autobiography of my mother jamaica kincaid

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The Autobiography of My Mother

Jamaica Kincaid

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1996

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Jamaica Kincaid

The autobiography of my mother.

Xuela Claudette Richardson is recalling the last seventy years of her life, and so she must begin with her birth, and the accompanying death of her mother. Xuela’s vivid, visceral recollections of the lonely, unsettled life that follows the trauma of her arrival include that of her distant father, who sends her away to another household at the earliest opportunity; of her passion for the stevedore Roland, who fulfils her sexually but not intellectually; and of her husband, who provides her with status and a wealthy lifestyle but whom she is incapable of loving. Poetic and disturbing, The Autobiography of My Mother is one of Kincaid’s most powerful statements of Afro-Caribbean women’s struggle for identity and independence, against a hostile backdrop of sexism and colonialism. Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Fierce, incantory. . . lyrical. . . powerful and disturbing Michiko Kakutani , New York Times

Kincaid, always an elegant stylist, makes this story of a simple woman extraordinary...filling her prose with rich, poetic detail. . . An unforgettable account of singular survival San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

A book that comes both to haunt and to dazzle us . . . [Kincaid] writes like an angel: with enviable lucidity and precision and a lyric touch that frequently aspires to the condition of poetry Boston Sunday Globe

Books by Jamaica Kincaid

Uncollected Writings

My Garden (Book)

Talk Stories

See Now Then

At the Bottom of the River

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER

by Jamaica Kincaid ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1996

Kincaid's ambitious new novel of Caribbean life (after Lucy, 1990, etc.) begins with the tantalizing promise of a memorable story about strong mothers and daughters—but then turns into a rhetorical riff on familiar ills of our time. Now in her 70s, Xuela, whose mother died in childbirth, tells of a life irrevocably shaped by a woman she never knew and by the children she herself never had. The idea of a daughter's life being as much her unknown mother's as her own is suggestive with dramatic potential, though here it seemingly becomes little more than excuse for a heavy dose of philosophy on the question of who one really is. Set on the island of Dominica, the tale is suffused with loss and angry grief: says the narrator, ``I came to feel that for my whole life I had been standing on a precipice . . . overwhelmed with sadness.'' Reared for seven years in the home of the woman who washes her father's clothes, Xuela learns to survive by depending only on herself. After she moves back in with her father and his new wife, these are skills that serve her well when her stepmother tries to kill her; and they're equally useful when, attending high school, she becomes pregnant by the man of the house she's then living in and coolly arranges her own abortion. But there's something increasingly indulgent, even cruel, in this self- sufficiency and anger, both of which come to seem more theme-driven than dramatically organic, a quality suggested also in Xuela's rigidly sustained indifference to the man, a British doctor and white, whom she finally marries after first seducing him and then helping his first wife poison herself. Because he's a colonionalist, it's not possible for Xuela to love him, no matter that he loves her deeply and wants to be with her forever. Vintage, tough, cool Kincaid prose, though telling a story that ultimately chills and repels. (First printing of 75,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-374-10732-7

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995

GENERAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Jamaica Kincaid

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

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by Harper Lee

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

More by J.D. Salinger

by J.D. Salinger

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Autobiography of My Mother Background

By jamaica kincaid.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

The Autobiography of My Mother , first published in 1996, is a novel written by Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid . Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 in the capital city of St. John’s, Antigua. She is the author of five novels, a short story collection, five nonfiction books, a children’s book, and an array of uncollected short stories and essays, Kincaid was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1994 and has been elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kincaid’s own life experiences living in poverty in Antigua as a child and her position in the world as a woman have been the basis of her novels.

In The Autobiography of My Mother , the readers encounter a first person, retrospective account of the life of Xuela Claudette Richardson , who narrates her life looking back over seventy years. It won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1997. Her memories are recollected and narrated with such clarity and vividness that one might even think it is being lived in the present. Intermingled with Xuela’s immediate story is the story of the Caribbean island of Dominica, a land that was once under the oppressions of colonial rule. The Autobiography of My Mother is different from her other novels because of its style. Unlike her other books which are filled with poetic and flowery language, The Autobiography of My Mother is written in a more direct style of prose. The book is pensive and reflective on the protagonist’s own life, instead of her relationships.

Xuela, who is half-Carib and half Scottish-African, loses her mother soon after her birth and is on her own from an early age. This novel follows her life of struggles, her relationships and surroundings as she tries to find her way in a world without a mother. It depicts her journey from childhood, to school, to adulthood, the exploring themes of fear, loss, and the forging of her character. The unusual narrative style and the lack of a more standard, traditional plot in the The Autobiography of My Mother was frowned upon by many. Despite these criticisms, the work was praised for its extensive character work and extravagant descriptions. Xuela struggles to cultivate a positive sense of self in an environment that continues to be hostile towards her because of her race and gender. She also struggles to cope with the early loss of her mother. Xuela never knew her mother, who died in childbirth.

It is also different than her other novels because of its subject matter. In most of her other books, Kincaid spins a story that depicts a rocky relationship between a mother and a daughter, reflecting on her own relationship with her mother as she became less valuable upon the birth of her brothers. Kincaid decided to take a different approach with The Autobiography of My Mother. The book actually begins by explaining the death of the protagonist’s mother. This is a reflection on a period of Kincaid’s life when she went into self-exile. At this time, Kincaid got a job in the United states and was expected to send the money back to her family in Antigua but didn’t. She didn’t even answer their letters. Instead, she focused on herself and on the life she wanted to build; this is precisely the phase in her life that is reflected in Autobiography of My Mother.

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Autobiography of My Mother Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for Autobiography of My Mother

Autobiography of My Mother study guide contains a biography of Jamaica Kincaid, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Autobiography of My Mother
• Autobiography of My Mother Summary
• Character List

Essays for Autobiography of My Mother

Autobiography of My Mother literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid.

• Origin and Resolution in White Teeth and Autobiography of My Mother.
• History and Identity in So Far From God and The Autobiography of My Mother

Wikipedia Entries for Autobiography of My Mother

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER: LOOKING AT THE PAST WITH OLD EYES

2018, Odisea Revista de Estudios Ingleses

The Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid 1996) is Xuela’s story. Xuela as the narrator and protagonist of the novel “moves between the imaginary world of the text and the real world of Kincaid’s life” (Edwards 116-17). The Palimpsest metaphor shows to be useful to represent the ‘palimpsesting of her identity’ that Xuela does in her autobiography because the final perception of Xuela’s identity implies a selection of experiences in which the visible surface makes it possible to perceive not only the young Xuela but that who never was and the life she did not allow herself to live.

Related Papers

Luciano Cabral

Trying to break up the shackles that had held the literary studies still for so many years, Roland Barthes declares that the author is better off dead. Such a surprising statement aimed at wiping away all of the efforts to reach an origin of a literary text, that is to say, a unique answer or a final interpretation. Nevertheless Philippe Lejeune posits that when it comes to autobiographical writings, the presence of the author is to be felt, and even gladly expected. For this reason, hermeneutics is able to interchangeably adopt either Barthes´s perspective or Lejeune´s standpoint. This essay intends to shed some light on Jamaica Kincaid´s The Autobiography of my Mother based on those both perspectives. Xuela, the protagonist, can be taken entirely on her own, that is, strictly textually. In so doing, the author will be dead. On the other hand, she can also be spotted under a different name, that is, Kincaid´s. In so doing, readers are to view the resurrection of an author.

Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal

Dr. Terri Smith Ruckel

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Barbara Arizti

International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies

Caribbean literature exposes a history of dispossession, exploitation and oppression which has been neglected and often deliberately misinterpreted. In this article the destructive effects of colonization and slavery in Jamaica Kincaid's 1996 novel The Autobiography of My Mother are scrutinized thoroughly. The main objective of this research is to examine Kincaid's novel within the framework of postcolonial studies, in the light of Albert Memmi (2013) and Frantz Fanon's (2008) theories on the psychology of colonialism. Frantz Fanon argues that colonialism had brought together two opposing social orders doomed to coexist in everlasting tension; the colonizer's and the colonized's; these tensions cause the moral and spiritual deformity of an ideological system based on racism, oppression, and exploitation. In contrast to Fanon, Kincaid regards resistance and liberation in a quite different perspective. Instead of attempting to build a "new woman", Xuela refuses to accept the colonizer's views of those like her that lead to self-destruction and self-hatred. Instead, in order to survive, she confidently chooses self-love, albeit an almost grotesque and obsessive one. Kincaid uses Xuela's relationships with various characters to categorize the social types that Fanon describes in his writings—from Philip and his wife Moira as examples of the deformation of behavior caused by colonial social hierarchies to using mask as a metaphor for her manipulative father's mimicry of the oppressors. This research finds out that colonization and slavery have negative impact on both the colonizer and the colonized.

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Wagadu: a Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies

Simone A James Alexander

The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. This chapter explores the haunting or ghostly presence of both the living and the dead. The ghosts of slavery and colonialism haunt the character/s and the text; in retaliation, Xuela/Kincaid performs a “ghosting” by defying narrative conventions, by blurring the line between fiction, myth, biography, and autobiography. Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. A creolized subject (daughter of a Carib mother and a half Scot, half-African father), the novel’s protagonist, Xuela Claudette Richardson, embodies resistance, for she not only survives her mother’s death, but she also survives her father’s subsequent abandonment and several foster homes. Xuela’s mother dies shortly after giving birth 108 Wagadu Volume 19, Summer 2018 © Wagadu (2018) ISSN : 1545-6196 to her, leaving her in the care of her father who, in es...

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1997 Fiction

The Autobiography of My Mother

Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson, and as a child was greatly influenced by her mother, Annie Richards. At sixteen years of age, after successfully completing a British education in Antigua, she moved to New York as an au pair.

After leaving her au pair job, working as a photographer’s assistant, and briefly attending college, Richardson changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid and began establishing herself as a writer. After having pieces published in The Village Voice and Ingenue magazine, Kincaid caught the attention of William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker , which made her staff writer in 1976. In 1983, she published a collection of short fiction, At the Bottom of the River . These stories, which had previously appeared in the New Yorker , won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Kincaid’s first novel, Annie John (1985), examines a childhood that begins as an idyllic relationship between mother and daughter, a connection that decays through mistrust and misunderstanding until the protagonist leaves her native Antigua. Lucy was published five years later and, in many ways, is thought to be a sequel to her first novel. The protagonist Lucy leaves Antigua, fleeing from her mother to become an au pair in New York. The plot of the novel centers on Lucy’s relationship to Mariah, the white woman she works for, and their struggle to understand each other. In a key scene recalling the experience of colonial education, Kincaid presents a critical view of the history of colonization.

The Autobiography of My Mother  (1997) was the third in Kincaid’s series of mother/daughter narratives. It is the story of a young woman, Xuela Claudette Richardson, whose mother dies at birth. The experience of losing one’s birth mother becomes a metaphor for the detachment from one’s mother country. The novel is a chilling and tight monologue, a haunting expression of the protagonist’s isolation, which traces the experiences of Xuela.

Kincaid’s My Brother (1997) is a departure from her earlier books, in which she explored autobiographical themes in fiction. My Brother tells the story of Devon Drew, Kincaid’s youngest brother, who died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) at the age of 33. Like her novels, Kincaid’s memoir of her brother’s death was praised for its stark honesty and lyrical language.

In addition, Kincaid also wrote A Small Place (1988), a book of essays about Antigua. Kincaid’s short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and The Paris Review . In addition, she has taught creative writing at both Bennington College and Harvard University. Married to the composer Allen Shawn, the son of her New Yorker editor, Kincaid made news in 1995 when she resigned as staff writer of that magazine in protest of the editorial policies of Tina Brown.

Contributed By: Eva Marie Stahl

VIDEO: Jamaica Kindcaid Gives ’12 Commencement Address At Grinnell College

September 3, 2012

Class of 1997

1997 Lifetime Achievement

Albert L. Murray

He presents himself as an ardent critic of theories that contend that African Americans are subservient to white social infrastructures. Murray views African American culture as an advantageous extension of the American self.

1997 Nonfiction

The Color of Water

James McBride

The story of life lived on both sides of the color line, McBride’s memoir gives equal space to the voice of his white mother […] and his own questions about navigating black identity as a mixed-race person.

The experience of losing one’s birth mother becomes a metaphor for the detachment from one’s mother country. The novel is a chilling and tight monologue, a haunting expression of the protagonist’s isolation.

• Literature & Fiction
• Genre Fiction

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The Autobiography of My Mother (Galley) Paperback – January 1, 1996

• Print length 240 pages
• Language English
• Publisher New York, Farrar Strauss Giroux
• Publication date January 1, 1996
• Dimensions 5.31 x 0.63 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0099738414
• ISBN-13 978-0099738411
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ New York, Farrar Strauss Giroux (January 1, 1996)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0099738414
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099738411
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.63 x 8.5 inches

About the author

Jamaica kincaid.

Jamaica Kincaid's works include, Mr Potter, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother, a memoir. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

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