(1949- ) novelist, short-story writer
Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua, and named Elaine Potter Richardson by her mother, Annie Richardson. Shortly after Kincaid’s birth, Annie married David Drew, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, after whom Kincaid models her fictional fathers, not her biological father, Roderick Potter. Annie Richardson taught her daughter how to read and sent her to the Moravian school. Shortly after her 17th birthday, Kincaid traveled to the United States to work and study.
Elaine Potter Richardson officially changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973, partially to heighten her anonymity as a writer. In 1976, she started to work as a staff writer for The New Yorker, after George W. Trow, the New Yorkers “Talk of the Town” editor, introduced Kincaid to the magazine’s editor, William Shawn. Before long, Kincaid began to write the “Talk of the Town” column and by 1992 was using the metaphor of gardening to write about the effects of colonialism.
Critics have praised Kincaid’s lyrical originality, her characterization, and the modernist narrative techniques in her depiction of Caribbean life, including colonialism, separation, and mother-child relationships. Kincaid voiced a lack of interest in First World approval, assuming a self-exiled literary position (in a 1990 interview with Donna Perry).
Ironically enough, critical attention and acclaim from First World critics—especially for her short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River (1983), and her novels, Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990)—steadily increased. To quote R. B. Hughes in Empire and Domestic Space in the Fiction ofJamaica Kincaid, “Kincaid’s novels illustrate alternative, conceptual, emancipatory spaces within idealised colonial territory. Her doing so depends upon her ‘… displacing the discursive structures of the (colonial) master subject,’ and depends too ‘… on a sense of possibilities and self-representation beyond the territory defined by the dominant [culture].’”
Other Works by Jamaica Kincaid
Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 1986.
Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.
Works about Jamaica Kincaid
Covi, Giovanna. Jamaica Kincaid and the Resistance to Canons. In Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, eds., Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990: 345-354.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, Press, 1999.
