Kincaid and Kishoiyian is an annotated conversation with writer and former Harvard Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence Jamaica Kincaid. The conversation occurred midmorning on 29 February 2024, and much of what was said is absent. Prior to the 29th, the day I transitioned from a legal pad to a transcription program; some topics we spoke about are the History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), Henry Adams and Henry James, Madagascar and Vermont, the seeds of Southwestern China, the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, Kenyan Pentecostal cult leader and murderer Paul NthengeMackenzie, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (1969), Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and near nudity, V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, Richard Pryor and Labi Siffre, the urge to eat Indian food on Christmas, the difficulty of digging a grave in a garden, and her theory that we are all assembled by the age of seven.
I’ve resided inside this conversation, our sole recorded conversation, three stretches: April while transcribing—May while editing—June while annotating. Our proximity is something I treasure and therefore wished to prolong. Perhaps I am destined to sift through archives, work away at ore. Kincaid and Kishoiyian has brought out both the architect and archaeologist within. At once I hope to construct a feature where our relation lays bare, legible to anyone; and to excavate her imprint, what allowed an identification to arise in January of 2023, when I first read Girl (1978), a listing of commands uttered in an aunties oratory, lethal and gentle-flowing as lava.
Before Kincaid I had little interest in reading or writing narrative. None of my friends did that. As I got to know her through Girl, then Lucy (1990), A Small Place (1988), At the Bottom of the River (1983), Annie John (1985), Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and My Brother (1999), I felt lamplit. Here was a woman whose tongue wasn’t tamed by the false stiff diction, the inherited deadening inferiority. She wrestles with Obeah and the New Testament, the British Empire and her kin. In narrative she stands tall, brave and triumphant.
Jamaica Kincaid
Go ahead! Go ahead! Ask anything.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What if we begin with Gauguin—you have so many books about him in your office, atop this table. I hesitate to call him awful, but he’s an awful guy regardless. What about him allures you?
The books are The Noble Savage (1954), Paul Gauguin: A Complete Life (1995), Paul Gauguin: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (2013), Paul Gauguin: The Other and I (2023), Gauguin: The Master, The Monster, The Myth (2023)
Jamaica Kincaid
This judgment paralysis approach to culture is not something I am called to. You don’t seem to be so either . . . Gauguin is very out because he was a pedophile, a colonist. But I love his pain, and his paintings. Before he travelled to Tahiti, Gauguin asked the great Swedish playwright Strindberg to write an introduction to his 1895 show. Strindberg replied, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t because I hate your work. I really don’t understand it.’ Gauguin messaged, ‘Thank you,’ then used it as the introduction. That is one reason I love him: I identify with his rebelliousness.
Paul Gauguin and August Strindberg were acquainted through the Parisian symbolist avant-garde. On 1 February 1895, Strindberg obliged Gaugin’s request, offering a letter which began: “I cannot grasp your art and I cannot like it.” This initial dismissal was born out of incomprehension, not criticism. Strindberg admits this, conceding that “writing has warmed me up and I am beginning to have a certain understanding of the art of Gauguin.” Though tender, this was not a turning point toward affection. Strindberg concludes: “So what is he? He is Gauguin, the savage who hates civilization.”
Jamaica Kincaid
I read biographies on Gauguin and everything about his life makes sense: he’s an artist. And an artist—a writer—must be a cruel person. They only should be cruel when they’re working and he was. He left his wife and children then went off to Asia and Africa and painted these things, most of which are in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Hermitage also has the best impressionists . . .
Another student arrived for office hours. Kincaid asks the other student, Are you flexible? Can you return?
She finds her magical scheduling tool, the phrase she uses to talk about her tablet.
Everyone's names have escaped her. She laughs about this then encourages the student to acknowledge her flaw, saying, What you can note in the student evaluations is that she was horrible at names . . . Say, ‘She couldn’t remember any of our names.’ Is 2 o’clock or 2:30 alright? O.K—Go away!
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
If a writer is this cruel person, what are your cruelties?
Jamaica Kincaid
My cruelties? Oh, you must talk to my children! I didn’t even realize I was so devoted to Gauguin but I have so many of his books. I’ve always admired him. I thought of him when I wrote a novel called Lucy. This is because early in my life Gauguin’s callousness towards his family was a great inspiration to me. I don’t know if you know anything about me but my parents . . .
Anyone with an attraction to Lucy must have at one point seen the family as a foul deed, a ripe fruit doomed to rot. In the novel Lucy migrates to America from Antigua to work as an au pair. When she receives news that her father has passed away, she sends a letter in response:“In the letter I asked my mother how she could have married a man who would die and leave her in debt even for his own burial. I pointed out the ways she had betrayed herself. I said I believed she had betrayed me also, and that I knew it to be true even if I couldn’t find a concrete example right then. I said that she had acted like a saint, but that since I was living in this real world I had really wanted just a mother. I reminded her that my whole upbringing had been devoted to preventing me from becoming a slut; I then gave a brief description of my personal life, offering each detail as evidence that my upbringing had been a failure and that, in fact, life as a slut was quite enjoyable, thank you very much. I would not come home now, I said. I would not come home ever. To all this the saint replied that she would always love me, she would always be my mother, my home would never be anywhere but with her. I burned this letter, along with all the others I had tied up in a neat little bundle that had been resting on my dresser.”
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Yes.
Jamaica Kincaid
So you can see how I would find a person who abandoned his family for his art so inspiring. But I’ve long ago gotten over that identification. Gauguin’s very out now because people attack him through a lens. Not that he abandoned his commitments, but that he took advantage of young women and gave them syphilis.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Disgusting, so disgusting.
Wait—you didn’t say: what are your cruelties?
Gauguin saw great dignity in cruelty, and believed artists must have a peripheral antagonistic presence toward themselves, their intimates, the civilization they inhabit. To be an anti-civilization was to be an artist was to be a brute. When he decided to be a serious painter in 1883, he announced: “Yes, I’m a great criminal all right. But what does it matter? Michelangelo also. And I’m not Michelangelo.”
There are thirty-seven works by Gauguin in the Harvard Art Museums collection, among which are his late self-portraits. In them he articulates himself again as a criminal through print technique. The first time I saw the portraits they struck me as carved with a pocket knife, almost as a bitter testimony, proof of misery. In Gauguin’s letters from Panama, Brittany, Tahiti, and the Marquesas—where he travelled to during the last decade of his life—a sense of the punitive duty an artist has to creation is stated: “You are without confidence in the future, but I have that confidence because I want to have it. Without that I should have long since thrown up the sponge. To hope is almost to live. I must live to do my duty to the end, and I can only do so by forcing my illusions, by creating hopes out of dreams. When day after day, I eat my dry bread with a glass of water, I make myself believe it is a beefsteak.”
Jamaica Kincaid
My own cruelties? Gee wizz! What are my cruelties? Oh god—who can judge their own cruelties. Don’t put this in, I don’t want to hear from horrible people. But I will give you an example . . .
For 11-12 minutes, we discussed emails between her and a prominent Jewish American friend, and his belief that the Holocaust is an eternal threat that absolves Israelis of any moral fault for atrocity. She says, ‘They [Israelis] have the army of an empire, the urge to conquer.’ Yet the government refuses to accept its own vileness. To see the army’s actions as anything other than a rightful defense. ‘They don’t have the wisdom to see the world as it is.’
Before us was a book on the illustrator Alfred Kubin. She skimmed through it as she relayed more about her friend, coming across three prints that made her tremble: Self-Observation (1902), of a loose head confronting its body; The Lady on the Horse (1901), of a lady on a live rocking horse, who goes back and forth while beneath her blades slice figures over and over; and Pagan Sacrifice (1900), of a man holding a lifeless woman beside a six-eyed demon. She says it was impossible for Kubin to conceal his depravity, ‘it’s there, there, there.’ She points.
The email and the prints reveal the same issue: she’s always seen precisely what people try to contest. Barbarism poorly camouflaged.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
So would you consider yourself a cruel mirror? Indicting the people around you?
Jamaica Kincaid
I was saying you can't see yourself. You never want to see yourself. I’m afraid I might actually kill [my friend], though I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail. Nor do I want to know that I’m a killer. Oh, my cruelties . . . My cruelties . . . I am a weak person, a disappointing person, but I can’t bring myself to accept that I am evil. I participate in evil every day—I did buy this shirt for eight dollars and fifty cents. I really enjoy wearing it to dinner parties and such, but the person who made this is probably in pain. What is the bad thing, though, that I do? The shirt?
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Was there something you had to do to become a writer?
Jamaica Kincaid
Yes! That's easy: I didn't send my paycheck to my parents.
We laughed loud and long. Kincaid’s cackle was first uproarious, then faint. She hid her face behind her hands, lowered her gaze like a child admitting they’d eaten a cookie saved for later. Half-delighted, half-afraid.
Jamaica Kincaid
It's a truth. Everything about it. I bought expensive clothes at Bergdorf Goodman and Bonwit Teller, two high-end stores on Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan, across the street from each other. Instead of sending my mother my paycheck, I purchased outfits costing hundreds of dollars. Now remember: this is 1968. I still have the clothes. There’s this long, beautiful kilt; I can’t find anybody to give it to who would really appreciate it. It would be you but you're not tall enough. My daughter is also too short. It's a shame, isn’t it such an elegant thing?
Kincaid shows me a photograph of her in the kilt, at a grand dinner party.
Jamaica Kincaid
My paycheck was ninety-five dollars a week for taking care of the four children—I showed them to you, right? Every purchase meant so much. Each was a whole world. A magnificent world.
Kincaid wears many accessories. On Thursday the 29th, her eyes were framed by glamorous, big-buggish glasses, and on her office ledge were a few hats. She confessed to being outward in nature: not out of a desire to be legible or intriguing but to seize her exterior, self-determine.
She writes a history of her appearance-authorship in “Putting Myself Together,” an essay beginning from her early independent days in New York: “I was very thin, because I had no money to eat properly, and because what little money I had I used to buy clothes. Being very thin, however, I looked good in clothes. I loved the way I looked all dressed up. I bought hats, I bought shoes, I bought stockings and garter belts to hold them up, I bought handbags, I bought suits, I bought blouses, I bought dresses, I bought skirts, and I bought jackets that did not match the skirts. I used to spend hours happily buying clothes to wear. Of course, I could not afford to buy my clothes in an actual store, a department store. Instead, they came from used-clothing stores, and they were clothes of a special kind, stylish clothes from a long-ago time—twenty or thirty or forty years earlier. They were clothes worn by people who were alive when I had not been; by people who were far more prosperous than I could imagine being. As a result, it took me a long time to get dressed, for I could not easily decide what combination of people, inconceivably older and more prosperous than I was, I wished to impersonate that day. It was sometimes hours after I started the process of getting dressed that I finally left my house and set off into the world.”
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
I relate, I relate. More than you realize.
For 9-10 minutes, I confessed some of my cruelties and we talked about them.
Jamaica Kincaid
No child comes into the world to correct their parents’ mistakes. My family had more children than they could care for. They took me out of school at age sixteen and sent me away to support their mistakes. I could see this early on and just said ‘No.’ Nobody’s obligated. We’re only obligated to be the best selves we can be . . . You cannot forgo a nice life to fix others.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Do you think your family sending you here severed any sense that you owed them something? I’ve always been disinterested in spite or grudges; they never stuck. I could flatter myself, say it’s some leaning toward forgiveness, but it’s more—waves hands in the air. I forget to be angry, it’s not intuitive, and then I’ll remember and be like—oh! I am outraged by what you’ve done! So belatedly, and then it goes, it goes quickly . . .
I’m drawn to Hannah Arendt because we’re born on the same day, 14 October, but also I read Eichmann in Jerusalem, and I thought—this, this is an intellectualism that I admire for its principles, she’s so principled in her judgement.
I resist blame, thinking of how mimicry occurs across generations, its multiplying effect, and also I think of all the state impositions that make cowards, force complicity. Blame is so resentable because it requires accepting that people are evil in an irredeemable way, which is easy about people in power, but so devastating intimately. I’m a coward in my intimate optimism. Maybe I’m influenced by the sermons I heard when I was young about forgiveness and transformation, in Isaiah, you know, ‘though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’ This sense that your interior can shift through contact. I wish I could weaken this cowardice, this false faith. But this is what binds families, nations. I might be a bit nationalist—in that I feel committed to Kenyans indiscriminately.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) is an unflinching anatomization of Adolf Eichmann, a senior official of the Nazi Party, his trial, and the branches of the party concerned with the “Final Solution” of the Jewish question. Arendt deems Eichmann an obedient eyes-closed agent of the party—his opinions were borrowed; his crimes were ordered; his talents were taken advantage of; his conscience was eroded at the Wannsee Conference. Though instead of exonerating him through collective guilt she indicts these abstractions and appeals to the ‘banality of evil’: to consider the agents hollow, interchangeable vessels for Nazism—not complicit but abiding—would be to deny German’s agency and individual contribution to the nation’s moral collapse.
Jamaica Kincaid
You read the King James Version, how marvelous! Have faith in abundance, and don’t ever lose your forgiveness. But don’t sacrifice yourself! It’s good for people to look wonderful and feel wonderful. When this is the case you accomplish more, you propel yourself into the world . . . I don’t know if I consider myself Antiguan . . . I certainly don’t have the allegiance you speak of . . .
It’s so wrong of parents to ask anything of their children. They should only say: ‘Good luck.’ Did Moses’ mother, as she placed him in the basket down the Nile, say, ‘Come back! Help us!’ ? I doubt so. Though he did eventually help people—those that left the Egyptian empire.
Kincaid once told me that the King James Version, of everything she read in Antigua, served as the anchor from which all her work emerged. As a child, she was allowed to read it without supervision, and this offered a great defense: the Book of Genesis alone demonstrated how to speak in a definitive tone—as the story flew from one creation to another, commandingly, without qualification, without pause—and it divided people and things into good and not, a distinction that gave her an affinity for sorting, not according to morals, but any quality of interest. The text gave her an Adamic sense of authority.
In girls ministry—a program my mother had me participate in from age 8 to 13—I found the King James Version at once blasphemous and bewitching. I couldn’t believe, I couldn’t believe, and that would’ve been alright if I wasn’t raised by my mother, a most reactive woman. I wasn’t a confident skeptic—I had no right to deny nor any alternatives to propose—but I was still too identifiably averse. I began to have an oppositional presence at girl’s ministry meetings: even if I kept quiet, other girls would know I was fuming, and unfortunately my friends, through affiliation, were exposed as non-believers. This made me feel awful. I didn’t enjoy being an objector. I remember, in desperation, praying to God that I would soon believe in God.
What brought on my objections was the hypocrisy of the elders at our church: how could this text, so divine, be delivered by these men that seemed so vulgar and evidently unholy. I never saw myself as a Christian but the realization that these men asserted a higher spirituality was inflaming. Hypocrisy enraged me more than anything else. There was nothing desirable about being an individual, identifiable. At school, I was always getting sent to the assistant principal’s office for causing trouble, skipping class— three, four times that happened in the seventh grade, and since around then I’ve seen such a privilege in irrelevance: once someone notices you, all actions stop being themselves and now are ascribed some significance. What I do oftentimes signifies nothing notable, has nothing hidden underneath. I didn’t want to go to class; I didn’t go. It’s ideologically incoherent that I’ve chosen to study literature, a most probing, suspect discipline, unsatisfied with the appearance of the everyday. Publishing personal writing is repulsive, too, as the ‘I’ removes me from the crowd, merging my interior with the name on my identification card. I guess I owe this way of being to meeting the King James Version in girls ministry. That’s what it did to me.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Now that you’ve articulated it I realize—what attracted me to your writing was the callousness. But also I’m opposed to that: I don't think it is very callous. I’ve read you and I’ve read about you, of course, and part of why I want to write something about you is I just don’t agree at all with much of what is said. You aren’t communicating anything that’s especially harsh or unreasonable. Your criticisms are generously thorough.
Kincaid is often considered a hostile, inhumane writer. Her characters are construed as people with venomous tongues and severe visions of the world. Search reviews of any of her books and you’ll discover characterizations of her as ‘angry’ and ‘unlovable’, her prose style as ‘compassion abandoned.’ This continues to puzzle me. Reading Kincaid, I always wish she went further, letting everything, mean or meaner, come alive on the page. I’m brought back to Ishmael Reed’s poem, “The Author Reflects on His 35th Birthday,” where he writes: “I ain’t been mean enough / Make me real real mean / Mean as old Marie rolling her eyes / Mean as the town Bessie sings about / Where all the birds sing bass.”
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
I’m wondering if you ever felt like this abandoning was over—that you accomplished severance, set the independence aspiration aside. When you renounced Antigua was that a way of bidding farewell to your younger self and everyone she knew?
Jamaica Kincaid
Woah. I did abandon. If I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have been able to become a writer.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Abandonment was unleashing?
Jamaica Kincaid
I want to be sure but I can’t be. First of all you should read a book called My Brother. It’s my book!
Kincaid’s My Brother is a memoir about her brother Devon Drew, who died of AIDS on 19 January 1996 at the age of 33. It’s a rare, difficult recounting of airy and rock-hard hatred—she moves through stories of her mother and brother’s love, suspecting that their affection has an antithetical expression.
I see My Brother as an attempt to perform an autopsy on her family. A posthumous hearing. There’s a line from My Brother that makes blatant its connection to abandoning: “I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are . . . why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.”
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
I did in one sitting last April, at the bottom of this staircase by the street between the Philosophy Department and the President’s House. Towards the beginning of the month. I was absolutely astonished by your outrightness, the contradictions, the offhand hurling of judgements, and your intellect. You are so various and sensitive. It was an exhilarating experience seriously—I walked back to my dorm in disbelief that you exist. You exist!
It is weird to say this because I know about Devon in a very secondhand way, but I am sorry. I’m so sorry. You wrote that you don’t love him and that was so admirably honest . . . I’ve never said something so polite, but I was so pleased by this sort of eulogy. It was right, you know?
I am a bit obsessed with landmarks, buoys: identifying the moments that mark a point of transition. Not the taught ones—childhood, adolescence, adulthood; meet, date, marriage—they feel too vague, amorphous, the way announcing that you’re traveling to Africa, when you’re destined for Dar es Salaam, offers no address, narrows the universe down to a galaxy. At present I’m finding language for the hurling moment: that period of childhood when suddenly all the angels have emigrated from Earth and you’re alone, somehow larger, with dawning certainty that what lies before you is a seemingly innavigable darkness—when you are hurled out of ignorance. In My Brother Kincaid relays a hurling moment, a landmark-image: “in this picture of my brother’s hardened stool, a memory, a moment of my own life is frozen; for his diaper sagged with a weight that was not gold but its opposite, a weight whose value would not bring us good fortune, a weight that only emphasized our family’s despair: our fortunes, our prospects were not more than the contents of my own brother’s diaper, and the contents were only shit. When my mother saw this unchanged diaper, it was the realization of this that released in her a fury toward me, a fury so fierce that I believed (and this was then, but even now many years later I am not convinced otherwise) that she wanted me dead.” When I read this all I could think was Yes, Yes. I remember saying, wide-eyed, She knows.
My hurling moment was not when my brother was diagnosed, that day—if such a day exists, we haven’t talked about these things—belongs to my mother. It must have been when I knew we would have to keep feeding and dressing him, tying his shoelaces; when naturally I held his hand so he wouldn’t eat grass or walk in the street giddy as cars sped toward him. Who was this boy, and what would we do with him? I couldn’t believe, I couldn’t believe. One day my mother loved me so, then she never was at ease again. For a time I was mourning that loss, the loss of lightness and love and order. I eventually grew disinterested in alternatives. Kincaid and I have talked about our brothers extensively: the end of paradise, the experience of being the eldest, the witness of unraveling. What she’s written about these things, and that’s nearly half her oeuvre, resonates, except there was little delight in taking my freedom and leaving my family.
Jamaica Kincaid
No. It’s not weird! Thank you. This is wonderful. I would say that it would’ve been cruel to not help my family after I began to have a life of my own, a husband and children and house and so on. At the time I regularly sent money to my mother, who told people I didn’t. When tourists got off the boat with their little copies of Annie John they’d find out where she lived, go and ask her to sign them, and she’d charge them . . .
So I saved myself from that. I did what they tell you to do when you’re in an airplane: ‘Put on your mask first, then help the person beside you.’ I put on my mask first and I got enough strength and I used it to help my brother live three more years than he would have if he hadn’t abandoned himself. But the idiot had no reason to live anyway . . .
She stares at me for a while, about a minute. I sense she’s looking through me, at a memory. Though I have no idea if this is accurate. There could have been a fly.
You know: you must live your life. You're a young brilliant woman. Pursue life. We are all entitled to an inner life of joy. And it's only if you have one, however surrounded by sorrow it might be, that you can then support people. But if you don’t pursue yourself, the likelihood of aging into an alcoholic is great.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Thank you. That matters so much. Life is something I’ve been insistent about pursuing, perhaps too adamantly. . . When sorrow surrounds, I—I realize I am too porous, my nervous system catches despair as though it’s airborne, a contagion. I’m not an individual. I doubt I could ever be servile or addicted to substances though I have spent most of my life being servile. That is what being a child was. I definitely flee from the adjective though.
Jamaica Kincaid
You couldn’t be servile? I couldn’t either! I would’ve been dead ten seconds in . . . though I was indeed a servant . . .
The birth of the daughter is the death of the mother: they share a body: as the daughter matures, the mother withers: they are an individual conscious. It is a merciless cycle—it aches for extinction, though Kincaid adheres to its sequence in most of her writings, especially Autobiography of My Mother and Lucy. She narrates the negating instant, when the cease being daughter and mother to become daughter-mother: “My past was my mother; I could hear her voice, and she spoke to me not in English or the French patois that she sometimes spoke, or in any language that needed help from the tongue; she spoke to me in a language anyone female could understand. And I was undeniably that – female. Oh, it was a laugh, for 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. And I could see now why, to the few feeble attempts I made to draw a line between us, her reply always was: ‘You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me.’ How else was I to take such a statement but as a sentence for life in a prison whose bars were stronger than any iron imaginable?”
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What was I going to say? Why did I lose it? I guess: are you glad? I seriously am thankful for everything that happens, in a prayerful way, too. This might be something I say that’s untrue. Or something I believe in a more aspirational way. But I seriously am thankful. It’s a delusional almost deferential view towards being, but I don’t know. Are you glad for who your mother is, your brother, your beginnings?
Jamaica Kincaid
My mother taught me to read. However, she never told me about the alphabet. She showed me how through a biography of Louis Pasteur, the man who invented pasteurized milk. In Antigua, ours was unpasteurized—we would go get cow’s milk from the farmer and it had to be heated because tuberculosis was carried in secretions. My duty was to watch the milk because when it boiled up the cream would spill into the fire.
When my mother taught me to read from this biography of Pasteur, the words just leaped up, and I became one with her as I was sitting in her lap, loving her so. I see my daughter and granddaughter replicate this and it’s so sweet—my mother and I were just like that. I was so ashamed of my love for my mother and my need for her. My granddaughter is too, when her mother isn’t there, she says with her head downturned, ‘Mummy, Mummy.’
As my mother taught me to read, though, it was as if she was giving me a part of herself —her intelligence. She’d correct me everytime the ‘A’ had to be elongated, one of the major mistakes I would make. And by the time I was three and a half I could read anything. It’s because of her. I’m very glad. I write a lot about my mother, condemning her of course. But so much of my life is made by her presence. And I knew she would never go to England and leave me . . . You know that drama about the Windrush Generation. I knew that would never happen to me, she wouldn’t.
In 1948 the British Nationality Act gave people from colonies the right to live and work in Britain. The government sought workers to fill post-war labor shortages. This led to a mass migration of Carribeans, the first of whom arrived on the HMT Empire Windrush at the Port of Tilbury on 21 June 1948, causing the creation of a group known as ‘The Windrush Generation.’
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
That’s amazing that you have these memories. I was always drinking boiled milk throughout adolescence. I can’t remember why—I’ll have to ask who started this. But shame; we should speak about shame.
Jamaica Kincaid
No, no. Not shame but disgust with necessity. You like hot milk?
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
A lot. I microwave milk at least once a week at school . . . So when you went to New York, did you feel a similar shame, or repulsion to necessity, toward your family, for your mother?
Jamaica Kincaid
No! I was angry.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
The anger annihilated the need?
Jamaica Kincaid
It didn't annihilate it, no, I was simply so flabbergasted that the person who taught me to read could also send me away many years later. I was almost sixteen, seventeen and couldn’t see how the two people could co-exist. A betrayal from the person who loved me, carried me in their arms. Have you read “Biography of a Dress”?
“Biography of a Dress” is a short story by Kincaid initially published in Grand Street. It’s about a two-year-old in a yellow poplin dress, employing many, many parentheticals to express what she knew then (as a child) and what she knows now (from above, looking down upon her adolescent self).
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
It’s great, you’ve given it to me!
Jamaica Kincaid
Did it come with a photograph?
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Yes, a little yellow dress.
Jamaica Kincaid
No, no, no. That's not the color. The photograph is of me at two years of age. I'm standing on a table in the photographer's studio because the background is too tall for a two year old. But when I turned seven, I took a picture before the same background, this time standing on the floor because I was tall enough . . . Actually at seven I think I was fully formed. I think I am still seven years old. Did I say this already?
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Yeah—you should say it as many times as it occurs to you!
Jamaica Kincaid
Since my mother taught me how to read, I went to school when I was three and a half, but we were supposed to be five. She told them I was five: she lied. If you want to analyze it, you can see how closely my attraction to fiction or lying or dissembling is related to my mother and reading and writing.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
No, no, no—that’s not mine to spend time theorizing about.
A writer’s oeuvre begins, in my mind, at the time of their first lie; detecting a lie is an igniting instant. I doubt this noticing determines anyone’s attraction to the role of the ‘writer’—rather, it might divide the eye and the mouth: distinguishing what you see from what you decide to say.
Jamaica Kincaid
At my school, the first book they introduced us to was this children's book about a farmer; I couldn't believe how stupid it was, though I learned something from it. It was the first instance I can recall putting together something. The book was about a farmer named Mr. Joe. He didn’t have a wife, but he had a dog named Mr. Dan, a cat named Ms. Tibbs, and a cow, though the cow didn’t have a name as far as I can remember. He had a chicken hen called Mother Hen. She had 12 chicks. 11 of them were little golden chicks. 1 was bigger. His name was Percy and he was all black feathered. He was always getting in trouble and was the example of what not to do. They said, ‘Don't do whatever he is doing.’
I was three and a half and I don’t know what was going through my mind. I know that he had black feathers and that he was always trying to do something that he shouldn’t do. Four years later, when I was seven, I again was in a class with people who are older than me because I was considered a very bright kid. But the bigger kids were horrible to me: I was smarter and kind of a teacher's pet. So I figured out how to make them like me, which was to make them laugh. I discovered I could do mimicry.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
I love imitations! I’m always doing imitations. What are your favorites?
Jamaica Kincaid
They’re wonderful! I don't have favorites. I just do it. For instance, if we see a bobcat crossing the lawn, I can pretend to be it and my children love it. You can ask them. I pretend to be a rabbit eating my daffodils or no, my tulips. So, I did imitations in class. One day I did it and the punishment was to copy books one and two of an illustrated edition of Paradise Lost by John Milton. As I did that I came across a copy of Lucifer and the fallen angels. In the illustration he was standing on a charred globe with one foot on the globe, very artistic; he was just beautiful. His hair was snakes. And I connected him to Percy the Chick.
Oh! I left something out. The sentence. In Percy the Chick, he was always trying to fly up on the highest bar of the fence. Mother Hen would say, ‘Don't do that.’ And one day he succeeded and fell and broke either his wing or his leg! The sentence written was ‘Percy the Chick had a fall.’ For the next few years that sentence stuck in my mind. I'm seven reading Milton, Lucifer falls and he's portrayed as covered in black, and I remember Percy the Chick had a fall. That was my analysis.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What did that do for you? Why remember?
Jamaica Kincaid
Oh, nothing that I could express. But it clearly did something––here I am telling it to you. I have never forgotten it. I’m very interested in the fact that I come from a place people often call paradise, starting with Christopher Columbus who describes Antigua as ‘a paradise.’ Left unsaid in his journal is the follow-up, his intentions: ‘and I shall soon destroy it.’
I would probably say those two books have influenced my moral compass—part of it, at least: the destruction of paradise, ignoring authority. I don’t think I’m rebellious but I’m very suspicious of authority. At ten years old I refused to sing the “Rule Britannia” or recite “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth because I would never see a daffodil. Why was I commemorating the memory of something I’d never see?
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What was your first skepticism?
Jamaica Kincaid
That was. My mother was also very political and part of the Labour Party, which was a party started for people who were descendants of slaves. She was anti-colonial although she wouldn’t have put it so; she was always saying, “You must bite the hand that feeds you” and calling the English uncivilized. The party she was in was led by the first prime minister of Antigua who eventually became one of the most corrupt people in the Caribbean. That’s the way our story ends.
The Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party was founded in 1946 during the first national elections as a liberation movement to advocate for cane cutters living on Crown Land. It has been led by the Bird family since then.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Did you ever want to avenge this? Confront the corrupt dynasties, challenge power. I’m thinking of Annie Ernaux who wrote in her diary, now nearly what sixty–seventy years ago, a pledge: “I write to avenge my people,” echoing Arthur Rimbaud’s cry in A Season in Hell: “I am of an inferior race for all eternity.” She saw such responsibility in being the last in a lineage of working class women, but that identity was also totalizing, rigid—and it brought upon a sort of an unfulfillable responsibility.
Jamaica Kincaid
I do! I do!
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What has your vengeance been?
Jamaica Kincaid
Just to be able to sit and write. I didn’t have to throw a bomb, though I perfectly understand young people who do. At this age I couldn’t. I don’t know what I would do if I were in Gaza or the West Bank. I’d be dead, you know? You know “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” was indeed a wonderful poem. Once I could separate the daffodil and Wordsworth from imperialism I planted a thousand daffodils. I showed you?
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Yes! Yes! I’ve seen the image.
Jamaica Kincaid
I spend a lot of time in both my writing and the garden in acts of redemption, removing things from the evil in which they were placed, entrapped. I told you about the sunflowers? I would like to write a letter to the Hopi Tribe in Arizona and New Mexico to tell them that their God, the sunflower, gives inspiration to Ukranians. You walk around the Southwest in the summer, along the side of the road—sunflower, sunflower, sunflower. The original one. Now they’ve bred them, they do all kinds of things to make them more yellow. The sunflower in Van Gogh is already a hybridization.
Sunflowers are native to the central and southern region of North America. Spanish colonizers carried the flower back to Europe in the early 16th century. It began to grow across Ukraine’s central and eastern steppes in the 18th century due to Peter the Great’s modernization program, and gradually sunflower oil became a significant export for Eastern Europe. Sunflowers' ubiquity have made them the unofficial national symbol of Ukraine, and they’ve come to signify peace, too, as they were mass planted after the Chernobyl disaster.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Does impurity bother you?
Jamaica Kincaid
No! Horticulture is the tree of knowledge. What bothers me is a black rose. A lot of hybrid flowers don’t produce as much pollen so they’re harmful to bees . . .
Kincaid shudders convulsively then turns toward the window, peering at the parking lot and courtyard. Greatness seems to invite an inseperable sense of catastrophe sharper than the terror that accompanies old age. It gives Kincaid a mystic, vanishing quality, as though she’s a temporary visitor from underground: whenever she disappears around the back corner of the department I get the impression that she has really disappeared and will be nowhere in sight were I to hurry after her.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What a betrayal to the earth.
Jamaica Kincaid
Absolutely! Once I saw that I stopped growing hybrids. I only grow native flowers, species. Isn’t this interesting? When the hybrid flowers don’t produce as much pollen, the bees see the flower and they’re working away at nothing!
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
I pity the bees. Imagine everywhere there were replicas of food. That would be so upsetting!
Jamaica Kincaid
I don’t know if the bees learn? One summer there was this tree the bees had found and they were working hard, going, ‘Bzzzzzzzz.’ It was so loud, it was incredible. Flowers bloom and you go outside and hear an orchestra.
Kincaid lent me Flowers of the Moon: Afroalpine Vegetation of the Rwenzori Mountains (2007) by the Belgian photographer Sebastian Schutsyer another time we were together. Schutsyer starts with Sir Henry Mortion Stanley’s 1876 report of the mountain range, considered the “discovery of a mountain on the border of Uganda and the Congo, feeding the waters of the Nile,” spotted previously by Greek astronomer Ptolemy, who named them Mountains of the Moon. This is followed by an examination of the Rwenzori’s giant heathers, senecios, and lobelias—unusually large and extravagant—then an analysis of how the aesthetic is undervalued in some regions of the world, whose primitivism doesn’t allow them to process beauty, since they know nothing else. Beauty, according to Schutsyer, remains inconceivable without its absence.
These statements are paired with his documentary photography, all in black-and-white, as well as drawings and maps of the region, which he frames as contributions to a small archive. We spoke about how bigoted his ethnography reads and how Mt. Kilimanjaro was bestowed upon the Kaiser, the emperor of Germany, by Queen Victoria as a birthday present. What a people—who sees a mountain and believes it is possessable? Kincaid’s book Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005) is such a skilled botanical ethnography. She stressed the importance of knowing the flora and fauna of your native country, and I was so taken by this that I borrowed three ecology textbooks on Maasailand and Murima from the library, though I’m now forgetting their titles. Unfortunately, they were not written by Kenyans.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
I'm enrolled in this course, ‘Archival Fictions’ with Professor Valeria Luiselli. She introduced us to Leo Heiblum, who started this project titled Encyclopedia Sónica. I don't know if you heard of it. He's recorded thousands of sounds of things. Mosquitos, spider monkeys, cícadas in chiapas, trains passing, temple bells. With the date, coordinates, time. He considers himself a composer of the Earth.
Jamaica Kincaid
What a wonderful idea!
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
He'll overlap them sometimes so at once you could be hearing, for instance, an elephant walking in Kerala and a factory in Mexico and thunder in Argentina. It’s miraculous. When he came to talk about it all I could think was ‘I’m living such a quarter life, all my sensations are so inactive.’ I’m thrilled because now I’m recording things in a way that makes me feel very intimately involved with my surroundings. Almost as a way of spying on nature. The Charles River has a perceptible noise, but you have to get close, make sure there’s no people interfering to hear the river alone. And I don’t know—it’s all made me feel reborn. That feeling overhangs everything, though, because of Christianity’s imprint: they’re always seeking something higher, hoping, desperately, for some salvation. I read too messianically. To ward off, outrun, cynicism. Always there’s this strong sense that rapture is imminent—adventure counters this, anywhere you might stumble upon what saves you.
There is a line in “At Last,” a story from At the Bottom of the River, that encloses the child’s genre of silence: “We prayed. But what did we pray for? We prayed to be saved . . . Were we saved? I don’t know.” When I was six, seven, my cousins and I spoke of God with this flat assurance, our conversations viewed divine intervention as ordinary, with equal weight to the weather report.
Jamaica Kincaid
At first it makes you kind of embarrassed that you’ve given into these feelings, forgoed little joys of Earth. It’s as if you discovered you have pubic hairs. It’s insane! Then you start imagining heaven. There's nothing more wonderful than sitting outside with a martini on the terrace at about 5: 30 and just hearing the woodpecker feeding on my house. ‘Peck, peck, peck.’ I have a wooden house. Follow me on Instagram to see my house. My handle is @virtuouspomona.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Would you follow me back?
Jamaica Kincaid
Oh, of course! I don’t follow people who say their account is private though. If you’re going to be on Instagram everyone must see you. Anyway, my house was built with wood where, if it was on the Cape near the sea, it would turn gray, but it’s in Vermont so it remains brown and woodpeckers just love it. Let me show you the photograph! Don’t help me find it, I have to learn . . . Let me show you the Rio Grande. It used to be this big river—see the canyons etched out . . . Look: this is the picture of me at seven years old. I’m standing in front of the backdrop . . .
For 7-8 minutes, we go through different images on her page, primarily those taken in her Vermont garden. The conversation turned into a kind of show-and-tell: she beams with pride about a flower she grew, I respond ‘Woah. What is that?’
Jamaica Kincaid
What’s the phrase, ‘Time will darken it.’ That’s the title of a book by William Maxwell. Isn’t that good? Write it down. He's a great writer by the way. Unfortunately he's white. I needed to tell you that because I’m always introducing you to writers and forgetting to mention that they’re white. There’s a young woman who was here before who was given a piece by Gayl Jones. Do you know of Jones?
William Keepers Maxwell Jr. served as the fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. I’ve forgotten to ask but I imagine young Kincaid knew him, as she began publishing for Talk of the Town in 1974 and then rose to staff writer in 1976. Another day Kincaid read aloud a paragraph from Time Will Darken It (1998): “There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made, is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, it proves to be too large ever to move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher.”
This voyaging through ancestral and domestic history, in search of the truth, seems to define Kincaid’s work. Her voice is nomadic, with an investigative nostalgia which allows her to pull the buried-boulder up higher than most. Seamus Heaney, descending from Northern Irish farmers and cattle dealers, wrote in the poem “Digging”: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun / Under my window, a clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground / My father, digging” and “Through living roots awaken in my head / But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”
These diggings toward lineage are sibling-sentiments—Maxwell and Heaney are both interested in the nature of their inheritance, their difference, every ‘I’ statement is an attempt to distinguish themselves from their ancestors, and that’s most relatable: to find who you are you must know the foundation on which you rest, who your parents were. I would like to write an oral history book about how people embark on genealogical investigations.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Yeah I read this book, Brown Girl, Brownstones, by Paule Marshall, and it led me to research Jones. Hilton Als gave me that book. You know Hilton Als, yes?
Jamaica Kincaid
Yes! You know Hilton Als? We’re friends, have I told you?
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Yes! I interviewed him for The Advocate in the fall and he asked about you, Have you met Jamaica yet? Have you been to Vermont? How is she?
Jamaica Kincaid
Wonderful! Wonderful! We’ve been friends since he was seventeen and I was twenty-seven. It’s been amazing to see him bloom into this great person. He was great then, too.
In 1979, when Hilton Als was seventeen years old, he read Kincaid’s “Wingless,” and her description of the Caribbean Sea and its surroundings had a seismic influence:“The sea, the shimmering pink-colored sand, the swimmers with hats, two people walking arm in arm, talking in each other’s faces, dots of water landing on noses, the sea spray on ankles, on overdeveloped calves, the blue, the green, the black, so deep, so smooth, a great and swift undercurrent, glassy, the white wavelets.” After reading it himself he read it aloud to his mother, and she responded, “Exactly.” Als wrote a letter to Kincaid later that month, and from that their friendship sprouted.
Als’ experience with Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), about a Brooklynnite also of Bajan descent, follows: he read it eleven times when he was eleven years old; then, after seeing the author’s biography on the book flap, looked up her name in the Manhattan telephone directory, called and told her, hurriedly, how much his mother loved her novel and how close he lived to where she’d grown up.
This ecstatic appreciation Als had as a young person pours into his criticism, he’s an overrunning river, and he writes as though shouting in the market, “You have to look at this! You have to read this! It has come to save us!”
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
He’s so generous, and also seems very unrestrained. I admire that so much.
Jamaica Kincaid
See that’s what a university takes out of you. One of my students asked me if I’d ever taught high school and I wondered whether it was meant to insult. I tell the class a lot of things they should have known in high school. Look at this image of me at the college I went to in 1970.
I may have a copy of this photograph stored away at school. Its specifics have deserted me, though she was surely wearing a hat. That’s all I remember: the hat was phenomenally huge, and her expression made me laugh.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What college? The New School?
Jamaica Kincaid
No, Franconia College. I like to tell people I didn’t go to college but it turns out there’s evidence. I was given this copy from a professor who told me I was very difficult. I complained a lot. That’s something I’m ashamed of. I was very immature which is why I’m so tolerant and forgiving of all you young people. You have to do stupid things. You are not to be punished for developing.
After emigrating to America to work as an au pair for three years, Kincaid attended Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship. She dropped out after one year.
I am drawn to the “almost-ness” of her having not attended college. The desire to erase that slight detour, to correct her biography, makes me smile—her lie has the air of truth, one year doesn’t amount to a degree, and the tell of an author, what she aspires toward is autodidactism, self-ownership. She’s saying, This is who I believe myself to be. It does not align with the actual. Accept my version of the events.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Did you feel unrestrained as a young person?
Jamaica Kincaid
No, it's that period that started the hell you guys are in. It was the period of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. Harvard was shut down. My agent Andrew Wylie was among the students who shut it down.
During the Vietnam War (1955-1975) Harvard’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society ran anti-war demonstrations: preventing the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara from leaving campus in November 1966, protesting the recruitment visit by Dow Chemicals—the primary supplier of napalm to the military—in October 1967, disrupting Reserve Officer Training Corps meetings, occupying University Hall in April 1969, and commissioning the bombing of Harvard Semitic Museum in October 1970.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
That's impressive. I want that to happen now for Palestine, though people on campus might be too self-preservational for that kind of large defiance. This obedient disposition is so confusing to me. I’ve always wished I could care more about authority, it’s not intuitive—I’m unable to wholly accept anyone.
Many of my friends are people who are unphased by detention, who have a dropout attitude, inadvertently. One of my closest friends long ago did. Our teachers couldn’t remain angry with us because the lies we told to maneuver out of punishment were too laughable. I miss meeting people who can pull someone’s leg. My father can with real commitment.
Were you involved in any way during the civil rights movement?
Jamaica Kincaid
No . . . Why would you want to go backwards and care about authority?
Shared cackle. When something is ridiculously comic both of us place our palms over our eyes, slapping our faces.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Were you disinterested, apolitical? It’s difficult to imagine an apolitical Jamaica Kincaid.
Jamaica Kincaid
No, no, I was new to America! I did go to the March on Washington and the Vietnam protests. I was studying photography and wasn’t a full-time student then but still a nanny. When I had weekends off, I’d go down to visit my boyfriend, who I met through the family I worked with. We vacationed in Indiana, on Lake Michigan, and I fell in love with him there. He was rich, and his family didn’t seem outraged that I was going out with their white son and was the servant. Well—maybe they did? There are things I don’t notice. I often forget about racism. I think people are rude, or badly brought up. Then later, many years later, I’ll be stunned to realize it was racism.
Another day Kincaid mentioned noticing several years later that not a single attendee of her wedding was Black. She was struck while examining the photograph book. At first I thought this was madness—that she had withdrawn into drafting stories and briefly gone blind—then I returned to “Blackness” in At the Bottom of the River:“How soft is the blackness as it falls. It falls in silence and yet it is deafening, for no other sound except the blackness falling can be heard. The blackness falls like soot from a lamp with an untrimmed wick. The blackness is visible and yet it is invisible, for I see that I cannot see it. 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 made glad in it. The blackness cannot be separated from me but often I can stand outside it. The blackness is not the air, though I breathe it. The blackness is not the earth, though I walk on it. The blackness is not water or food, though I drink and eat it. The blackness is not my blood, though it flows through my veins. The blackness enters my many-tiered spaces and soon the significant word and event recede and eventually vanish: in this way I am annihilated and my form becomes formless and I am absorbed into a vastness of free-flowing matter. In the blackness, then, I have been erased. I can no longer say my own name. I can no longer point to myself and say “I.” In the blackness my voice is silent. 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.”
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Why the desire to photograph?
We moved quickly from the comment on the weekends and the boyfriend because they’re all fictionalized in Lucy and therefore familiar. It’s frightful that I anticipated some of her anecdotes, though perhaps what I am most disturbed by is the premise of published autobiographical writing.
Jamaica Kincaid
I suppose I thought it was something I could do with my limited education. I came to America, went to school at night, got a GED. The mother of the family I lived with—who actually attended Radcliffe—was extremely kind to me and had the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. I started to want to be a photographer. So I studied photography.
Henri Cartier-Bressson is a French photographer with well-worn eyes. He lived inside history. Bore witness to landmarks of the twentieth century: the last stage of the Chinese Civil War, the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi, the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the construction of the Ming Tombs Reservoir, the early days of postwar Soviet Union, the Guerra Civil Española, the liberation of France, the decolonization of Indonesia and Côte d'Ivoire. His travels go on, challenging the constraints of time.
In 1952, he wrote The Decisive Moment (Images à la Sauvette (“Images on the Run”)), a theory of what great photographers work toward: “If a photograph is to communicate its subject in all its intensity, the relationship of form must be rigorously established. Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things. What the eye does is to find and focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality. In a photograph, composition is the result of a simultaneous coalition, the organic coordination of elements seen by the eye. One does not add composition as though it were an afterthought superimposed on the basic subject material, since it is impossible to separate content from form. Composition must have its own inevitability about it. But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.”
You see this photographic genius in Kincaid’s writing, the way she reveals the essence of a phenomenon through a string of measured anecdotes, whittles down the decisive hours. Her talent for selection impress upon her life this sort of inevitability. Elaine Potter Richardson was bound to become Jamaica Kincaid.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Do you feel like it is a democratic medium?
Jamaica Kincaid
My God no. Maybe it is now but sadly, then, no, not at all. And I didn't have ideas of that kind. It was something I loved to do. Actually, the photographs I took were photographs of stories I had in mind. In fact, how I transitioned to writing is because I was writing out my photographs.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Explain, explain. What do you mean by stories in the image?
Jamaica Kincaid
I would have an image in my mind of a field and two girls in it and I would write it out, ‘It should have this, it should have that.’ And then even though it was not posed, I would somehow find the image I had written down and take a photograph of it.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Almost like photography was locating in the world what was already in your mind?
Jamaica Kincaid
Yes! That’s very good. You must go to Harvard.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Don’t do that to me, don’t do that to me.
Jamaica Kincaid
I must! When I was at Franconia College, I saw a film called La Jetée by Christopher Marker. It’s all stills and then somewhere in the middle kind of science fiction; it moves imperceptibly then returns. It wasn’t long after I saw that that I left college, put my things in a car and drove to New York to sleep on people’s couches. Another thing that made me change my mind was reading the short stories of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The stories are weird, and I thought that’s it: that’s what I want to write. I didn’t write weird or unusual stories until I wrote “Girl” in 1978. A decade before, in 1968, I was working for this family who changed my mind, too. The mother gave me Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, all kinds of writing. She made me into a feminist.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Do you believe you were feminist before but didn't have the language for it—almost as though the books realized beliefs that were buried, intuitive, gave them a shape. Or do you think that actually shifted your worldview? You don’t seem like someone who needs theory to steer them.
Jamaica Kincaid
That’s true, I didn’t—I was always a feminist. All women are feminist. Those who aren’t are like Clarence Thomas. Every woman's one but she might not like it.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
A reluctant feminist?
Jamaica Kincaid
Yes! Some never want to be.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
So you began to identify as a feminist when she gave you these books.
Jamaica Kincaid
I read them and I thought, ‘Exactly. Of course.’ It was all true. When my brothers were born, my parents would say, ‘this one is going to be the prime minister, this one is going to be a pastor or minister in the church.’ And I never heard them say that about me and I was an exceptional student. I noticed going unnoticed. It registered. That's why I say every woman is a feminist, every woman notices that they're not as valuable in their families. Some of them don't care because it's hard work to be a feminist.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
‘I noticed going unnoticed.’ Oh it’s simple, really so simple. You’ve nailed it: it’s a loud, wounding silence. Societal, impersonal, but also self-inflicted. What a relief it is that it is so impersonal—but that might be the issue, we’re so accustomed that it’s almost an anticipated invisibility. You don’t need Beauvoir to know you’re a ghost . . . I suspect it can be easy to accept womanhood for some women . . .
Jamaica Kincaid
Especially if they benefit you like white women . . . If you're born into a well off family and have privileges, why risk that by becoming a feminist?
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Womanhood felt enforced around twelve, thirteen, it was cemented—and could I call what I did combative? Maybe my demeanor was. The risk of maturing into the traditional woman was so menacing. I was a child who always thought, I am doomed, we are doomed. From the very beginning this had a gendered bend. I wasn’t brooding, I was always playing outside, so daring—my friends and I taught ourselves back handspring, back tuck, aerial, all kinds of flips. We would walk on the side of the road for hours, too, looking to bridge jump, hitchhike to different parts of the beach. I don’t know why I harbored this stubborn, secret cynicism, perhaps being enclosed by a sort of defeatism, at a standstill, and never really having any aspirations imposed on me. It made me think I was a lost cause, I haven’t let go of that possibility. This sounds ridiculous to most people at Harvard—a lost cause at Harvard University! How ridiculous! The self-belief you sustained as a young person is really extraordinary.
I worry that identifying omissions disrupts the ambiguity of the article. To write, ‘here is a hidden place’ asserts that everywhere else was continuous, exposed, and that’s wrong—our dialogue is admittedly partial, edited with a straightening hand. Here, however, the break feels important as it was a shift: I cut the discussion that emerged from some ramblings I now disagree with, beginning: My energy against womanhood is mostly extinguished . . . Only in Kincaid’s office could I say something so wildly untrue; this tempering is a testament to what a feminine eden she’s established there, in her 8 by 8.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What else forwarded your political commitments? What other theorists were you reading at the time?
Jamaica Kincaid
You are no lost cause. I know plenty of lost causes. At the time I read Frantz Fanon and John Locke. One of the first courses I took was in enlightenment philosophy.
She looks to her office library for the book and, after rummaging around, moving things to the floor or to higher shelves, finds the course textbook: A History of Political Theory (1937). She points to the front page and says, That's where the family I worked for lived: 1261 Madison Avenue. That was my New York life before I changed my name from Elaine Potter Richardson. This textbook was for my class at The New School. I can't believe I still have it from 1968. School was what I did when I was finished taking care of the girls. My day ended at 4:30 P.M. The mother came home and took over and I would quickly get into my clothes, rush to the subway, and go to class.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
You took the four or the six?
Jamaica Kincaid
Yes! Look at you. You know New York well.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What did Fanon and Locke do for you?
Jamaica Kincaid
I was probing the world I came into: the imperialism of the British. I wondered how it got set up. I wouldn’t have been able to put it quite so but instinctively I wanted to know how these things went. How did it start? I knew a lot about slavery; we discussed these things much more openly in the West Indies. Of course this was because the white masters were busy in England. So they weren’t there to see us calling them bastards.
One time, my mother and her father were having a quarrel over letters. And there was a painting of Christopher Columbus being returned to Spain after his fourth voyage because he argued with the other imperialist assholes and they imprisoned him and sent him back to Spain in chains. I wrote about ‘Columbus in Chains’ in Annie John. Everyone in Antigua knew a lot about conquest but it was told to us in a fairy tale way. When we learned about Lord Nelson and his ability to control the English-speaking islands, his talent—they were actually commending him for controlling slavery. You know Josephine was born in Martinique.
In Chapter 5 of Annie John Annie skips ahead in her history textbook and encounters a picture of Columbus seated in the bottom of a ship, wearing his traditional three-quarter trousers and maroon-velvet shirt with enormous sleeves. His hat had a gold feather in it, his black shoes had huge gold buckles, his hands and feet were buckled up in chains. He was being punished for his quarrel with Bobadilla, the representative of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. She encounters the picture again, at the dinner table with her mother and father. The family received a reprint of it in a letter from her aunt, and her mother glanced at it then laughed as she said, “So the great man can no longer just get up and go. How I would love to see his face now!” Annie wrote below the picture, with her new fountain pen, in Old English lettering—a script she had newly mastered—“The Great Man Can No Longer Just Get Up and Go.”
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
Who is Josephine?
Jamaica Kincaid
Napoleon's wife: Josephine Bonaparte? You must know that. You see, that’s why I have to ask my student why he thinks I should teach high school. I think you all are not given the right things to read. You shouldn’t be reading Toni Morrison in school or me. You should be reading Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, the botanist William Bartram. I read a lot of things in school you all will only come across when you arrive at college. I knew what happened but didn’t know why.
I’m always amazed by what people read in high school. That they had the willingness to read at all astounds. Before university I don’t recall ever being described as bookish, I didn’t know silence or solitary time. Every assigned novel—The Odyssey, The Sun Also Rises, Huckleberry Finn—seemed insurmountable, and I rarely got further than the first thirty pages before quitting.The struggle I faced when reading was such a source of shame and confusion, my parameters were far narrower than I’d like, and each text told me I wasn’t capable of the distance I was looking to travel in life. Recently I revisited some essays from the tenth grade, all less than a thousand words, we never exceeded that range—our teachers didn’t want to hear so much from us—and my writings on Othello relied on internet summaries so unsubtly I was cracking up. To think I once considered myself a strong cheat. When I was admitted to Harvard, we’d been reading Frankenstein and The Awakening, inching away at 15-30 pages assigned per night. I didn’t read either and remember thinking, urgently, I want to read books.
Many people find this unbelievable since I am now a student of literature. Still I approach books with such fear—treading lightly, consulting secondary sources. I’m tip toeing toward the classics. A document such as this, littered with literary references, stirs a feeling of estrangement—when I return to my computer to work on it, sometimes I wonder, with a seriousness, Is this me who wrote this? What has happened? Simultaneously I’m filled with such exhilaration and surprise and an almost maternal sensation, as though I’m an admiring, devoted spectator to someone else’s transfiguration. These things once overwhelmed, and I wished to redo adolescence, seek a disciplined, canonical education, where I sat indoors at age thirteen with Austen, Dickens, Auden. I’ve long let go of the thought that my lateness disadvantages. This is just how my story goes. Reading is a practice that accompanies my entrance into adulthood. I am lucky to have fallen for literature at all.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
When you went to college you were investigating the why.
Jamaica Kincaid
Yes, the Enlightenment I learned about in Antigua was presented as a glorious opening of Europe, affirming the superiority of Europeans.
Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian
What did you find it actually was?
It’s past 2 o’clock. The student from earlier arrives for their office hours. She pulls out her magical scheduling tool and puts me down for Tuesday, 3 o’clock, the following week. She says, ‘I ought to prepare so I have more answers for you then . .’
One newly discovered activity is reading during sundown, in deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the text and am in darkness, sitting as what I’ve read quietly unties me from who I was hours earlier and wakes ideas that laid slumbering, awaiting the words that could resurrect them. Lately this is how I acquire language (though walking in Ongata Rongai I hear at least six-eight languages: Kiswahili, Kikuyu, Maa, Kipsigi, Somali, Luhya . . .); visit another region of mind. Re-reading and working through Kincaid and Kishoiyian was a relocating, educational experience, then, where I felt as though I was witnessing myself learn another loose, associative language, take in the teachings of Professor Kincaid. Don’t apologize, don’t dismiss the dead white men, don’t notice melanin—and when you do, don’t make it matter, there are more meaningful things about a person beyond their color. Don’t conceal your body when it’s blossoming, don’t withhold your criticisms against professors because of age, don’t dress so pious—have more sex, it’s so wonderful to be young and having sex. Report on your interior not your reality, create a band: it’s a beautiful thing to be a backup singer. Learn the latin names of plants, the back-alleys of history, the songs that led to songs—even if this information feels far too obscure. Buy a copy of grey’s anatomy, take laxative tea if you look too big, ask a boy the question about erections. Care—care more than you should; keep your fury close, read everyone’s news not only reports from your country, and be a child before you have a child. Your eight children will seize childhood from you. Know how to be a slut on the brink of being a prostitute, know how to look angry without articulating it, know how to sway to jazz, know how to read anything. Read a little bit of it all. Don’t say kind things when you wish to be nasty, don’t require a reason to be nasty. And go—go wherever you can and please write me about it.
I am age nineteen. I will write many things. Soon I should go to Venice, Geneva, Athens, Dar es Salaam, Arusha, and Istanbul; surely I will message Kincaid and tell her what is there. The person I’ve become I do not know very well. On the outside everything is familiar. My body is bigger, and I hide it more than when I was younger and hellbent on drawing men. My eyes are the same, though a slight fear has crept into them. My ears have new bumps. My hair has come undone. The things I cannot put my hands on—those have changed, and when I’m not certain what to make of myself I return Kincaid. “I did not know then that I had embarked on something called self-invention, the making of a type of person that did not exist in the place where I was born."
2025