SOURCE: “Island Daughter,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 5, February, 1991, pp. 5–6.

[In the following review of Lucy,Adisa discusses Kincaid's portrayal of Caribbean life and continuities between Annie John and Lucy, concluding that the latter's protagonist is less likeable.]

Sardonic is the word that kept ringing through my head as I read Jamaica Kincaid's latest novel [Lucy]. Kincaid and I are sisters in that we are both children of the tropics, she a daughter of Antigua, I a daughter of Jamaica. So I should be able to say that I know Kincaid, but I don't, although I am intimate with a lot of the things she writes about. I certainly don't know Lucy Warner, the heroine of this novel, nor anyone like her who completely severs connections to her roots, her ancestry. Yet I understand her ruthless determination to shape herself in sharp contrast to the West Indian community she is trying to flee.

In an interview with Selwyn Cudjoe that appeared in Callaloo in 1989, Kincaid, asked if her first novel, Annie John, was autobiographical, responded: “The feelings in it are autobiographical, yes. I didn't want to say that it was autobiographical because I felt that would be somehow admitting something about myself, but it is, and so that's that.”¹

If Annie John is partially autobiographical, then so is Lucy, which reads like its sequel. Lucy's journey to North America parallels Kincaid's life in many ways. Rereading Annie John, I was struck by how much this new work picks up smoothly from the closing of the former. At the end of Annie John, Annie is leaving home for England to pursue her studies. Lucy opens with Lucy's arrival in North America as an au pair girl. Although the places of departure and arrival are different, and the characters have different names, they both possess the same heritage and emit the same tropical odor. Lucy is a more mature Annie John.

Kincaid's work fits within the emerging body of literature by women writers of the English-speaking Caribbean. They share common techniques and themes—the use of a storyteller motif, the themes of mother-daughter relationship and the impact of colonialism, which shapes the young heroines but also forces them to leave to form themselves, to become “someone” of their own making.

Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey (1970), set in colonial Trinidad, was one of the first of these rites-of-passage novels. Cynthia, the young protagonist, is torn between two mother figures: her Tantie, who represents rural acceptance, and her Aunt Beatrice, who represents middle-class, urban respectability and symbolizes all the neurosis of a colonial subject obsessed with imitating the master. Like Kincaid's Annie, Cynthia at the close of this story is preparing to leave Trinidad for England to pursue her studies. We don't know her fate.

Another writer, Jamaican Michelle Cliff, creates another adolescent heroine, Clare Savage, in Abeng (1984), set in pre-independence Jamaica. Clare is torn between her black mother and her white father, and all the contradictions inherent in such a union during that era; in addition, she has to forge a place for herself in a society that is riven along color and class lines. While the end of Abeng does not show Clare leaving her island home for a metropolis, her exodus is clearly imminent. There is no place for her if she stays. When we meet her again it is in Cliff's next novel, No Telephone to Heaven (1987). Now she is poised in North America, passing, hoping no one will require her to produce her black Jamaican mother at the high school she attends. Like Lucy, central to her dilemma is her relationship—or lack of—with her mother.

Although Lucy Josephine Warner might well be a more mature Annie John, she still carries with her the same baggage: the desperate need to separate herself from her homeland, symbolized by her mother. Tightly woven into this work are passages that make direct reference to Annie John, or complete a story, present another view of a scene, begun in that novel: And Lucy is no more able to dissociate herself from her family, emotionally, than was Annie John. Throughout the novel Lucy is being pulled in two directions: by her ardent desire to be inextricably bound to her mother, and by the realization that she can no longer be an extension or her mother. Her feelings about her homeland and her mother are equally passionate, equally disdainful. “I wondered,” she writes, “if ever in my whole life a day would go by when these people I left behind, my own family, would not appear before me in one way or another.” The fact is, Lucy's family does not remain behind; they follow her at every turn, insert themselves and sometimes even displace the very people she is physically with at a given moment. Each incident Lucy faces recalls a tale from back home, every person she meets brings to memory a relative. The past is not buried or drowned in the deep sea Lucy traversed to reach this cold, grey city. The past is very much with her, no matter how fast she sprints to outdistance it.

Kincaid is a skilled writer. She makes keen observations about people and situations, dismissing them all in the same deft, swift voice, so that all one feels is the sting after the hand has made contact with the face. The book is not linear; it digresses. Nor does it focus only on Lucy. Mariah and Lewis, Lucy's employers, are symbols of perfection and wealth, and through their characters Kincaid is able to unmask the American myth of perfection and insert caustic remarks about power, wealth and white male privilege. She is particularly unrelenting about the special privilege that men like Lewis have in this society, how they use their power to have everyone, their wives included, defer to them, and how they manipulate every situation to their advantage, sacrificing not a word or idea of their own.

While Lucy mocks and dismisses the elite who run this society, it tends to overlook racism; it even makes the life of an au pair girl seem quite charming. Perhaps there are some ideal situations, but the stories I have heard from women of the West Indies, some of whom came to this country in the late fifties and early sixties as au pair girls, many more as domestics, paint another, far from ideal picture: facelessness, isolation, exploitation, indentured servitude. In the interview in Callaloo, Kincaid intimates that her own journey was not so perfect: she herself, aged just sixteen, left Antigua in 1965 to become an au pair girl in America, where “I wasn't quite a servant, but almost.”

How fortunate Lucy is, then, to have been spared servitude. Instead, she is befriended, confided in, even introduced to eligible white men of the social stature of her employers. Racism largely seems not to exist in Lucy's world—but it does. While eating in the dining-car of the train on which she is accompanying Mariah to her childhood home, Lucy remarks:

The other people sitting down to eat dinner all looked like Mariah's relatives; the people waiting on them all looked like mine. The people who looked like my relatives were all older men and very dignified, as if they were just emerging from a church after the Sunday service. On closer observation, they were not at all like my relatives; they only looked like them. My relatives always gave backchat.

(p. 32)

I can't help but wonder why she feels so urgent a need to dissociate herself from blacks, since she and African-Americans share a common history and ancestry. This passage is snide. Lucy rejects the forging of links; she insists she has nothing in common with the black men who serve her, even though she too is beholden to the Mariahs of the world. She opts instead for individualism, being the anomaly, a person immune to the ordinary needs of community and family.

Kincaid continues in Lucy what she began in Annie John—that is, to retell the stories, stories her mother and relatives told her, which is largely how she comes to know and see herself. Storytelling is very much a motif of Caribbean society, and I too am a product of that tradition. Much of what I know about my early life comes from the stories my mother told me about myself, and the stories she told others about me. Like Annie John and Lucy Warner, who I am is a direct result of those stories. The oral tradition reigns. Over a period of time the stories become integral to who we are; they connect us to the history we did not live or do not recall. The teller of the stories is as important as the stories themselves. Since the teller is a woman, and is often our mother, we become our mother—as Lucy finally concedes, not with alarm or even surprise but acceptance: “I had spent so much time saying I did not want to be like my mother that I missed the whole story: I was not like my mother—I was my mother.”

This is the thread that keeps this book from unraveling, from becoming a lament, a daughter's cry for autonomy and separation. Kincaid's own skill as a storyteller takes over: the stories are no more Lucy's mother's but Lucy's own, and every time she claims one of the stories that her mother told her, she discovers a little bit more about herself, she stumbles on wisdom: Her history becomes a shawl that she pulls closer to cover her shoulders from the cold.

The complications of this central relationship between the protagonist and her mother extend far beyond the “normal” conflict that a daughter and mother experience. I try to think how my own story was different, and why, like Kincaid, I grew up in a small island community that praised imitation and sameness. It was understood that I would improve my standards, yet pattern myself off my mother. I was expected to be good in both the colonial context—a good subject—and in terms of what are considered “proper” traditional values for girls who aspire to middle-class status. I was my mother's daughter, and was as confident of her love as is Annie of her mother's at the beginning of Annie John.

What then is the source of Lucy's anger and abhorrence of her mother? Where did the rupture begin? I tried to trace it in Annie John, and I believe I found the place—the point where her mother demands that she become an individual separate from her.

My mother and I had many dresses made out of the same cloth, though hers had a different, more grownup style … One day, my mother and I had gone to get some material for new dresses to celebrate her birthday (the usual gift from my father) when I came upon a piece of cloth … I immediately said how much I loved this piece of cloth and how nice I thought it would look on us both, but my mother replied, “Oh no. You are getting too old for that. It's time you had your own clothes. You just cannot go around the rest of your life looking like a little me.”

(Annie John, pp. 25–26)

Growing up, I remember my older sister and I having dresses made out of the same fabric as my mother's, and I recall distinctly the feeling of oneness that came from dressing like them. I also recall the anger I felt toward my sister when, as a teenager, she no longer wanted to dress like me or have me tag along with her and her friends. I don't think I ever hated her, at least not for more than a day; yet I believe this episode is the trigger of Annie's and Lucy's turmoil. In the same passage, Annie continues:

To say that I felt the earth swept away from under me would not be going too far. It wasn't just what she said, it was the way she said it. No accompanying little laugh. No bending over and kissing my little wet forehead … I got my dress with the men playing pianos, and my mother got a dress with red and yellow overgrown hibiscus, but I was never able to wear my own dress or see my mother in hers without feeling bitterness and hatred, directed not so much toward my mother as toward, I suppose, life in general.

(p. 26)

Lucy is a more cynical work than Annie John. Lucy is not a person I admire. I applaud her audacity, I am amazed by her indifference, I am floored by her astuteness and knowledge of people, I smile at her brashness and dismissal of traditional values, but I don't feel that I know her, and what I know of her I don't like. Lucy Josephine Warner is too much above and beyond all attachments. She seems incapable of being hurt; yet she harbors such hatred for her mother. And I am still not sure I understand or even know the source of her pain, real as it is. Almost to the end she remains self-righteously assured, she doesn't falter, she doesn't yield, she doesn't grow. But perhaps at the very end we glimpse a young woman who is asking for a chance:

I could write down only this: “I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it.” And then as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great blur.

(pp. 163–164)

Note

1. Selwyn R. Cudjoe, “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview,” Callaloo, Vol.2, No.2 (Spring 1989).