SOURCE: “The Rhythm of Reality in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid,” in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 466–72.

[In the following essay, Simmons discusses the recurring themes of loss and betrayal in Kincaid's fiction, specifically addressing the author's use of repetitive language and litanies in her prose to underscore contradictions and to effect closure.]

At heart Jamaica Kincaid's work is not about the charm of a Caribbean childhood, though her first and best-known novel, Annie John (1983), may leave this impression. Nor is it about colonialism, though her angry, book-length essay, A Small Place (1988), accuses the reader of continuing the exploitation begun by Columbus. Nor, finally, is Kincaid's work about black and white in America, though her second novel, Lucy (1990), runs a rich white urban family through the shredder of a young black au pair's rage.

At heart Kincaid's work is about loss, an all but unbearable fall from a paradise partially remembered, partially dreamed, a state of wholeness in which things are unchangeably themselves and division is unknown. This paradise has been displaced by a constantly shifting reality, which is revealed to the reader through the rhythms and repetitions of Kincaid's prose. In the long, seemingly artless, list-like sentences, the reader is mesmerized into Kincaid's world, a world in which one reality constantly slides into another under cover of the ordinary rhythms of life.

The sense of betrayal, which permeates Kincaid's work, is explored first in the treachery of a once-adored mother. In Kincaid's first book, the collection of surrealistic short stories At the Bottom of the River (1983), a girl yearns for an impossible return to the perfect world that existed before the “betrayal” of birth and for union with a mother figure who will “every night, over and over, … tell me something that begins, ‘Before you were born.’”¹ The yearning for a lost maternal paradise, however, is inextricably linked to betrayal, and elsewhere in At the Bottom of the River the mother is shown methodically transforming herself into a serpent, growing “plates of metal-colored scales on her back” and flattening her head “so that her eyes, which were by now ablaze, sat on top of her head and spun like two revolving balls” (BR, 55).

In Annie John, a more conventionally narrative coming-of-age book, the treachery of a once-adoring mother is spelled out. As the child begins to reach puberty, the mother suddenly turns on her. The mother who has previously seen her daughter as beautiful and perfect, now sees the child as a mass of imperfection and immorality. At the same time that she imposes rules and regimens designed to turn the girl into a “young lady,” the mother also communicates that this project is doomed, that no amount of training can overcome what she now perceives to be the girl's true nature, that of a “slut.”

While betrayal by a beloved mother is a theme that echoes throughout Kincaid's work, this first treachery is mirrored by the colonial world of British-dominated Antigua. The young protagonist of Annie John enjoys the prestige of being a top student, but approval and praise are withdrawn when Annie, in her growing awareness that she is the descendant of people whose enslavement was the result of European “discovery,” treats a picture of Christopher Columbus with mild disrespect. As a child of the colonial system, Annie is faced with a dilemma similar to that which she has begun to face when dealing with her mother. Both powers—maternal and imperial—demand childlike devotion and unquestioning trust; both turn on the girl in retaliatory fury at the slightest hint of mature awareness. To be acknowledged, loved, and rewarded, then, she must betray her own maturing self. The result is a confusion about where the self really lies: “Sometimes, what with our teachers and our books, it was hard for us to tell on which side we really now belonged—with the master or with the slaves.”²

Like the betraying mother, the colonial system, in pretending to nurture the child, actually steals her from herself. For the black child in the British-dominated Caribbean, “the self is faced with extinction by the very processes of acculturation which all who nurture the child commend.”³ Only imitation and blind acquiescence are acceptable, not the questioning gaze of an emerging intelligence.

The theme of betrayal, and an increasing anger at having been somehow trapped into turning against oneself, explodes in A Small Place, in which the author revisits her home, the island of Antigua, after an absence of twenty years. The island is now self-governing, but white tourists have replaced the departed British as the dominant group. As the tourists turn the islanders into holiday attractions, the islanders, as Kincaid depicts them, retaliate in kind, reducing the tourist into a dehumanized object.

If the white tourists in Antigua are excoriated, the black inhabitants are not spared Kincaid's wrath as they, in some areas, act out the roles of incompetence and dishonesty written for them by the English and, in other areas, emulate imperial rapacity. The postindependence schools are so bad that Kincaid, with her preindependence education, is shocked. And the government of Antigua is so patently dishonest that “the answer on every Antiguan's lips to the question, ‘What is going on here now?’ is ‘The government is corrupt. Them are thief, them are big thief.’ Imagine, then, the bitterness and the shame in me as I tell you this.”⁴ Once again the betrayer is, in part, the self.

In Lucy the theme of loss and betrayal is continued, though the title character is no longer in the Caribbean but has come to work as an au pair in a big American city resembling New York. The sense of loss may be even more powerful here than in the other works, as the rich beloved contradiction of the childhood world is not only figuratively but also literally lost. Lucy—named, her mother has told her, for Lucifer—has been expelled from both the Caribbean and her mother's life. Warm, vivid Antigua has been replaced by the pale chill of a North American winter. Lucy's mother, source of all intelligence, power, beauty, and magic, has been replaced by Lucy's wealthy employer, the affectionate but sheltered and naïve Mariah, who proffers books on feminism to help Lucy over her deep sense of loss and despair. In one way, Kincaid's young protagonist has, by leaving home, triumphed over her mother's wish to keep her forever infantilized or criminalized. She is still, however, threatened by the mother's power. She keeps her mother's letters but does not open them: “I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.”⁵

If Lucy has not entirely freed herself of her mother, neither is she free of the destructive legacy of a colonial education. When Mariah, brimming with delight in the pale Northeastern spring, introduces Lucy to her favorite place, a grove of daffodils, Lucy is filled with rage. She has never seen a daffodil before but has been forced to memorize a long poem about daffodils as part of her British education, an education which, as a matter of course, expected students to ignore their own lush flora and to study and celebrate a plant they would probably never see. Though Mariah's intentions are innocent, even loving, Lucy wants only to take a scythe and “kill” the flowers. Part of her fury is at how “simple” they look, as if “made to erase a complicated and unnecessary idea” (L, 29), the complicated idea of dominance. The colonial education, which has forced the girl first to love daffodils, then to hate them, creates a chasm between her and the well-meaning Mariah.

I felt sorry that I had cast her beloved daffodils in a scene she had never considered, a scene of conquered and conquests; a scene of brutes masquerading as angels and angels portrayed as brutes. … It wasn't her fault. It wasn't my fault. But nothing could change the fact that where she saw beautiful flowers I saw sorrow and bitterness. The same thing could cause us to shed tears, but those tears would not taste the same.

(L, 30)

Here too neither the source of suffering nor its redress is simple.

Although the themes of loss, betrayal, and self-betrayal permeate these works, this is probably not what draws most readers to Kincaid's writing. Rather, they are struck first by the language, which reviewers frequently describe in terms of poetry, demonstrating a “joy in the sheer sounds of words.”⁶ Kincaid's language can be examined in a number of ways. It has been claimed as particularly “feminine,” the “language of sounds and silence” of the nursery “which stands before and beyond the rational signifying words of the father.” Kincaid's style has also been described as “a successful example of [the] Afro-American rhetorical strategy, [as] parody, repetition, inversion mark every single movement of Kincaid's narrative.”⁷ “Girl,” the first piece in the collection At the Bottom of the River (and Kincaid's first story to appear in the New Yorker, which later published virtually all of her fiction), is described as “a rhythm so strong it seemed to be hypnosis, aimed at magically chanting out bits of the subconscious.”⁸

As with most magical and religious incantations, however, the spell is cast for a reason. The rhythms and repetitions charm and lull the reader, disguising what is actually happening in the prose, which is that one thing is constantly being transformed into another. The rhythm and repetition of Kincaid's prose mark a clash of contradictions. At the same time they work to manipulate a reader into unconsciously accepting the paradoxes that are being offered. In “Girl” the mother's chant of information and advice enfolds and ensnares the daughter, rendering the girl nearly helpless before the mother's transforming will. In Annie John Kincaid's use of rhythm, repetition, and list-making signal contradiction and manipulation, but increasingly these devices also mark a response to impending loss. The mother's beloved homemaking energy, including her celebration of her child, is catalogued at the very moment that energy is being turned against the child, destroying her sense of home. In A Small Place it is the assumed white reader who is immobilized by the rhythms of the prose, as Kincaid's protagonist graduates from being the victim of such transformative power to a practitioner in her own right.

Kincaid's “Girl” may be read as a kind of primer in the manipulative art of rhythm and repetition. The story begins with the mother's voice giving such simple, benevolent, and appropriately maternal advice as “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” (3). Like the girl to whom the mother speaks, the reader is lulled and drawn in by the chant of motherly admonitions, which go on to advise about how to dress for the hot sun, how to cook pumpkin fritters, how to buy cloth for a blouse, and how to prepare fish. Seduced in only a few lines, readers, like the listening girl, are caught unaware by an admonition which sounds like the previous, benevolent advice but has in fact suddenly veered in a new direction, uniting the contradictions of nurture and condemnation: “… always eat your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming” (3). As the brief, one-sentence story progresses, we come to see that the mother's speech, inviting with nurturing advice on the one hand and repelling with condemnatory characterization on the other, not only manipulates the girl into receptivity to the mother's condemning view, but also teaches the art of manipulation. The mother incorporates into her indictment of the girl's impending sluttishness the task of teaching her how to hide that condition: “… this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming” (4). As the contradictions draw closer together—as nurture and manipulation become increasingly intertwined—the language seems to become even more rhythmic.

… this is how you smile to someone you don't like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how you 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. …

(4)

In the last third of “Girl” the mother's voice continues the litany of domestic instruction, but added now is comment on a frighteningly contradictory world, one in which nothing is ever what it seems to be. The continued tone of motherly advice at first works to lighten the sinister nature of the information imparted and then, paradoxically, seems to make these disclosures even more frightening; eventually we see that, in a world in which a recipe for stew slides into a recipe for the death of a child, nothing is safe.

… don't pick people's flowers—you might catch something; don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; 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.

(5)

In the collection's second story, “In the Night,” a comfortable domestic world is again casually transformed into the site of a life-and-death struggle, then casually changed back. The repetitive language first comforts in its invocation of familiar and simple activities, then horrifies as it veers into the suggestion that there is little difference between making a dress and killing a child: “… 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. …” (11).

The story “In the Night” ends with a fantasy in which the girl imagines that she will one day marry a woman whom we take to be her mother, “a redskin woman with black bramblebush hair and brown eyes, who wears skirts that are so big I can easily bury my head in them” and who, each night will tell a story that begins, ‘Before you were born’” (11, 12). The two will live in a “mud hut near the sea,” and the fantasy proceeds as a list of domestic furnishings and tools, one of the numerous such lists found in Kincaid's work.

With this story we encounter something new. Now it is the girl, not the mother, who slides one reality into another under cover of life's ordinary rhythms. Contained in the following list are both a vision of mother and daughter living together eternally in simple domestic bliss and a literal portrait of the inevitable collapse of this union.

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 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 the hot 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.

(12)

Here the “pictures” are ambiguous, certainly intentionally so. The two women could have come to the jetty to wave good-bye to a third person, or they could be waving good-bye to each other. And we do not know who they are; they could be mother and daughter or someone else. Readers of Annie John, however, will see here a preview of that book's final chapter, “A Walk to the Jetty,” in which Annie and her mother embrace, wave good-bye, and then part, as Annie leaves Antigua seemingly forever. Thus the fantasy of eternal mother-daughter union is transformed into separation, even as it is being constructed. From this vantage point, even the picture of the embrace cannot be seen as the unambiguous demonstration of affection it seems to be. For if this is a preview of the final scene of Annie John, the embrace is, rather than a demonstration of affectionate union, one last struggle for power as the mother holds the girl so tightly that she cannot breathe and the girl, “suddenly on [her] guard,” asks herself “‘What does she want now?’” (AJ, 147).

In the title story of At the Bottom of the River, which concludes the volume, we see Kincaid changing the nature and purpose of the incantatory list. As the mother uses it both to invite and denounce, the daughter uses it as a way of both holding on and breaking free. Again and again we will see this effect in Kincaid's work, as her protagonists, as if to gain some control over life's eternal changeability, list the contents of a world that must soon be departed. As the mother in Kincaid uses her repetitious chants to control others, the daughter uses them to control herself, appearing to steady herself by chanting out the properties of a beloved world even as she prepares to leave it. We remember that Kincaid and her characters—mothers and daughters—are women caught between worlds, and perhaps it is only in this way that the duality can be managed.

This connection between the listing of beloved objects and departure becomes clear at the end of this final story, as the protagonist emerges from the “pit” of an existential crisis in which she confronts her own inevitable death. The acceptance of the inevitability of this ultimate departure is signaled by a listing of domestic items that seem to symbolize all the beauty, simplicity, and perishability of human life. It is as if in reciting the list of homely items, the story's protagonist joins with them as a part of all life, rather than feeling herself alone and apart in her fate.

Emerging from this pit, I step into a room and I see that 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.

(82)

In At the Bottom of the River an increase in rhythmic, repetitious language seems to mark a crescendo of contradictions, in Annie John the presence of extensive listings of domestic items may be used to chart an intensified sense of loss, or imminent loss. In the book's second chapter, “The Circling Hand,” in which Annie's mother first harshly announces a change in their formerly close relationship, listings of domestic items abound. Most of the lists catalogue the mother's activities, her shopping, her cooking (“pumpkin soup with droppers, banana fritters with salt fish stewed in antroba and tomatoes, fungie with salt fish stewed in antroba and tomatoes” [17]), or her laundry methods. Most striking is the page-long list of Annie's baby and childhood paraphernalia which fill the mother's trunk, from her first garment, a white chemise sewed by the mother, to her first jewelry, her report cards, and certificates of merit from Sunday School. Annie will, of course, be banished from all such sites of maternal activity within a few pages, apparently as a result of her impending maturity. No longer will she be allowed to be her mother's little shadow, and sorting through the beloved trunk is one of the first shared pleasures to go, as the mother harshly declares that they no longer have time for such things.

In the last chapter of Annie John, “A Walk to the Jetty,” Annie prepares to leave Antigua, and once again list-making flourishes as Annie, on the morning of her departure, catalogues the morning sounds in her house, the contents of her room, the breakfast menu, and finally the significant events of her childhood as they are suggested by the various sites she must pass on her walk to the jetty. These things and places are not only dear and familiar; they are Annie's very life, and there is a kind of death in leaving them. Now the domestic lists take on an increasingly rhythmic form, as Annie seeks to set the moment of departure to the ongoing beat of daily life.

The house we live in my father built with his own hands. The bed I am lying in my father built with his own hands. If I get up and sit on a chair, it is a chair my father built with his own hands. When my mother uses a large wooden spoon to stir the porridge we sometimes eat as part of our breakfast, it will be a spoon that my father has carved with his own hands. The nightie I am wearing, with scalloped neck and hem and sleeves, my mother made with her own hands. When I look at things in a certain way, I suppose I should say that the two of them made me with their own hands. … Lying in my bed for the last time, I thought, This is what I add up to.

(133)

Kincaid's protagonist insists that she is glad to leave it all, that she never again wants to hear the sheep being driven to pasture past her house or her mother dressing and gargling. As she lies in the half-dark looking at her room and all the things that “had meant a lot” to her, she declares, “My heart could have burst open with joy at the thought of never having to see any of it again” (132). But this claim is contradicted by the energy expended on the lists and their great detail. Even her vow that her departure will be permanent is cast in terms of another, rhythmic, listing of the details of home: “I had made up my mind that, come what may, the road for me now went only in one direction: away from my home, away from my mother, away from my father, away from the everlasting blue sky, away from the everlasting hot sun, away from the people who said to me, ‘This happened during the time your mother was carrying you’” (134).

In A Small Place rhythm and repetition are once again used to manipulate an unsuspecting listener, this time Kincaid's assumed white reader, the “you” to whom the piece is addressed. Like the daughter in “Girl,” the reader of A Small Place is not immediately put on guard against an assault, but rather is drawn in by what seems to be a cheerful offer to discuss a pleasant subject. Here the subject is tourism in the Caribbean, and the essay's opening lines seem to set out a typical travel-writing invitation to dream of pleasurable experiences in exotic places: “If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see” (3). Like the mother's voice in “Girl,” Kincaid's voice in A Small Place keeps up the reassuring litany of advice and information, even as it turns toward condemnation. True, there is, from the very beginning, a somewhat unusual and slightly unsettling focus on the vacationer—“You may be the sort of tourist who would …” (3)—but still it is possible to read on in relative comfort, to assume that this is the safe and satisfying piece of travel writing one is eager to enjoy.

Soon, however, as the phrase “You are a tourist” is repeated again and again, we come to see that it is not merely a descriptive term. Rather, “you are a tourist” becomes an indictment, repeated as a sort of refrain after every fresh example of insensitive and dehumanizing behavior. At first the phrase may seem to offer an excuse, to explain, for example, why the traveler is free to enjoy the hot, dry climate without ever wondering how constant drought may affect the island's inhabitants. But just as we have become nervous enough to form this comforting theory, it is exploded by the demonstration that the phrase “You are a tourist,” rather than excusing the reader, is pulling him into a racially charged atmosphere that he is intent upon avoiding. The phrase is in fact a code for “You are white.” Kincaid writes:

You disembark from your plane. You go through customs. Since you are a tourist, a North American or European—to be frank, white, and not an Antiguan black returning to Antigua from Europe or North America with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap clothes and food for relatives, you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched.

(5)

Soon it is clear that Kincaid is not writing about the tourist destination so much as about the tourist, repeating “You are a tourist” and then “You are on holiday” as a drumbeat of indictment. The tourist is shown in many attitudes, but always he demonstrates a narcissistic determination to see Antigua and Antiguans in terms of his own desires and needs, never as a place and people with a separate existence. Even a dangerous road and bad drivers will be worked into the theme of holiday thrills in which the author's island home is transformed into one big amusement park: “Your driver is reckless; he is a dangerous man who drives in the middle of the road when he thinks no other cars are coming in the opposite direction, passes other cars on blind curves than run uphill, drives at sixty miles an hour on narrow, curving roads. … This may frighten (you are on your holiday; you are a tourist); this might excite you (you are on holiday; you are a tourist)” (6).

In a few pages, then, Kincaid has reversed the usual situation. The reader who has, probably unconsciously, expected to dehumanize the natives with his narcissistic gaze has been himself dehumanized, reduced to the stereotype, “You are a tourist.” Kincaid does not stop here. Again, she pulls the reader in by seeming to return to the expected travelogue. Upon seeing the sea, the tourist—always “you”—is transported: “Oh, what beauty! Oh, what beauty! You have never seen anything like this. You are so excited. You breathe shallow. You breathe deep.” But swiftly, with the repetition of the phrase “You see yourself,” even this seemingly innocuous moment is transformed into a portrait of the tourist, whose determination to consume everything in sight renders him bloated and ugly. First, pleasantly enough, “You see a beautiful boy skimming the water, godlike, on a Windsurfer.” Then, dangerously,

… you see an incredibly unattractive, fat, pastrylike-fleshed woman enjoying a walk on the beautiful sand, with a man, an incredibly unattractive, fat pastrylike-fleshed man; you see the pleasure they are taking in their surroundings. Still standing, looking out the window, you see yourself lying on the beach, enjoying the amazing sun. … You see yourself taking a walk on that beach, you see yourself meeting new people (only they are new in a very limited way, for they are people just like you). You see yourself eating some delicious, locally grown food. You see yourself, you see yourself.

(13)

If you, the tourist, see yourself reduced to a dehumanized stereotype, Kincaid seems to say, perhaps you can see how you are connected to the people you had intended to dehumanize, to reduce to mere picturesque vacation scenery. At the end of this section, by repeating the phrase “every native,” Kincaid joins white tourist and black Antiguan in common humanity.

That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives.

(19)

In Kincaid's story “Ovando,” a fantasy about a European conqueror of that name, the most striking rhythmic repetitions begin late in the story, as if the author, having set out Ovando's destructive deeds, only now cries out against them. Here, as elsewhere, an intensified sense of rhythm seems to mark an intensification of emotion. At the story's crescendo Ovando is no longer a man but has become the “night,” a deep, dark receptacle for all that is deadly and dreaded: “Ovando lived in the thickest part of the night, the deepest part of the night, the part of the night where all suffering dwells, including death; the part of the night in which the weight of the world is made visible and eternal terror is confirmed.”⁹

In the last lines of the story, as in the last section of A Small Place, Kincaid unites victim and victimizer in a shared fate. Here the repetition of “nothing” sounds a funeral chant for both those who dominate and those who are dominated. As is frequently the case, rhythm and repetition signal both loss and the struggle to survive it: “A charge against Ovando, then, is that he loved himself so that all other selves and all other things became nothing to him. I became nothing to Ovando. My relatives became nothing to Ovando. Everything that could trace its lineage through me became nothing to Ovando. And so it came to be that Ovando loved nothing, lived in nothing and died in just that way” (83).

In the novel Lucy we can recognize Kincaid's voice and language, but the use of rhythm and repetition is much less pronounced. In the cool, gray world of an American city, the intensity that inspires the rhythmic passages in earlier works has been muted, and the voice is calmer and more analytical. This is a world without magic; magical transformations have been replaced by a rich family's disguises and pretenses, posturings which Lucy sees through effortlessly. It is not until late in the book, once Lucy begins to speak about the loss she felt when her mother's attention turned to a succession of baby brothers, that we get the first, long list, a litany of love and loss.

As I was telling Mariah all these things, all sorts of little details of my life on the island where I grew up came back to me: the color of six o'clock in the evening sky on the day I went to call the midwife to assist my mother in the birth of my first brother; the white of the chemise that my mother embroidered for the birth of my second brother; the redness of the red ants that attacked my third brother as he lay in bed next to my mother a day after he was born; the navy blue of the sailor suit my first brother wore when my father took him to a cricket match; the absence of red lipstick on my mother's mouth after they were all born; the day the men from the prison in their black-and-white jail clothes came to cut down a plum tree that grew in our yard, because one of my brothers had almost choked to death swallowing whole a plum he picked up from the ground.

(131)

The white chemise here is reminiscent of another garment, the white cotton gown that begins the list of beloved childhood items in Annie John's trunk. This echo allows us to see the world of change and loss contained in the passage above. The infant who replaces Annie in the cherished white dress will himself be displaced, will be thrown out into a world in which all things seem to be in physical and moral flux. The juxtaposition of white chemise and biting red ants, of toddling children and jail crews, of ripe plums and the sudden threat of death whisks us back to the dangerous magical world of Kincaid's earlier work, a world in which the most innocent act may carry with it an unintentional pollution, as in “Girl”: “… don't eat fruit on the street—flies will follow you” (4). While this may not be the world Lucy lives in now, it is still the world that lives in her.

Lucy contains one other passage of rhythmic repetition, which, like the lists at the end of Annie John, marks the protagonist's preparations to leave one world for another.

I used to be nineteen; I used to live in the household of Lewis and Mariah, and I used to be the girl who took care of the children. … I used to see Mariah with happiness an essential part of her daily existence, and then, when the perfect world she had known for so long vanished without warning, I saw sadness replace it; I used to lie naked in moonlight with a boy named Hugh; I used to not know who Lewis was, until one day he revealed himself to be just another man, an ordinary man, when I saw him in love with his wife's best friend; I used to be that person, and I used to be in those situations. That was how I spent the year just past.

(138)

Lucy has not yet told us she is leaving her employer to live on her own, but the list signals impending change. Here again we see a detailed accounting of all that is soon to be left forever, as if this is a way of continuing to have those things which are one's life, even as one prepares for departure.

Although Kincaid's style may mesmerize, may have such power as to seem an end in itself, the careful reader begins to see that the author's language may be the most powerful symbol of all for the themes of loss and betrayal in a world divided against itself. A Kincaid sentence, as West Indian poet Derek Walcott has written, “constantly heads toward its own contradiction.”¹⁰ Finally, it may be that it is in Kincaid's sentences, if not in her stories, that a kind of resolution to the crisis of loss and betrayal is achieved. Here at least the contradictions are held in solution.

The fact that Kincaid's work is so frequently its own contradiction may explain the difficulty critics have had in categorizing her. Intensely personal, psychologically dense, Kincaid “does not fit in to any of the fashionable schools of Caribbean writing” that are preoccupied with racial and social identity.”¹¹ Nor can she be easily categorized as a black or feminist writer: Kincaid does not feel the need to “delineate” her world “sociologically,” writes black-studies scholar and critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. “She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both.” The ability to make this assumption marks a “distinct departure” for Gates, and he compares Kincaid to another writer, Toni Morrison, who also assumes her world. With writers like these, he says, “we can get beyond the large theme of racism and get to deeper themes of how black people love and cry and live and die. Which, after all, is what art is all about” (quoted in Garis, 70).

Notes

1. Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River, New York, Plume, 1983, p. 12. Subsequent citations use the abbreviation BR where needed for clarity.

2. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John, New York, Plume, 1983, p. 26. Subsequent citations use the abbreviation AJ where needed for clarity.

3. Craig Tapping, “Children and History in the Caribbean Novel: George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John,” Kunapipi (Denmark), 21 (1989), p. 53.

4. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988, p. 41. Subsequent citations use the abbreviation SP where needed for clarity.

5. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990, p. 91. Subsequent citations use the abbreviation L where needed for clarity.

6. Anne Tyler, “Mothers and Mysteries,” New Republic, 31 December 1983, p. 33.

7. Giovanna Covi, “Jamaica Kincaid and the Resistance to Canons,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, eds., Trenton, N.J., Africa World Press, 1990, p. 438–39.

8. Jacqueline Austin, “Up from Eden,” Village Voice Literary Supplement, 34 (April 1985), p. 7.

9. Jamaica Kincaid, “Ovando,” Conjunctions, 14 (1989), p. 82.

10. Leslie Garis, “Through West Indian Eyes,” New York Times Magazine, 7 October 1990, p. 80.

11. Louis James, “Reflections, and the Bottom of the River: The Transformation of Caribbean Experience in the Fiction of Jamaica Kincaid,” Wasafiri, Winter 1988/89, p. 15.