Reviews with content warning for Animal cruelty - The Autobiography of My Mother

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The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

2 reviews

caribbeangirlreading's review against another edition

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challenging reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

“And what do I ask? What is the question I can ask? I own nothing, I am not a man. I ask, What makes the world turn against me and all who look like me? I own nothing, I survey nothing, when I ask this question; the luxury of an answer that will fill volumes does not stretch out before me. When I ask this question, my voice is filled with despair… The population of Roseau, that is, the ones who looked like me, had long ago been reduced to shadows; the forever foreign, the margins, had long ago lost any connection to wholeness, to an inner life of our own invention…”

“…a master cannot be a friend. And who would want such a thing, master and friend at once? A man would want that. It is a man who would ask, What makes the world turn, and then would find in his own reply fields of gravity, imaginary lines, tilts and axes, reason and logic, and, quite brazenly, a theory of justice.”

TITLE—The Autobiography of my Mother

AUTHOR—Jamaica Kincaid

PUBLISHED—2022 (orig. 1996)

PUBLISHER—Picador (orig. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

GENRE—literary fiction

SETTING—Dominica

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—first person narrator—septuagenarian MC reflecting back on their life, stream of consciousness writing style, cycles of violence, the real vs the “unreal” & how colonialism tries to gate-keep & destroy entire realities, Indigenous & African diasporic lifeways & beliefs & living realities, loveless family dynamics, systemic patriarchy, Seeing & visions, faith vs fear, what one believes—whose beliefs, shamelessness, marginality

“To say that we had seen this boy float out to meet a woman surrounded by fruit, and then vanish in the swollen waters in the mouth of the river, was to say that we lived in a darkness from which we could not be redeemed. I then and now had and have no use for redemption.”

My thoughts:

This was a fascinating and thought-provoking book. Written in the voice of a very old woman reminiscing on and recollecting her life, and employing dry, blunt observations, using an economy of words, much like an elder who is conserving her energy and very much told in an elder’s voice.

Though most of Xuela‘s characterization comes from statements that she makes about herself, there were a few subtler, excellent moments of her characterization that I loved: 1)“and it is spring (I am not familiar with this, I cannot find any joy in this, I think people associated with it are less than I am but I, Xuela, am not in a position to make my feeling have any meaning)” and 2) “his skin was thin and pink and transparent, as if it were on its way to being skin but had not yet reached the state that real skin is; it was not the skin of anyone I have loved yet and not the skin I dreamed of…” The many different subtle and unsubtle subversions in this book were I think my favorite thing about it.

I also loved the discussion around performance as relates to gender, race, and identity, even as a whole social and cultural phenomenon. And how Xuela was depicted to be who she is without performance or even really self-critique or -analysis. Especially in comparison to the character of her father: Xuela took no responsibility for other ppl’s judgment of her—so that she could hold on to herself—whereas her father’s entire identity was only defined by other people’s judgments—losing whoever “he really might have been”.

I can kind of see why some reviewers call her work “pessimistic”. I understand why a person might want to believe that that is what this work is: a pessimistic view of a particular kind of human experience, of human life. Kincaid actually speaks to this desire *in* the book (her “sermonette”). But I think to dismiss the book as a purely bleak and pessimistic monologue, is to underappreciate the deeper messages of Kincaid’s writing and to underacknowledge the damage done by the forces of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery as depicted by the characters in this novel, and even to risk aligning oneself with the very perspective whose incalculable harm is responsible for the very misery and hopelessness about which she is writing.

I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy stream of consciousness narration and a literary, philosophical challenge. This book is best read in the summertime. You’re going to want to recharge with some easy warmth and vitamin d during and after this one.

Final note: On to MY BROTHER next! I love how each of her books contributes to a larger dialogue between all of the interconnected themes and characters/perspectives.

“…and no matter how swept away I would become by anyone or anything, in the end I allowed nothing to replace my own being in my own mind.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.75

Season: Summer

CW // animal cruelty & death, abortion, sexual content (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

everything else by Jamaica Kincaid—reading her work in order of publication has been extremely rewarding
SULA by Toni Morrison—TBR
ON A WOMAN’S MADNESS by Astrid Roemer
“of colour” by Katherine Agyemaa Agard—TBR
A REGARDED SELF: CARIBBEAN WOMANHOOD AND THE ETHICS OF DISORDERLY BEING by Kaiama L. Glover—TBR
BLACK LOOKS: RACE AND REPRESENTATION by bell hooks—TBR
THE ANNOTATED MRS DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf, edited by Merve Emre—bc Kincaid in AUTOBIOGRAPHY: “… to condemn yourself is to forgive yourself…” 👀 & stream of consciousness, sociocultural critique

Favorite Quotes—

“My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind. …I only came to know this in the middle of my life, just at the time when I was no longer young and realized that I had less of some of the things I used to have in abundance and more of some of the things I had scarcely had at all. And this realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward…”

“He was poor, but it was not because he was good; he had not done enough bad things yet to get rich.”

“In a place like this, brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is sometimes the only thing freely given…”

“…everything in my life, good or bad, to which I am inextricably bound is a source of pain.”

“I had been warned repeatedly by her not to touch this plate, for she had seen me look at it with an obsessive curiosity. I would look at it and wonder about the picture painted on its surface, a picture of a wide-open field filled with grass and flowers in the most tender shades of yellow, pink, blue, and green; the sky had a sun in it that shone but did not burn bright; the clouds were thin and scattered about like a decoration, not thick and banked up, not harbingers of doom. This picture was nothing but a field full of grass and flowers on a sunny day, but it had an atmosphere of secret abundance, happiness, and tranquillity; underneath it was written in gold letters the one word HEAVEN. Of course it was not a picture of heaven at all; it was a picture of the English countryside idealized, but I did not know that, I did not know that such a thing as the English countryside existed. And neither did Eunice; she thought that this picture was a picture of heaven, offering as it did a secret promise of a life without worry or care or want.”

“…on the wall behind the wooden table and chair was a map; at the top of the map were the words "THE BRITISH EMPIRE." These were the first words I learned to read.”

“I was not afraid, because my mother had already died and that is the only thing a child is really afraid of; when I was born, my mother was dead, and I had already lived all those years with Eunice, a woman who was not my mother and who could not love me, and without my father, never knowing when I would see him again, so I was not afraid for myself in this situation. (And if it is not really true that I was not afraid then, it was not the only time that I did not admit to myself my own vulnerability.)”

“And she said that she hoped I would learn to tell the difference between the two: love and hate. To this day, I have tried to tell the difference between the two, and I cannot, because often they wear so much the same face.”

“The stretch of road was new to me, and yet it had a familiarity that made me sad. Around each bend was the familiar dark green of the trees that grew with a ferociousness that no hand had yet attempted to restrain, a green so unrelenting that it attained great beauty and great ugliness and yet great humility all at once; it was itself: nothing could be added to it; nothing could be taken away from it.”

“No love: I could live in a place like this. I knew this atmosphere all too well. Love would have defeated me. Love would always defeat me.”

“She spoke to me then in French patois; in his presence she had spoken to me in English. She would do this to me through all the time we knew each other, but that first time, in the sanctuary of my room, at seven years old, I recognized this to be an attempt on her part to make an illegitimate of me, to associate me with the made-up language of people regarded as not real—the shadow people, the forever humiliated, the forever low.”

“…he was a part of a whole way of life on the island which perpetuated pain.”

“The more he robbed, the more money he had, the more he went to church…”

“From the moment I stepped out of my bed in the early morning to the time I covered myself up again in the dark of night, I negotiated many treacherous acts of deception, but it was clear to me who I really was.”

“That she did not think very much of the person who was most like her, a daughter, a female, was so normal that it would have been noticed only if it had been otherwise: to people like us, despising anything that was most like ourselves was almost a law of nature.”

“…but the person they saw was an expression of my father's desires, an expression of his needs; the personality they were observing was like a suit of clothes my father had made for himself, and eventually he wore it so long that it became impossible to remove, it covered completely who he really was; who he really might have been became unknown, even to himself. …a painful life, a copied life, a life whose origins he did not know.”

“And I learned, too, that no one can truly judge himself; to describe your own transgressions is to forgive yourself for them; to confess your bad deeds is also at once to forgive yourself, and so silence becomes the only form of self-punishment: to live forever locked up in an iron cage made of your own silence, and then, from time to time, to have this silence broken by a designated crier, someone who repeats over and over, in broken or complete sentences, a list of the violations, the bad deeds committed.”

“…I would not allow the passage of time or the full weight of desire to make a pawn of me.”

“It was almost as if I sensed a danger and quickly made myself a defense; in seeing the thing I might be, I too early became its opposite.”

“…the burden of my life: the short past, the unknown future.”

“The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.”

“…and perhaps because I no longer had a future I began to want one very much. But what such a thing could be for me I did not know, for I was standing in a black hole. The other alternative was another black hole, this other black hole was one I did not know; I chose the one I did not know.”

“I had carried my own life in my own hands. …and no matter how swept away I would become by anyone or anything, in the end I allowed nothing to replace my own being in my own mind.”

“Neither this woman nor the tree became a symbol of anything to me. I had come to know that I would rather be all dead or all alive, but never half of one and half of the other at the same time… His mother believed in obeah. His father held the beliefs of the people who had subjugated him. He was not dead; he was not alive.”

“She insisted that I was not my father's child, and that even if I was his child, I was illegitimate. The look of awe and bewilderment that alternately crossed her face when she realized that I welcomed this characterization made me pity her. I wished somehow she would draw inspiration from me. Why am I not valued? is the question she wanted to ask the world, the world as constituted by her mother and her father; but she could not ask such a question, she could not begin to suspect there might be an answer.”

“It also signified defeat yet again, for what would the outcome have been of all the lives of the conquered if they had not come to believe in the gods of the people who had conquered them?”

“There was hardly a day of my life that I did not observe some incident to add fresh weight to this view, for to me history was not a large stage filled with commemoration, bands, cheers, ribbons, medals, the sound of fine glass clinking and raised high in the air; in other words, the sounds of victory. For me history was not only the past: it was the past and it was also the present. I did not mind my defeat, I only minded that it had to last so long; I did not see the future, and that is perhaps as it should be. Why should anyone see such a thing. And yet…and yet, it made me sad to know that I did not look straight ahead of me, I always looked back, sometimes I looked to the side, but mostly I looked back.”

“…a poor man driven out of his mind by a set of events that the guilty and the tired and the hopeless call life.”

“…people who are sad do not sing at all.”

“There is a certain way that life ought to be, an ideal way, a perfect way, and there is the way that life is, not quite the opposite of ideal, not quite the opposite of perfect, it just is not quite the way it should be but not quite the way it should not be either; I mean to say that in any situation, only one or two, maybe even three out of ten, things are just what you have been praying for.”

“…my self was the only thing I had that was my own… The impulse to possess is alive in every heart, and some people choose vast plains, some people choose high mountains, some people choose wide seas, and some people choose husbands; I chose to possess myself.”

“…a blankness that they hope to fill …with the usual things: time divided into years, months, days, or something like that.

They, too, would have made a fetish of the ordinary: the outer skin of the penis, the thin membrane at the opening of the vagina; they, too, would have made things, utensils from a variety of materials, in a variety of shapes, for a variety of uses; they, too, would have observed some violent occurrence in nature the earth rupturing, seas where dry land used to be, darkness where light used to be and would have found in these occurrences promises of some kind, ways to live by, rituals, and a sense of specialness, for they had been spared; and they, too, would have had myths of beginnings and myths of ends.”

“For my father, the sea, the big and beautiful sea, sometimes a shimmering sheet of blue, sometimes a shimmering sheet of black, sometimes a shimmering sheet of gray, could hold no such largesse of inspiration, could hold no such abundance of comfort, could hold no such anything of any good; its beauty was lost to him, blank; to look at it, to see it, was to be reminded of the despair of the victor and the despair of the vanquished at once; for the emptiness of conquest is not lost on the conqueror, faced as such a person is with the unending desire for more and more and more, until only death silences this desire; and the bottomless well of pain and misery that the conquered experiences no amount of revenge can satiate or erase the perpetration of a great injustice.”

“…they brought her up, baptized her a Christian, and demanded that she be a quiet, shy, long-suffering, unquestioning, modest, wishing-to-die-soon person.”

“It is possible that he appeared as yet another irresistible force, the last in her life; it is possible that she loved him passionately.”

“It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.”

“I had never ceased to observe myself, and at the time I could see that what I had lost in physical appeal or beauty I had gained in character. It was written all over me; I did not fail to arouse curiosity in anyone capable of it.”

“…there are many wrongs that nothing can ever make right, the past in the world as I know it is irreversible.”

“…a world cruel beyond ordinary imagining…”

“And yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.”

“The depths of evil, its results, were all too clear to me: its satisfactions, its rewards, the glorious sensations, the praise, the feeling of exaltation and superiority evil elicits when it is successful, the feeling of invincibility I had observed all of this firsthand. All roads come to an end, and all ends are the same, trailing off into nothing; even an echo eventually will be silenced.”

“I am of the vanquished, I am of the defeated. The past is a fixed point, the future is open-ended; for me the future must remain capable of casting a light on the past such that in my defeat lies the seed of my great victory, in my defeat lies the beginning of my great revenge.”

“Romance is the refuge of the defeated; the defeated need songs to soothe themselves, they need a sweet tune to soothe themselves, for their whole being is a wound; they need a soft bed to sleep on, for when they are awake it is a nightmare, the dream of sleep is their reality.”

“… to condemn yourself is to forgive yourself…”

“He was so sure inside himself that all the things he knew were correct, not that they were true, but that they were correct. Truth would have undone him, the truth is always so full of uncertainty.”

“This account is an account of the person who was never allowed to be and an account of the person I did not allow myself to become.”

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