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Caribbean
novelist Jamaica
Kincaid was
born May 25, 1949, as Elaine
Cynthia Potter Richardson in Antigua and Barbuda,
where she lived with her stepfather, a carpenter, and her mother until 1965.
At age 17 she was sent by her parent to
Westchester, New York to work as an au pair (Nanny or care giver) to support
her family in Antigua, Feeling embittered and alone, she refused to respond to
her mother's correspondence or send money home.
Her relationship changed with her mom when the first of her three brothers was born
and Kincaid felt her mother hated her ever since. She
expressed her feelings publicly about the issue.
I don't know if having other
children was the cause for our relationship changing--it might have changed as
I entered adolescence, but her attention went elsewhere. And also our family
money remained the same but there were more people to feed and to clothe and so
everything got sort of shortened not only material things but emotional things,
the good emotional things I got a short end of that. But then I got more of
things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect... If I hadn't
become a writer I don't know what would have happened to me; that was a kind of self-rescuing.
Kincaid
was “discovered’ by New Yorker columnist George Trow,
published one of her articles in the “Talk of the Town"
section of Ingénue magazine. As a result, Kincaid met the editor of the
magazine, William Shawn,
who offered her a job. Kincaid later married Shawn's
son, Allen,
a composer and Bennington College professor and they had two children, a
daughter, Annie, in 1985 and a son, Harold, in 1989.
Kincaid's
first collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983),
won her the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of
Arts and Letters. Her autobiographical Annie
John (1985) was critically acclaimed for its
universal appeal as a coming-of-age story and for its treatment of indigenous
Caribbean culture. In 1988 Kincaid wrote A
Small Place, a book-length essay which
chronicled Kincaid's outrage at the devastation of postcolonial Antigua: the
corruption of the new leaders and the exploitation resulting from the influx of
tourism.
Kincaid
received the Guggenheim Fellowship award
in 1989, and in 1991 she earned her honorary degrees from Williams College and
Long Island College, after the publication of Lucy in 1990. She published her
next book The Autobiography
of My Mother in 1995.
In 1996, Kincaid's youngest brother Devon
died from AIDS at 33; she later resigned her from the New Yorker. A
year later her book My Brother, a
dedication to her brother was released.
Kincaid over the years have published other
various novels, in 2003 Mr.
Potter. Kincaid's love of horticulture has
also taken center stage in My
Favorite Plant (1998), My Garden Book (1999),
and Among Flowers: A Walk
in the Himalaya (2004).
Jamaica
Kincaid currently
lives with her family in North Bennington, Vermont,
during the summers she is a visiting lecturer on African and African American
Studies and on English and American Literature and Language.
·
Seed Gathering Atop the
World (2002)
·
Talk Stories (2001)
·
My Garden (1999)
·
My Favorite Plant (editor)
(1998)
·
My Brother (1997)
·
The Autobiography of My
Mother (1996)
·
"Song of Roland.”
New Yorker (12 April 1993)
·
At the Bottom of the
River (1992)
·
Lucy (1990)
·
"Ovando.” Conjunctions14
(1989)
·
A Small Place (1988)
·
Annie John (1983)
·
"Antigua Crossing.”
Rolling Stone. (29 June 1978)
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