Jamaica Kincaid Colonialism, Coming of Age and Preserving the Past in the Work of Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid has earned a reputation for speaking frankly and brashly about the personal journey of self-awareness. In doing so, the author has also become a powerful voice for the oft-underrepresented experience of Caribbean Islanders in the late 20th Century. A native of Antigua, Jamaica Kincaid left in her late teens to pursue an education in the United States. This dramatic break from her past would be followed by the adoption of the pen name by which she would become famous. This transformation is critical to the present discussion because it implicates the major themes that would be recurrent in her writing and because it inclines us to consider the ways in which we constantly reinvent ourselves. In both Annie John and My Brother, Kincaid uses the very personal and transformative experiences of her protagonists in order to explore both the personal and cultural ways in which we are constantly defined by our past.

Discussion:

Kincaid's work is at once fictional and autobiographical. These characteristics are readily apparent in her first novel, Annie John (1985). The story of a girl who shares a profound love with her mother but who must go to school in America, it bears many features in common with the author's own emotional difficulty at leaving home when young.

The emotional and physical separation that Annie John must endure is at once the novel's central conflict and the prerogative for its core coming-of-age...

In spite of the sadness, isolation and resentment that Annie John feels, especially toward her mother, it is the independence foisted upon her which makes her strong. It also opens her to a world of new experiences, friendships and opportunities for personal growth. These experiences would combine with the person she had been during her formative years in Antigua to define the person that she would ultimately become. This is a core aspect of Kincaid's novel. For the author, coming of age is not simply a matter of confronting new experiences but of allowing them to interact with the person you once were. The notion that strikes the reader is that one can't truly become the person they aspire to be until they accept all parts of what they once were.
For Annie John, learning this is accompanied by no small amount of difficulty and resentment. Indeed, there is a point in her adolescence where she attempts to reinvent herself as anything contrary to her mother. Kincaid (1996) tells that

"we both noticed that now if she said that something I did reminded her of her own self at my age, I would try to do it a different way, or, failing that, do it in a way that she could not stomach. She returned the blow by admiring and praising everything that she suspected had special meaning for me." (p. 87)

Where Annie John is about attempting to keep parts of the past while making a clean break from it, My Brother is about the act of returning home. This novel abounds with questions about whether or not the past truly can be…