pp. 4-5).

Through the word slut the mother presents her daughter's sociosexual and metaphysical reality as she wishes it to be. She spells out what to note, what not to become, and therefore, as later events bear out, what to desire. In psychological terms, the phallus is introduced as a primary signifier of desire, to be rejected at all costs.

This self-reiterating discourse evokes fear or self-disgust or both. The “Girl” of the title is being warned to conform in such a way as to refract what the mother-speaker did or did not do growing up in Dominica. Thus the mother is trying to prevent the daughter from doing things that might well have disrupted her own life. Hence the mother through her daughter both tries to and wants to rewrite her own script. If only through discursive repetition, the daughter is obliquely reminded that “slut” as a cultural taboo marks colonialism. Its overuse—in a quiet reference to the historical sexual abuse of black women—underscores the status of the narrator as a young black woman. The mother's admonitions illumine the critical role that history has played and is playing in everyone's lives.

The narrator responds mildly and rather unprovocatively—perhaps deliberately so. Retrospectively, Kincaid seems to have decoded these responses by the daughter as repressed. The speaker disrupts her mother's commands only twice with the briefest of comments. After her mother tells her, “Don't sing benna [calypsos] in Sunday School; you mustn't speak to wharf-rat [reform school] boys, not even to give directions; don't eat fruits or the street-flies will follow you,” the daughter stoutly replies: “But I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday School.” The mother does not want, it seems, to fracture colonial decorum in Sunday School with manifestations of Antiguan culture. First, the daughter announces her obedience and correct conduct in a clear effort to please her mother. At a conscious level, she agrees to conform—or so it seems. This answer also intimates a sideways refutation of any potential charge of anticolonial opposition or of immorality intimated in “slut” and reaccentuated in the reference to “wharf-rat boys.” A further suggestion is that the daughter knows full well what the mother is talking about. Her intentionally soft answer could be stressing how preposterous she finds these charges or how meticulously she will deny them. The reply is ambiguous.

The daughter's second reply comes after the mother tells her how “to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it's fresh.” She says: “What if the baker won't let me feel the bread?” to which the mother responds: “You mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?” (p. 5). The daughter dreads that she cannot live up to the mother's expectations but, as her defensiveness indicates, she still admires her mother's refusal not to be pushed around. The mother derides the very idea that the daughter will be a pushover, obviously expecting the daughter to be strong yet obedient at the same time. She appears oblivious to the complex bind in which she may be positioning the daughter. At another level, too, the mother challenges the daughter to make people expose their wares; otherwise, she commands the daughter, “call them on it.”

Through her bossy directives in “Girl,” the mother attempts to preempt certain prejudices against black Antiguan females as sexually loose. She wants to protect her daughter from obvious pitfalls. (We assume rules are bent or circumstances refashioned in the case of ruling-class white students who kick over sexual traces.) On the other hand, the mother's anxiety may project a desire to prevent her daughter from repeating behavior that the mother had to live down or deny in her past.

Besides, from the mother's standpoint, bringing a daughter up well necessitates such vigilance; her attentiveness indicates lavish maternal caring. She wants to teach her daughter “highly adaptive mechanisms designed to promote physical and mental survival. Without such teaching the mental and physical survival of Black women would be impossible.”¹⁷ The daughter herself would feel cherished—rather than dominated—and consequently shies from separation, unconsciously craving a closer, almost symbiotic, preoedipal maternal union. Anna Freud explains the painful fluctuations of adolescent conflict this way:

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner; to fight his impulses and to accept them; to ward them off successfully and to be overrun by them; to love his parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and to be dependent on them; … to be more idealistic, artistic, generous and unselfish than he will ever be again, but also the opposite: self-centered, egotistic, calculating. Such fluctuations between extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they may signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge, that the ego of the individual in question does not cease to experiment and is in no hurry to close down on possibilities.¹⁸

The ambiguous end of “Girl” stresses the mother's love of decision making and her persistence in trying to determine the daughter's future behavior. The end also applauds self-assertion even though the relentless litany of repetitions delivered from on high tends to crush response: “All geared to enforce the sanctioned behavior of the Caribbean woman-child, domestic and limiting; little here supports the expansion of the self.”¹⁹ In affirmation of this point, Jamaica Kincaid in a recent interview explains how she tried to replicate their relationship: “‘Girl’ is my mother's voice exactly over many years. There are two times that I talked in my life as a child, as a powerless person. Now I talk all the time.”²⁰ At the very least, the social and moral commandments render answering back, let alone rebellion, a risk-taking business to the listening, provoked, effectively silenced daughter. At an even deeper level, in a perverse displacement, the mother is encouraging the daughter to live a version of her now hidden past sexual life. She goads her daughter into being on permanent guard, ready for any eventuality:

Don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make donkona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it; and this is how to move quick so that it doesn't fall on you.

(p. 5)

Only by keeping her barriers high can the mother control external behavior. A bottled-up insecurity, even a sense of terror, lurks around the edges of such injunctions. At the same time, the mother reminds the daughter of familiar cultural practices—the injunction about the blackbird, for example, warns against accepting what lies on the surface.²¹ The blackbird's complexity also inscribes the importance of obeah in everyday life.

On the other hand, the entire section could be the daughter's own internal monologue. What if the daughter is simply imagining this oracular, maternal discourse, extrapolating certain worries expressed by the mother in day-to-day asides? What if the daughter is already aware of temptation but worries about crossing her mother's path? Is she enunciating her own worst fears and using her mother to project anxieties about a perceived “lack”? Perhaps she plots disobedience and has rehearsed this revenge against the mother—a form of compensation or expiation by the daughter. She is allowing her mother to speak her mind, to read the daughter's thoughts and respond. As compensation for “bad thoughts,” she is constructing negative mother-daughter dialogues in which she has to suppress any response.

At any rate, the implied narrator in “Girl” dialogizes many silences on the daughter's part. The mother-daughter relationship appears to be framed principally in terms of maternal-colonial power, mixed with probable rage and frustration in the daughter. A polyphony of messages fuses with conflicting reactions.

Three shorter references supplement the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship and its embedding of colonialism. In them, different evocations of motherhood and resistance erupt. In its mystery and private symbols, for example, the section named “At Last” invokes a mother getting a chance to explain some troubling issues. She does this through a displaced conversation in which territorial and emotional spaces represented by a home and its yard signify speakers. A narrator expresses anger at a pregnant mother for neglecting the eldest child, presumably herself, pouring forth her jealousy in a tale of red ants. (Red ants recur in several later texts.)

The debate between the home and the yard dramatically reenacts the narrator's material and psychic lives. The confining house obliges the narrator to listen and obey a list of her mother's dos and don'ts, reminiscent of the maternal commandments in “Girl.” In this case, home emblematizes a restrictive maternality, life lived as a dominated person. Through the mother, this moody older child who feels jealousy toward new siblings begins to speak that jealousy and her sense of neglect: “We held hands once and were beautiful. But what followed? Sleepless night, oh, sleepless night. A baby was born on Thursday and was almost eaten, eyes first, by red ants, on Friday” (“At Last,” p. 14). In the borderland of the yard, the narrator can cherish secrets and distance herself from circumstances that invalidate her. The yard signals spaciousness and seeming freedom. Her agony at (maternal) separation symbolically reverberates in her anguish about doors “tied so tight shut.” The mother vehemently denies that the doors were even (ever) closed. In two subsequent and related exchanges, the speaker asks morbidly, even ominously, if “what passed between us” was “like a carcass? Did you feed on it … Or was it like a skeleton? Did you live on it?” (p. 15). Emotionally torn apart, she feels eaten alive and dead at the same time. She adds that “eggs boiled violently in that pot” and a coconut fiber mattress “made our skin raw,” pointed allusions not only to poverty but to conceptions and births that plagued her life. Perhaps she hints at efforts to terminate pregnancies.²² Additionally, with respect to political environment, British colonists tried to pick the carcass of Antiguan people clean and reduce a living culture to a skeleton. Eggs boil violently because sex for women can be perilous and birth in such a society is a dangerous engagement.

Second, In “What I Have Been Doing Lately,” the narrator muses scenarios aloud to voice herself into an indeterminate environment, both visionary and material. This meditation on infinite space links to her sense of loneliness, perhaps as compensation for the absent mother, perhaps a sign of the merger of two “mothers.” The nature that surrounds her reminds her of that which never deserts her: “To love the infinite universe is to give a material meaning, an objective meaning, to the infinity of the love for a mother. To love a solitary place, when we are abandoned by everyone, is to compensate for a painful absence; it is a reminder for us of the one who never abandons.”²³ Dreams of the past and future merge with the present. Another evocative monkey tale erupts where the monkey (the narrator) avenges itself against its enemy. In its first manifestation, the monkey does nothing, as if lying in wait, living up to its trickster image. In both cases, the narrator is an agent, but the point where the narrator stops and the monkey starts slips out of reach.²⁴ That monkey remains elusive as it does throughout Kincaid's texts, signifying simultaneously the ubiquity of resistance, noncomplicity, and mimicry. “At Last” also parodically reenacts itself as a self-conscious fiction: “In the covert form [of self-awareness], this process [of narcissistic texts] is internalized, actualized; such a text is self-reflective but not necessarily self-conscious.”²⁵ What complicates the metafictional self-reflection is the powerful (and avowed) injection of intentionally refigured autobiographical moments.

A third section entitled “The Letter from Home” features an epistolary monologue, a subtle stylistic variant on “Girl” and “Holidays.” “The Letter from Home” exemplifies Kincaid's preference to articulate concerns through a polyphonic speaker, often in dialogue. Starting softly with milking cows and churning butter, the prose moves rapidly to a greater order of intensity, antinomies, and surreal elements: crashing tree branches, hissing gas, incantatory images of lizards: “My heart beat loudly thud! thud!, tiny beads of water gathered on my nose, my hair went limp, my waist grew folds, I shed my skin; lips have trembled, tears have flowed, cheeks have puffed, stomachs have twisted with pain” (p. 37). Fantasy and realism, nurturance and death lie side by side in an uneasy union. Water appears in an elemental state. Sexual imagery abounds subtly and overtly: “My waist grew folds, I shed my skin.” Once again she claims a sexual and important subjectivity, evoking distinctly anticolonial obeah practices in which priestesses shed skin, a developmental paradigm of sorts. Lizards echo penises, quickly fusing and separating.²⁶ A complex world emotes where identities shift and exchange themselves. Signs of the evolutionary process spell gradual but qualitative changes.

The challenge of the maternal-filial unit that peppers the text culminates in the section “My Mother.” Both eulogy and matricidal desire, “My Mother” movingly recasts preoedipal bliss. The narrator opens with a near death-wish fantasy as she confesses the depth of her love: “Immediately on wishing my mother dead and seeing the pain it caused her, I was sorry and cried so many tears that all the earth around me was drenched. Standing before my mother, I begged her forgiveness, and I begged so earnestly that she took pity on me, kissing my face and placing my head on her bosom to rest. Placing her arms around me, she drew my head closer and closer to her bosom, until finally I suffocated. I lay on her bosom, breathless, for a time uncountable, until one day, for a reason she has kept to herself, she shook me out and stood me under a tree and I started to breathe again” (p. 53). She wants to control her mother and annihilate herself. In common teenage fashion, she wishes her mother dead and simultaneously longs for her love. She projects the perceived threat of maternal withdrawal as a threat to the mother herself at her own guilty hands.²⁷ She also represents the trickster monkey again in a different form. Images of suffocation and death signify certain damning realizations: Her excess denies room for growth, and even love is corrupted as a consequence. But after she interjects duplicity to signify distance, resentment wins out. Water symbolizes negation: “Between my mother and me now were the tears I had cried, and I gathered up some stones and banked them in so that they formed a small pond. The water in the pond was thick and black and poisonous, so that only unnameable invertebrates could live in it. My mother and I now watched each other carefully, always making sure to shower the other with words and deeds of love and affection” (p. 54). Slimy worms characterize the texture of their relationship that has literally sunk very low, into the wind. Water is now stagnant. Only mud (not a vibrant connection with and to the imagination) resides in the depths. This meditation continues with several lush fantasies that oscillate between the registers of love and hate. In one surreal cross-cultural episode that invokes an ancient Hindu myth, mother and daughter mesmerize each other and turn themselves into lizards: “Silently, she had instructed me to follow her example, and now I too traveled along on my white underbelly, my tongue darting and flickering in the hot air” (p. 55).²⁸ In a second vision, a grazing lamb—the innocent lamb symbolizing British imperialism?—inspires insight or self-revelation in the speaker: “The lamb is cross and miserable. So would I be, too, if I had to live [like colonizers?] in a climate not suited to my nature” (p. 57). After this, she digs an immense hole over which she constructs a beautiful house, a fatal trap for her mother to fall through. Instead the mother walks on water and easily evades death. The mother confounds boundaries just as colonizers survive in the face of hatred. The episode epitomizes childhood and colonizer, a continuum that encompasses peoples and their bipolar reactions. It also amounts to a death wish. But water acts atypically; its fluidity becomes a site of safety.²⁹

These matricidal, anticolonial desires are indivisible from the protagonist's burning hatred—“I glowed and glowed again, red with anger” (p. 59). They also intimate emotional antipathy too—some kind of unfathomable, unfaceable sadness. At the biological level, the gap between hatred and sadness, however, underscores the intensity of the narrator's devotion, hinting at a dimension of insecurity. After powerful rejection, the narrator inevitably starts a self-barricading process to preserve personal intactness. In that sense, At the Bottom of the River explains conflicts faced by Kincaid's later, often similarly profiled narrators. Perhaps Kincaid's own personal agony erupts here. She has talked more than once about the differential treatment her biological parents gave her brothers almost from birth. As an only child for so long, Jamaica Kincaid expected that same undiluted level of affection and attention to continue. Her sense of emptiness as a child who emotionally feels neglected growing up fills in many fictive textual silences. At the same time the paradigm might be attached to the uphill struggle indigenous people wage against insensitive foreign forces.

At the end of “My Mother,” as the protagonist approaches the jetty where she will leave her natal home for Britain, she rapidly becomes saturated in preoedipallike longing, her ego no longer concerned with its own intactness: “What peace came over me then, for I could not see where she left off and I began, or where I left off and she began. … As we walk through the rooms, we merge and separate, merge and separate; soon we shall enter the final stage of our evolution” (p. 60).³⁰ But no sooner has this fantasy begun than it explodes and flashes warning signals; it becomes a fairy tale that part of her craves to preserve, but its idyllic features are also corrupted by ominous signs: agitated motion and a lamb that emblematize a contaminating British colonialism and an imposed Christianity. It is as if the narrator tries to imagine a state of permanent harmony in which hostility insistently intervenes: “My mother and I live in a bower made from flowers whose petals are imperishable. There is the silvery blue of the sea, crisscrossed with sharp darts of light, there is the warm rain falling on the clumps of castor bush, there is the small lamb bounding across the pasture, there is the soft ground welcoming the soles of my pink feet. It is in this way my mother and I have lived for a long time now” (p. 61). This joyful vision of the sea echoes the world of Mrs. Do As You Would Be Done By in The Water-Babies. Blue invokes transparency, the meshing of boundaries, a diaphanous veil. Next to white, blue is the color of the immateriality that the narrator seems to long for. But it represents only a vision, nothing more, and the proleptic presence of the usually beatific lamb, as well as sharp “darts,” unexpected interventions, mark a rank uncertainty lurking beneath.

The accumulation of injuries that the narrator experiences in “Girl” and “My Mother” culminate in a meditation entitled “Blackness,” about a foreboding yet comforting set of sensations that rehearse her inner and outer confusion. Symbolic blackness recalls the soot of Grimes's corruption that drenches vulnerable Tom. The two mothers coalesce in a brilliant fusion: “The blackness fills up a small room, a large field, an island, my own being. The blackness cannot bring me joy but often I am glad in it. The blackness cannot be separated from me but often I can stand outside it” (p. 46).

Coping with overwhelming emotion induces disintegration. First of all, the narrator lives with a mother—at one level biological—whom she hates and adores; the mother engenders the narrator's defiant, single-handed struggles at school against indoctrination. This mother is also the motherland. She represents (is) British postcolonial authority, an unmothering mother, one who does not nurture. The narrator is experiencing dislocation as if she were saying, “I can no longer say my own name. I can no longer point to myself and say ‘I.’” “Blackness” involves linguistic alienation, feelings of loss and censorship that threaten to annihilate her: “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” (p. 47). Trapped in signification that does not offer validation, she feels beaten down, dissolved almost. This feeling of impending erasure recapitulates an incident from “Holidays” that identifies a similar sense of disappearance: “How frightened I became once 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” (“Blackness,” p. 47). Now she has lost her voice in public, barely holding on to that hovering space in language where the prediscursive registers, where there are no borders constructed by the West to contain people. The narrator resorts—but only just—to semiotic babble.³¹ Rhythmic harmonies and onomatopoetic reverberations pulsate in harmony. The narrator ponders her existence, rejoices in her power when she finds “I was not at one with myself and I felt myself separate.” Immediately after she cuts into that private exultation by describing herself as a “brittle substance dashed and shattered, each separate part without knowledge of the other separate parts” (p. 48). Seesawing between numbness and vital awareness, between familiarity and strangeness affirms isolation but induces a sense of diverse vantage points that she can occupy simultaneously. The ensuing vision signals colonial devastation, the visionary narrator representing colonized people: “I dreamed of bands of men who walked aimlessly, their guns and cannons slackened at their sides, the chambers emptied of bullets and shells. They had fought in a field from time to time and from time to time they grew tired of it. 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. No longer could I see the blooming trefoils, their overpowering perfume a constant giddy delight to me” (pp. 48-49). The inner silence that immerses the narrator also protects her against hideous, frequent nightmares. Such an interiority offers something resembling a precolonial harmony—in Africa, say—where “the pastures are unfenced, the lions roam the continents, the continents are not separated” (p. 52).³² The speaker's subjectivity is continually in flux. Although she calls it peace, this felt integrity is also a fragile edifice she has constructed in order to hold mental wolves at bay. Her vision of a wholesome erasure is also a self-obliteration: “Living in the silent voice, I am at last at peace. Living in the silent voice, I am at last erased” (p. 52).

In the end, where a mother describes a daughter, we review the familiar situation of “Girl” from an alternate site. By now this daughter acts catatonic, out of reach. The mother's discourse recalls Tom from The Water-Babies who is made transparent “when passing through a small beam of light” (p. 49). “She sees the child's cruelties—[she is, the mother says] pitiless to the hunchback boy.” On a more endorsing note, the mother also understands that the child is enamored of “ancestral history” (p. 51).

This maternal narrator, then, pictures herself plurally to one who cannot decode it. It is as if the original daughterly narrator of “Girl” voices her mother into a more high-profiled existence to keep things fair, to give her mother a chance to tell “her side of the story.” But unlike the mother in “Girl,” she cannot pronounce judgment. Instead, she is sad for the daughter's seeming loss—or what would seem a loss—of the mother. She can only try to surmise what happened and fit the daughter's actions within a framework she can comprehend: “Having observed the many differing physical existences feed on each other, she is beyond despair or the spiritual vacuum. … My child rushes from death to death, so familiar a state is it to her” (p. 51).

On the other hand, at the end of the mother's musings, the narrator validates the mother's influence, almost as if the narrator were willing the mother to think positively: “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 sadness” (p. 51).

The last section, which bears the title of the volume, “At the Bottom of the River,” conjures up a dream world. The narrator shares a vision of perilous terrain where power and antinomy are the order of the day. This metaphysical beauty has little or no meaning outside of human contact: “The stream … awaits the eye, the hand, the foot that shall then give all this a meaning” (p. 63). Once again, water will heal, will provide clarity, will function as a catalyst. The fluidity and motion of water underscore the elusiveness of identity that has beleaguered the narrator. She is at one with the ocean, where boundaries dissolve. Anton Ehrenzweig comments as follows, discussing the separation of self and other: “The London psycho-analysts, D. E. Winnicott and Marion Milner, have stressed the importance for a creative ego to be able to suspend the boundaries between self and not-self in order to become more at home in the world of reality where the objects and self are clearly held apart. The ego rhythm of differentiation and dedifferentiation constantly swings between these two poles and between the inside and outside worlds. So also does the spectator, now focusing on single gestalt patterns, now blotting out all conscious awareness.”³³

Fluidity also suggests that those committed to unitary thinking—a hallmark of colonizers—those for whom linearity and Western logic are guideposts to life, are incomplete by definition; they cannot fill in or articulate the primal scene. The narrator describes such an individual: “He cannot conceive of the union of opposites, or, for that matter, their very existence. He cannot conceive of flocks of birds in migratory flight, or that night will follow day and season follow season in a seemingly endless cycle, and the beauty and the pleasure and the purpose that might come from all this” (p. 63). A sense of fusion, even harmony that the narrator slid or escaped into and out of in “Blackness,” “At Last,” “What I Have Been Doing Lately,” and now “At the Bottom of the River” is unavailable to such a being. “At the Bottom of the River” asserts that a focus on identity implies “neither the ontologically given and eternally determined stability of that identity, nor its uniqueness, its utterly irreducible character, its privileged status as something total and complete in and of itself.”³⁴ This individual is an incomplete man who lives with undeveloped senses in a denatured world; he is spiritually dead in his interiority and contradictions; he “sits in nothing, this man” (p. 64).

To illuminate the amplitude of this fantasy, the narrator emphasizes those who cannot participate in the vision, those who cannot “see.” The couple in question closely resembles the parents whom Kincaid discusses in interviews and characters who are like those parents fleshed out in later texts. Much is made of the carpenter (Kincaid's stepfather was a carpenter) who measures and sizes up the world. This man sees beauty and is sometimes joyful before he fells the oak and kills the cow. His narrow perspective fences him in.³⁵ Uncomprehending of a wider, all-embracing, nonbinary world, he “feels the futility … [and] a silence stretching out … its length and breadth and depth immeasurable. Nothing” (p. 68).

Functioning as a Cartesian cogito, this man surveys “a … last nail driven in just so.” Anything he cannot pin down is outside his universe. His senses may be technically alive but that hardly matters for he is too absorbed in disintegration: “Tomorrow the oak will be felled, the trestle will break, the cow's hooves will be made into glue.” He appreciates beauty but finds engagement ultimately impossible: “crossing and recrossing the threshold” between uncertainty and precision (p. 68).

The narrator has learned to reject rigid taxonomies and exacting litanies. But coming to this determination—rejecting “measurement,” the totality of a certain weltanschauung—has not been easy: “How vainly I struggle against all this” (p. 68). At times, life not death intrudes on these meditations on mortality. Her mother's catechism of dos and don'ts in “Girl” cuts off the chance of response. Like the carpenter, the mother sizes things up and tries to be a God of sorts, leaving the narrator without power over these outside acts and utterances.

Having withdrawn from this world of measurement and betrayal, the speaker negotiates herself toward a new position where she can function more freely as a subject. The in-dwelling becomes trancelike and opens up into space. She begins to see through to the bottom of the river, to a primal condition in the world. The narrator longs to perpetuate that moment of clarity, that condition of original harmony. Water imagery suggests transition, too, in its evocation of simple youthful pleasures.

Thus Kincaid implies longing and unsureness in diverse ways. Her structure also affirms the indeterminacy implied in the poetics. It underlines her refusal to affix an “essential” meaning and offer comforting certainties. Repetitions, dreamlike and surreal sequences, trances, free association, fragments even, dominate the brief sections. Seeming nonsequiturs, ambiguities, doubled meanings, allusions, occasional typographic blanks and spaces add to the ethos of indeterminacy. Magic-realist yokings coupled with water imagery propel the protagonist toward writing. Delving the depths dredges up the narrator's unconscious, how she should and can create.

Here the narrator rejects all forms of truth and beauty, conventionally and Eurocentrically understood. She discerns multiplicity in all things. Hence how things are said to be is nothing more than that: one person's excluding discourse. In this plural world, “false are all appearances” (p. 69). She has learned that she must keep engaging in wholeness: for ontological preservation, she must eschew the disloyal, orthodox world that betrays those who seek peace and union. She tells of a creature like herself who was stung by a honeybee that she chased. The ecstatic pain and power of that sting symbolize her quest. That language of quest could also be a hearkening to and a search not only for her own voice and body but those of her mother too. The quest could be “an attempt to locate that ‘internal,’ the space of women's being, before it is filled with dread.”³⁶ This creature has begun to know pain and pleasure and its affect in equal measure; it lives inside and outside itself and when it vanishes it leaves a glow. The narrator hints at self-reversibility. She can be inside and outside at once. The honeybee is also the site of creative association and play. Somewhat like an Indian runner, the narrator wants (and wants to be) this mystical experience.³⁷

In this translike state, the speaker comes to know that union is the sine qua non of joy.³⁸ The bird who tries to kill the lowly worm is killed by the boy who can be protean if he chooses. If the worm resembles a form of human consciousness, then all that attack its integrity are in danger. Only those who let well alone, who live and let live and embrace diversity, dwell as whole beings in any space.

The narrator's disquisition ends with a radiant spectacle at the bottom of the river where the grass is a green “from which all other greens might come” (p. 76), where neither day nor night exists. There is a mystical sense that this “nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”³⁹ This nigh-on perfect world is “not yet divided, not yet examined, not yet numbered, and not yet dead. I looked at this world as it revealed itself to me—how new, how new—and I longed to go there” (p. 78).

But this paradisiacal place also intersects ineluctably with a physical plane where the narrator discerns her own physicality while mystically glancing at herself. The vision becomes even more expansive and inclusive. Standing above land and sea, the narrator stoops down and touches the deepest bottom, an elemental place where life begins. This scene suggests a synthesis of the scientific transcendental arenas of the text. The battery of images around evolution, insects, vertebrates, and even the fusion and interchangeability of tenses culminate in this epiphanic moment. And sure enough, material thoughts continue to intervene, paralleling, partly dissolving these lucidly transcendent experiences. She thinks of the “smell of vanilla from the kitchen.” Nonetheless, though appetite, smell, sight, and sound merge in a kinaesthetic union, her thoughts are temporarily still suspended, as it were, “conscious of nothing—not happiness, not contentment, and not the memory of night, which soon would come” (p. 80). She is “stripped away.” This pared-down state might be something that can be articulated and conceived,—but it is still a condition not materially attainable; neither a recognizable human presence outside the imagination nor an inner sense of the world. At the moment of that insight, when that apparition realizes itself, the “awakening” assumes a physical form. Her withdrawal from the world of a measuring father-colonizer and a family-tending mother is complete—because through her exploration she has gradually staked a new position where she can comfortably stand. She ends by claiming a public voice, having constituted the conditions for doing so.

The “I” recognizes writing implements that connect her to “human endeavor” and empower her reentry into the world.⁴⁰ She locates herself on the continuum of all living and lighted things that have existed and continue to exist: “The lamp is lit. In the light of the lamp, I see some books, I see a chair, I see a table, I see a pen; I see a bowl of ripe fruit, a bottle of milk, a flute made of wood, the clothes that I will wear. And as I see these things in the light of the lamp, all perishable and transient, how bound up I know I am to all that is human endeavor, to all that is past and to all that shall be, to all that shall be lost and leave no trace. I claim these things then—mine—and now feel myself grow solid and complete” (p. 82). At that climactic moment when she apprehends the possibility of infinity, the “I” sounds herself (itself) into beauty, into the void, and into the world. The child-becoming narrator returns to one original source—mother's milk. She wants to write in white ink, with the pen and the milk, to recover that sense of union.⁴¹ Put another way, the narrator simultaneously connects with art and life, embracing this newfound being, however partially. At this point she speaks and speaks tellingly: “My name [fills] up my mouth.”

The variant meditations, each an entity in its own right, end with an identity claim, not as a resolution but as one way of vocalizing a vision, of culling fragments from a collective past. Jamaica Kincaid does not favor or intend any firm closure. To impose a synthesis is to be a carpenter, one who measures things and identifies a fixed, unmediated meaning. Nonetheless, the speaker does experience a revelation that propels her on a journey toward writing, toward articulation. She experiences a vocation of sorts through mystical means.

On the other hand, the epiphanic final section marks the entry of the narrator into art, into a world in which she senses she can function. She realizes that she cannot live without division. Dredging herself into externality and out of her interior, she emerges from the chrysalis that alone will complete the thorax. Out of this decision to individuate, art and a butterfly emerge. The possibility of drowning transforms into rebirth. Contradictions merge. Undertaking a quest—metonymic for coping with loss—she shapes a beginning where she can enter the symbolic order through cultural production. She has excavated the tools that will enable her to take a stand. Symbolizing the depths of the unconscious, the bottom of the ocean creatively baptises her into life and anticolonial opposition. Thus “At the Bottom of the River” investigates the making of an artist-activist and a myth. It traces the gradual discovery of conditions out of which writing can evolve and be put to political use. Conditions of colonialism create artists who battle that institution. A portrait of the artist emerges as an adolescent female whose repressed desires assume a healthier, counterhegemonic form of expression. With the lamp, the light, and a room of her own, the narrator marks her entry into discourse. The narrator refuses but also has to use the father's text to claim identity. Entry into language and art constitutes an original and striking victory over diverse mothers, “the (in)security of a childhood always begun anew.”⁴² Art and transcendent political vision supersede postcolonial contamination.

Each section of At the Bottom of the River is a discrete narrative about a child growing up in a world where psychological, physical, and political dominations seem the order of the day. Little escape exists outside the imagination. Collectively assembled yet chronologically unconnected, each section loosely features recurring thematic elements, many of them overlapping: a state of mind at a given time (“Holidays”); an apprehension of something that is massively compressed (“Girl”); plural versions of the same experience (“What I Have Been Doing Lately”); a sense of ontological abyss (“Blackness”); desire and imagining (“My Mother”); vignettes of school and peers that disclose jealousy, fear, and despair (“Wingless”); an attempt to normalize experience while maintaining great distance through a deliberate surface account (“The Letter from Home”); a playing-out of oppositions between an inner and outer world, a mother-self dyad (“At Last”); self-reconciliation, self-knowledge, and an entry into light (“At the Bottom of the River”).

Operating within an economy of loss (of the mother, of primal love), the narrator embarks on a reconstitution of her world; she constructs more fluid boundaries. On the one hand, she articulates a world of beauty and preoedipal bonding where image and sweet sensation rule; throughout the ten sections, she probes how “the onset of puberty creates the essential dialectic of adolescence—new possibilities and new dangers” (p. 6). The individuation process that involves alternating cycles of rejecting the mother and longing for harmony unfolds in a painful way, chronologically disjointed, its form fragmented. The discontinuous parts of this process match the narrator's psychic fragmentation. Such discrete articulations oppose the linearity of traditional Western modes of narrative. Through metonym and memory, she calls up her prememory life. Craving both distance and intimacy, she lives in intense self-absorption, experiencing turmoil and a plummeting self-worth as she senses public and private rejection. Periodically she attempts to empower herself. In the river apparition, she claims herself, according to her own satisfaction. She envisions an adult life where she can be a recorder of community life.

Sexual difference plays a vital part in the formation of the narrator's identity. In this multiplicity and fluidity that is sometimes associated with the female body, textuality suggests or is, in part, corporeality.⁴³ A female unconscious voices itself through mobile representations of the body, through the thorax that briefly fascinates the narrator in “Holidays.” What is a headless body? What produces it and how does objectification effect it? Does it symbolize a sense of objectification, of erasure? A father obsessed with exact measurement (the symbolic order, the law of the father) contrasts with a woman-child focused on absence and incompletion in a prediscursive order. The child lives in a world of feeling without shadow, a womb-enclosed state. She is forced to abandon “an attempt to locate that ‘interval’; the space of women's language before it is filled with dread.”⁴⁴

Beyond that, “At the Bottom of the River” subtly challenges the mechanical separation often imbricated in gender (not biological) difference and female roles; such differentiation lies within the realm of the carpenter. In contrast to his fixed perspective, this protagonist swims into light and creativity, toward the lamp and the pen. In a sense, she transforms and transcends the girl in the opening section who is no longer the repressed term of an equation involving the domestic or the colonial family. Now she flouts the expected role of women in Antiguan society, an ideology that reduces females to ciphers. “At the Bottom of the River,” then, is a series of negotiations through which the speaker navigates through and out of preoedipal, prelinguistic, unmediated love into a functioning life within the symbolic order that will facilitate a counterhegemonic position.

Jamaica Kincaid stated recently that having small children did not allow for the absolute immersion in meditations on unindividuated unity out of which At the Bottom emerges. Perhaps one thing she was referring to was a certain indecipherability that marks this book. An already acclaimed journalist, Kincaid recapitulates the traumas of childhood and adolescence as a female growing up in a poverty-stricken, now post-colonial island where her mother—read multiply—dominated her life. Within the insistent probing of this mother-daughter unit, the factors of poverty and imperial expropriation constantly affect the speaker's maturation. Others also loom large as she uneasily reckons with a number of questions: Who she was then, in the light of the person she has become and the persona she has created who facilitates this reconstruction. Can this “I” ever be fixed since it (she) seems to be dispersed everywhere without a “care.”

How this apparently discontinuous narrative tells itself, offering different versions of the same event, hopping around, fusing fantasy and dreams with harsh material realities, is symptomatic of what the text tells. The occult, the esoteric, the regressive signify a center that is not holding.⁴⁵ The format of loosely connected segments introduces the idea of the arbitrariness of narrative and the complexity of colonial life. The reader is always aware of other options necessarily suppressed, choices temporarily vetoed. The symbolic order denies the “girl” a free place, so she ruptures it with the semiotic. Figuring deep-dyed poverty, night-soil men witness the phantasmagoric sight of a skinless woman who will drink her enemies' blood in secret and of Mr. Gishard, dead and reappearing. The night-soil men quietly come to pick up people's excrement because no sewage system exists—that is one thing—and the dead Mr. Gishard appears—that is another. Both are substantive, both important. Respectively they signal colonialism and its opposition in people's culture. Thus the narrator lives coincident existences in different spaces, mentally, physically, politically. The formation and claiming of identity that constitute At the Bottom of the River are born of now-irrecoverable conditions and origins. However inchoately, the imagination of the girl empowers her to see through and beyond to what might happen and to recuperate what has been submerged.⁴⁶

To add an additional layering to the narrator's textural life, Jamaica Kincaid stated in an early interview that Bruno Schulz's surrealism and Nadine Gordimer's suggestive tale of South African racism, “A Lion on the Freeway,” influenced her writing at this time.⁴⁷ Their texts enhanced her apprehension of a universe she wanted to convey. But Kincaid puts her own personal stamp on these apprehensions. She blends obeah with dreams, introduces trancelike states, intertextualizes, and reinterprets fantasy.⁴⁸ She endows her narrator with a rich interiority. Wearing one face in public, another at home, the speaker is so terrified of being dissolved that she lets fear engorge her. But in her imagination, the narrator can be anywhere and do anything. By suggesting who and how she is becoming, she traces herself as a subject-in-process negotiating that central mother-daughter twosome. The narrator understands the world through obeah, through dreams, trance, and an acceptance of the fantastic that coexist side by side in Kincaid's unique version of magic realism. She combines this with an understanding of socially constructed mores and cause-effect relationships encapsulated in the linear thinking of the carpenter. This fusion of physical and metaphysical worlds, of personal and (post) colonial identities, characterizes Jamaica Kincaid's special vision.

In future writing, Jamaica Kincaid will introduce textual self-resonance, but at this point the reader cannot know that these experiences, this sensibility, and the crucial strategy of naming will continue in later texts. At a metafictional level, Kincaid invites the reader to ponder the separation between life and art and their interaction, how the narrator's everyday musings, her unsureness, constitute artistic expression.

Even within the texts themselves, some kind of narratival mirroring process operates. The speaker in one section seems to echo others: Some incidents and motifs reoccur. In “Blackness,” the ill child hearkens back to the one whose mother instructs her. The reader is invited to consider possible ambiguities. Are these narrators the same or different? If they are the same, what does that signify? What multiple positions, both imagined and material, are possible? How do imagined ones get played out? Obeah then becomes critical because the text insists that all enactments be treated on the same plane of seriousness. Part child, part adolescent, the narrator comes to terms with a world that fuses fantasy, Eurocentric conceptions of the world, and day-to-day events.⁴⁹ She accepts these factors and considerations as separate and equally privileged modes of knowing.

Inextricably linked to the mother-daughter separation, colonialism insistently inflects the text. Coupled with the complicating of female experience, that imperial presence suggests its pervasive, quotidian intersection with gender relations. Only language and memory can conjure up the mother-daughter split. That is to say, although the lost biological mother is a major trope, at a different symbolic level outside womb and home, the lost mother also represents precolonial roots before the advent of a vicious surrogate colonial mother. Seemingly a solitary individual, the narrator emblematizes the colonized and joins herself globally to a school of oppositional thinking. Implicitly, Kincaid suggests that alternate explanations always exist. Thus the mystery and indeterminacy of the text further affirm the absurdity of linearity and fixed meaning. At the same time, Kincaid always insists that magic events do not altogether function with different laws but rather “weave a miraculous occurrence into a rigorously everyday reality.”⁵⁰ In that sense, At the Bottom of the River is counterintuitive, a reverse articulation that deals with disputed epistemologies. Jamaica Kincaid denies complexity of meaning and unfixedness now; whether to believe that scenario of rescripted simplicity is another question. Neither its magical nor its factual elements deny the historicity of the text. Time constitutes a network of convergencies of time past, present, and imminent. From the start, the family to which Jamaica Kincaid constantly refers to is also the macrocolonized Antiguan family, the island population before 1967 and any form of independence. In that sense, all references to a mother allusively resonate with colonial as well as maternal signs.

Put another way, the variant narrators of At the Bottom speak internally and externally, exemplifying a personal marginality and an abiding sense of alienation that in the last section slides into epiphany. Nothing conforms to an everyday conception of time or space; the surreal world mingles interchangeably and equally with the world of material reality. Water suggests quotidian and historical fluidity, the constant transformation of events and experiences always in process. And precisely that easy fusion of fantasy, memory, and everyday life creates coherence. Thus a fluid investigative perspective alternates with intimations of postcolonial life and affirms a national cultural heritage. The plural narrator does not accept any demarcation between given fact and an intuited sense of her world. Claiming the rights of an omniscient storyteller, the speaker transforms (transcends) herself and her inner imaginings. Neither author, Elaine Potter Richardson, born in Antigua, nor the narrator who chronicles the events, nor the protagonist living and reliving certain experiences can live distinctly. The narrator reinstates local and personal history as global.

These overlapping speakers create a chorus of voices that sound throughout. Because memory is a primary textual cohesion and because the refraction of that memory is splintered, nothing is fixed, everything is in flux, even the motion toward the lamp and the pen at the end.

In her next text, Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid changes pace but retains some constants nonetheless. From a mystical probing of growing up, constructed as a set of fragmented though allied experiences, she moves to a less densely textured chronicle although the representation of living as a (divisive) diverse set of experiences remains.

Notes

1. Perry, “Interview” with Jamaica Kincaid,” pp. 698-99. The setting of At the Bottom of the River is the island of Antigua, where Jamaica Kincaid was born, a geographical and physical reality that constantly serves as contextual backdrop.

2. Kingsley, The Water-Babies, especially pp. 3-31.

3. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, pp. 11, 194.

4. Kingsley, The Water-Babies, p. 10.

5. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, p. 29. See the Garis interview, “Through West Indian Eyes.” For West Indian commentary, see, for example, Morris and Dunn, “‘The Bloodstream of Our Inheritance.’”

6. Said, “Figures, Configurations, Transfigurations,” p. 6. See also Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Strikes Back, pp. 152-54.

7. I thank Robert Haller for a valuable discussion of this and other hymns and scriptural points. Jamaica Kincaid notes also that each morning, as a schoolgirl, she began classes with “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (New Yorker, October 14, 1977, p. 27). She has also recently stated that it was the first hymn in her Methodist children's hymnal (ibid., March 29, 1993, p. 51). For information about the author of “All Things,” Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander, see Moffatt and Patrick, Handbook to the Church Hymnary with Supplement, especially pp. 9, 249-50. For allied information, see Routley, An English-Speaking Hymnal Guide. See also North, The Psalms and Hymns of Protestantism, pp. 3-12, and Reuel K. Wilson, “The Letters of Bruno Schulz, Jerzy Stempowski, and Especially Julian Tuwim,” p. 246.

8. Robert Evans Snodgrass, The Thorax of Insects and the Articulation of the Wings, pp. 511-83; see also Snodgrass, A Contribution toward an Encyclopedia of Insect Anatomy, in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 146, no. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, July 12, 1963): 29-31; and Insect Ultrastructure, ed. Robert C. King and Hiromu Akai (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1984), pp. 35, 117, 492.

9. Dutton, “Merge and Separate,” p. 409. See also “An Interview with Bruno Schulz,” pp. 145-47.

10. Dutton, “Merge and Separate,” p. 409.

11. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, pp. 109, 110.

12. The history of British rule in Antigua is a history of corruption. The neglect of the island can be seen to this day in the irregular and dangerous pavements and lack of lighting in the streets at night. There is still no adequate sewage system, another legacy from British colonial times, when there was none at all. See The Revitalization of Downtown Saint John's, Antigua and Barbuda. For John Bull and its association with English values, see Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull.

13. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization.

14. Cudjoe, “Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” pp. 396-411.

15. Hints of obeah emerge here. The author speaks of it in her “Antigua Crossings,” p. 48. See also Ismond, “Jamaica Kincaid,” pp. 336-41. See also Dutton, “Merge and Separate.” Ramchand's view of the orality of this passage is riveting in his The West Indian Novel and Its Background, p. 110.

16. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, p. 109.

17. Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Traditional and New Perspectives,” p. 99. There are several important analyses and commentaries on mother-daughter relationships that have a bearing here. Among them are Murdoch, “Severing the (M)other Connection,” pp. 328-29; Daughters of the Nightmare, a report “compiled from a number of recent sources,” pp. 7-9; Davies, “Mothering and Healing in Recent Black Women's Fiction,” p. 43; and Giddings, When and Where I Enter, pp. 47-55. For the view that females are more bonded to their mothers and hence would resent separation more than males, see Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering.

18. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, pp. 43-53, 101-5. See also Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Their Roles and Functions in American Society,” pp. 75-126.

19. See Davies and Fido, Out of the Kumbla, p. 4. Additionally, for a rich probing of At the Bottom of the River in general, see Davies, “Writing Home,” especially pp. 64-68.

20. Ferguson, “Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.”

21. Note, too, how Bachelard associates blackbirds with water (Water and Dreams, p. 193).

22. In Lucy, the veiled suggestion of attempted abortion(s) is explicitly made: “She was pregnant with the last of her children. She did not want to be pregnant and three times had tried to throw away the child, but all her methods had failed and she remained pregnant” (p. 151).

23. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, p. 116.

24. The role that the monkey plays in Caribbean culture as a trickster is important here. I thank Robert Antoni for a conversation on this point. For the monkey as trickster and related issues, see Abrahams, The Man-of-Words in the West Indies, pp. 153 ff. and 178 ff. See also Dance, Folklore from Contemporary Jamaicans, pp. xix-xxv, 11-12, 16-17, and 23-26. As racist tropes for Africans, monkeys always have an identity in flux. In eighteenth-century England, monkeys appear in texts emblematic of foreigners. In 1713, moreover, among countless examples, Sir Richard Blackmore spoke of the great chain of being as follows: “So the Ape or Monkey, that bears the greatest Similitude to Man, is the next Order of Animals below him. Nor is the Disagreement between the basest Individuals of our Species and the Ape or Monkey so great, but that were the latter endowed with the Faculty of Speech, they might perhaps as justly claim the Rank and Dignity of the human Race, as the Savage Hottentot, or stupid Native of Nova Zembla.”

    Jordan goes on to argue: “It is apparent, however unpalatable the apparency may be, that certain superficial physical characteristics in the West African Negro helped sustain (and perhaps helped initiate) the popular connection with the ape. By the latter part of the century, Bryan Edwards, a thoroughly good-hearted man, thought it necessary to discuss the apparent resemblance in the Ibo tribe” (White over Black, p. 237).

25. Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, p. 7.

26. For a discussion of lizards and imagery, see Pope, The Reptile World, pp. 235-321. This fantasy finds resonances in Caribbean mythology. It intersects with the dream of couvade, the subject of a story by Wilson Harris in which the purpose of the dream and its invocation of lizards is to pass on history and legacy to newborn children. See Harris, The Sleepers of Roraima. For further information about reptilian qualities in mothers, see Cartey Whispers from the Caribbean, p. 16.

27. LaPlanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 349-57.

28. See Ismond, “Jamaica Kincaid,” p. 341.

29. In this episode, different pieces of Hindu mythology and other unique imaginings play themselves out. How the mother acts is very different from traditional practices of maternal suicide. See Sahi, The Child and the Serpent, pp. 153-56. See also Bailey, The Mythology of Brahma, p. 115. For the shedding of the epidermis, see “An Interview with Bruno Schulz,” p. 146; see also Holland, Popular Hinduism and Hindu Mythology and Kinsley, Hinduism, especially pp. 82-91.

30. For this issue of merge and separate in Caribbean texts, see Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background, p. 109.

31. See Minh-Ha, When the Moon Waxes Red, p. 14; Jacobus, “The Difference of View,” p. 51. See also Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 102-3.

32. A haunting echo exists here of Nadine Gordimer, “A Lion on the Freeway,” a story that Kincaid found influential. See Cudjoe, “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” p. 403. By implication, Jamaica Kincaid intertextualizes an attack on racism here through oblique reference to the antiapartheid stand in that story. See her A Soldier's Embrace, pp. 24-27. For a riveting postmodern interpretation of “Blackness” and “Wingless,” see Covi, “Jamaica Kincaid and the Resistance to the Canons,” p. 348.

33. Ehrenzweig, The Order of Art, p. 121.

34. Said, “Figures, Configurations, Transformations,” p. 13. For a view of the last chapter as a “vision of androgynous existence,” see Gilkes, “The Madonna Pool,” p. 13.

35. An allusion reverberates here to Jesus' stepfather, Joseph, who was apparently a just but passive man. At the same time, Kincaid may be subtly indicting the fixity of Christianity. For measuring, see the New Yorker, January 3, 1983, pp. 23-24. For an expansion of the stepfather's opinions, see the New Yorker, July 19, 1976, p. 23. Given Jamaica Kincaid's statements about autobiography, we know that during the experiences of the speaker in At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid's mother, Annie Richardson Potter, parted from her father, Roderick Potter, and she and David Drew began their relationship. In At the Bottom, however, she speaks of the father as if he were her own father. Even so, she probably knew how her own father, Roderick Potter, was incurring her mother's anger by refusing to help with child support.

36. Kloepfer, The Unspeakable Mother, p. 21. See also Covi's view, “Jamaica Kincaid and the Resistance to Canons,” p. 349.

37. I take this metaphor from a recent movie of that title. So far I have been unable to trace its origin, although running is a traditionally important act in many tribes, such as the Navajo and the Pawnee. I thank Dan Ladely for a conversation on this point. Cudjoe remarks that “Aimé Césaire utilized the technique of surrealism to plumb the soul of his being to arrive at his original self” (Resistance and Caribbean Literature, p. 184).

38. Jamaica Kincaid's short narrative entitled “Annie, Gwen, Lily, Pam and Tulip,” published in 1986, makes a slant response—as a complement as well as a contestation—to the narrator's idyllic vision.

39. Note also that Davies brilliantly discusses the house at the bottom of the river as “a trope for her own writer-self [its A-shape] synonymous with the rudiments of writing: the alphabet” (“Writing Home,” p. 68).

40. Gardner and Mackenzie, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 66.

41. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” pp. 260, 251; Minh-Ha, When the Moon Waxes Red, p. 124.

42. See, for example, Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” pp. 245-64, and Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” pp. 99-106. See also Kristeva, “My Memory's Hyperbole,” p. 221, and Kloepfer, The Unspeakable Mother, p. 148.

43. See note 41 and Minh-Ha, When the Moon Waxes Red, p. 144.

44. Kloepfer, The Unspeakable Mother, p. 21.

45. For the importance of obeah, see Johnson, The Devil, the Gargoyle, and the Buffoon and Kincaid, “Antigua Crossings,” especially p. 50.

46. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, p. 150.

47. For Bruno Schulz, see, for example, Russel E. Brown, “Bruno Schulz's Sanatorium Story,” pp. 35-46. See also Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, and note 29.

48. Jamaica Kincaid repeats the same tropes (the lamb, water in many guises, measuring versus intuiting) as well as wholesale repetitions of sections to throw off the idea that events belong in one specific context. She uses transformations the same way—her mother and herself as lizards, her enactment of a dream in Michigan, her projection of herself as Tom, the nineteenth-century chimney-sweep cum water-baby in a modern incarnation. Note, too, that Bachelard characterizes water as the most maternal and feminine of the alchemical elements (Water and Dreams, p. 110). Given a slightly pessimistic view early on in her interviews, Kincaid may be projecting the potential of abyss in the midst of ecstasy.

49. Biographical details from Jamaica Kincaid's life suggest that the experiences in At the Bottom of the River take place when the speaker is around nine years old.

50. Hart, Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende, p. 21. Note, too, that in the sense that Jamaica Kincaid's texts are open, not closed, they are “parabolic” in Barbara Herrnstein Smith's coinage (On the Margins of Discourse, p. 44).