{"id":35589,"date":"2025-07-31T00:10:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T00:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/35589\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T00:10:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T00:10:09","slug":"kincaids-putting-myself-together-is-a-revelation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/35589\/","title":{"rendered":"Kincaid’s ‘Putting Myself Together’ is a revelation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cPutting Myself Together<\/a>,\u201c Jamaica Kincaid\u2019s new, career-spanning essay collection, is a kind of intellectual autobiography. Elaine Potter Richardson emigrated from Antigua to the United States in 1965. She was 16 years old. Her family sent her away to study nursing, become a nurse, and remit her salary back home. By the early 1970s, Richardson was living alone in Manhattan, designing a new life plan and renaming herself Jamaica Kincaid. Before ever publishing a word, Kincaid called herself a writer: \u201cAt one minute I wanted to be a writer, and instinctively realizing I was in America, the next minute I decided I was a writer, and so when anyone asked me who I was, I said, I am a writer. I did not know exactly what that means, I still do not know exactly what that means, but even now, when I am asked what it is that I am, I say, I am a writer.\u201d Both style and self-invention remain central obsessions in Kincaid\u2019s oeuvre.<\/p>\n

In 1974, after a brief stint at Ingenue, a magazine where she learned how poorly suited she was for working \u201cunder anyone\u2019s thumb,\u201d 25-year-old Kincaid began filing unsigned essays in The New Yorker\u2019s \u201cTalk of the Town.\u201d She published in that section until 1983. In \u201cTalk Stories<\/a>\u201d (2001), which collects those pieces, Kincaid recalls her writerly beginnings as both a period of economic deprivation \u2014\u201cI had no money, I had no place to live, and I almost never could afford to buy myself my own food\u201d \u2014 and a time of artistic development \u2014 \u201cI did not hear anything anyone else said, I only heard my own voice, I was only interested in my own story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kincaid was also writing for The Village Voice, Ms., and Rolling Stone, where she published essays like 1977\u2019s \u201cJamaica Kincaid\u2019s New York\u201d and \u201cAntigua Crossings: A Deep and Blue Passage on the Caribbean Sea\u201d in 1978. These essays demonstrate, on one hand, that very early in her career, she\u2019d identified the elemental music of her unique prose style (Henry Louis Gates Jr.\u2019s introduction explains that Kincaid writes with \u201ca driving, unremitting eye \u2014 though never without humor\u201d) and, on the other hand, that in her Caribbean familial story she\u2019d located the limestone foundation on which to build her future efforts in fiction and nonfiction. Kincaid had already begun cultivating an array of overlapping, perennial obsessions: matriarchal power and mothers (specifically her own), banishment and excommunication from family structures, the British empire, colonial literary education, Antigua, and travel.<\/p>\n

Get Starting Point<\/p>\n

A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.<\/p>\n

Several times in \u201cPutting Myself Together\u201d Kincaid details the scene of her original subjection: when she was nine, her mother shipped her off to Dominica to live with her maternal grandmother and aunt. In the 2000 essay \u201cIslander Once, Now a Voyager,\u201d Kincaid re-enters that wound: \u201cThe first time I traveled anywhere, I was not yet a writer, but I can now see that I must have been in the process of becoming one. I was nine years old and had been the only child in my family until then, when, suddenly it seemed to me, my first brother was born. My mother no longer paid any attention to me; she seemed to care only about my new brother. One day, I was asked to hold him and he fell out of my arms. My mother said that I had dropped him, and as a punishment, she sent me off to live with her sister and her parents, all of whom she hated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing in the introduction to her 1996 edition of \u201cThe Best American Essays,\u201d Kincaid recalled that her early teachers taught her that the essay\u2019s formal principles require writers to make statements, build upon those statements, and sum up their building. \u201c[H]ow dry, how impossible,\u201d she writes of such formulae, and then of her realization that \u201cthis definition was meant to be a restriction, and it worked very well; for how could I express any truth about myself or anything I might know in the form of state, build, and sum up when everything about me and everything I knew existed in a state of rage, rage, and more rage. I came into being in the colonial situation. It does not lend itself to any literary situation that is in existence. Not to me, anyway.\u201d Kincaid iterates certain anecdotes and histories, both intimate and colonial, because her conception of the essay form demands a kind of elliptical experimentation, recycling expulsions, eras, poems, slavers, sailors, and crimes to reveal new layers of insight and truth.<\/p>\n

Though Kincaid is most frequently identified as an accomplished novelist \u2014 \u201cAnnie John<\/a>\u201d (1985), \u201cLucy<\/a>\u201d (1992), \u201cAutobiography of My Mother\u201d (1996), \u201cMr. Potter<\/a>\u201d (2003), \u201cSee Now Then<\/a>\u201d (2013) \u2014 her masterpiece may be her book-length travel essay about the failures of British colonialism and Antiguan postcolonial governance, \u201cA Small Place<\/a>\u201d (1988). I have read the paperback copy I purchased in 1995 so frequently and closely that the book, which radically rearranged my mind, must be stored in an envelope to keep its loose pages contained. Not only does \u201cPutting Myself Together\u201d pick up threads from \u201cA Small Place\u201d it extends and amplifies the claim forwarded by her turn of the century books \u2014 \u201cMy Brother<\/a>\u201d (1997), \u201cMy Garden (Book)<\/a>\u201d (1999), \u201cTalk Stories,\u201d and \u201cAmong Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas<\/a>\u201d (2005) \u2014 that Kincaid is a master of literary nonfiction\u2019s multifarious forms. <\/p>\n

During this century\u2019s first quarter, Kincaid has enhanced her catalog with meditative essayettes and longform efforts about gardening for Architectural Digest, The Paris Review, and Book Post, a Substack magazine. In some of these she pivots from writing about \u201cmyself, my mother, the place where I had grown up, myself and my mother again,\u201d and enters the garden as a reader, taking up gardening catalogs and tomes about \u201clandscape design and also from accounts of Explorers and Conquerors.\u201d The garden becomes \u201can essential part of that thing called history\u201d from Columbus to Thomas Jefferson to the Bloomsbury Group.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet, the garden holds all the world\u2019s concerns and all of Kincaid\u2019s obsessions, so, eventually, the book\u2019s ending returns to reading, writing, and her mother. Though arranged chronologically, \u201cPutting Myself Together\u201d is a finely made garden: teeming, various, surprising. However, it offers \u201cnot complete satisfaction, only some satisfaction.\u201d As Kincaid notes in her introduction to \u201cMy Favorite Plant,\u201d \u201ca garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden \u2014 Paradise \u2014 but after a while the owner and the occupants wanted more.\u201d Kincaid\u2019s retrospective satisfies incompletely, provoking both our astonishment and desire for more.<\/p>\n

Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974-<\/p>\n

By Jamaica Kincaid<\/p>\n

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $30<\/p>\n

Walton Muyumba teaches literature at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of \u201cThe Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cPutting Myself Together,\u201c Jamaica Kincaid\u2019s new, career-spanning essay collection, is a kind of intellectual autobiography. Elaine Potter Richardson…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-35589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}