The best kinds of conversations should meander and detour, trip over delicate areas, double down when a point must be emphatically asserted. After all, the ostensible subject of this 1997 on-stage chat between Dionne Brand and Jamaica Kincaid is the release of Kincaid's memoir, My Brother. But this book gets only a brief nod early on and the subject is largely abandoned for other thoughts and digressions. You can't for a moment fault either of these vital writers for that fact, as important and provocative as Kincaid's book is, for even when planned, a conversation best works when the unexpected comes out, when an anecdote or a memory surfaces that opens up a new avenue for exploration. There is a striking chemistry here between these two very different kinds of writers (though on the surface they seem to share a number of similarities): they agree, they laugh, they riff on each other's thoughts, all to wonderful effect. The chemistry is so strong, one suspects, that any subject they choose to explore would be worth listening to. So pay close attention because another great thing about good conversations: they are fleeting and may only happen once.
Works by Jamaica Kincaid
My Brother (print edition)
See Now Then (print edition) (ebook)
Annie John (print edition) (ebook)
A Small Place (print edition) (audiobook)
Lucy (print edition) (ebook)
At the Bottom of the River (print edition)
Works by Dione Brand
Salvage: Readings from the Wreck (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading (ebook)
Beyond Borders: Arab Feminists Talk About Their Lives - East and West (DVD)
Other Related Books or Materials
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, produced by the Toronto Public Library in association with the Toronto Festival of Authors. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Jamaica Kincaid talks about life and death, men and women, home and away, and also about paragraphs and sentences, and the paradox of feeling trapped in these while using them to imagine new possibilities.
Jamaica Kincaid: I think it surprised me that it wasn't ordinary. And no one had told me that each, each death was... Oh, I suppose people had told me and I just hadn't noticed because I'm very superstitious... No, not superstitious. I'm very afraid of death and actually find it overdone. I think too many people have done it and...It might be one of those things that could go out of fashion, and so I think I hadn't paid attention to other people's grief, to what other people, when they looked so sad, I just thought it was... Perhaps if I looked closely, I would catch it, too. So I never paid attention, and I was just amazed at how special it seemed, how unique it seemed.
RANDY: Once the applause finally dies down, and it takes a while, Trinidadian-born Canadian writer Dionne Brand expresses gratitude to the audience, for its warm welcome of Antigua-born American writer Jamaica Kincaid, and in turn, very sincerely, to Kincaid herself, for the chance to chat like this. It makes sense, given Brand’s clear admiration for Kincaid’s work, and also a sense of kinship between them, as two accomplished women writers from the Caribbean. Kincaid was in Toronto in November 1997 in support of her book, My Brother, an often-wrenching memoir about the death of her brother, Devon, back in Antigua, following an AIDS diagnosis and at the far end of a life very, very different than hers. By the late 1990s, Kincaid was well-established as a major American writer and arguably the most prominent second-generation literary voice to come out of the Caribbean. As for the first generation of those writers, emerging in the 1950s and 1960s largely through movement between home countries and London, Kincaid tells an amusing anecdote about once meeting Derek Walcott, who more or less man-splained the Caribbean writers she should have been reading, all of whom were men. While she can certainly show anger and other intensities on the page, on stage Kincaid is a show of bemusement and restraint. Assessing the listed authors Walcott gave her, she briskly dismisses George Lamming as pompous and calls V.S. Naipaul “very discouraging” to read because, well, he’s “very discouraging.” To laughter she leaves it there, only to loop back and revise — a willingness and capacity Brand praises her writing for later in the interview. Here, Kincaid notes how very good a writer Naipaul is, if also very discouraging, and also that he’s one of what Kincaid calls “these men.” Just so, when Brand reminds Kincaid that Walcott’s own writing features, in places, less-than-positive representations of women, but proposes this can be forgiven, Kincaid thoughtfully disagrees. She says we needn’t forgive him, and declines to explain why, creating the kind of unsettling challenge to either traditional or fashionable notions that show up throughout her writing.
As the interview develops, Kincaid has much more to say about men, whether literary or Antiguan, and in turn much to say about Antiguan life dating forward from Columbus, and finally, about women, in particular writers, mothers, daughters. Kincaid has long been interested in how lives can be confined to sentences and paragraphs – she means here, I think, the politics of representation and imagination, of how colonized peoples, and women in particular, have been conceptually and practically trapped by how others, how men, men in power, conceive of them and capture them on the page. Kincaid resists easy notions and romantic cant, and so I won’t say that her writing frees women from the paragraph and sentence traps set and sprung by men. But her many readers, her generations of readers, could be forgiven for thinking so.
******
[applause]
Dionne Brand: That's lovely. I mean, it's lovely to see you all.
Jamaica Kincaid: It's very...
DB: It's wonderful.
JK: Very nice.
DB: It's a tribute to Ms. Kincaid's work that you are here, I'm sure. I wanna say, that it is a great, great pleasure and honor to meet you.
JK: Thank you.
DB: I know we've met before.
JK: Yes, we have.
DB: Not like this though. And I must tell you that to read you is for me to look into clear water, clear water, that's what your language does for me, and I think it's the kind of water, not any kind of water, the kind of water that I think coral distills, far out in the ocean. I come from an island too, Trinidad...
JK: Yes.
DB: Tobago. And there's a little pool of water out called the Nylon Pool, terribly named by Princess Margaret, but we'll forget that right now. But what it is, it's the kind of whittling away by coral on the ocean floor. And suddenly they grow this huge pool of just clear crystal beautiful water. And I wanna tell you that your language strikes me like that.
JK: Gosh, thank you.
DB: No, it does. Isn't that... Doesn't it? There are such...
JK: I don't know how I'll be able to go home after all this.
DB: Well, you needn't. We can...
[LAUGHTER]
And I wanna go on a little bit more about it. I have read your work and I deeply admire that then kind of bone clarity of it, and there's something else that it does, your prose, I think, is unforgiving.
JK: Yes.
DB: Yes. I think you mean it to be that.
JK: Absolutely, I do.
DB: And it's unrepentant and for me it's so unsparing. It really aches. And particularly your new book, which I sat and read last night, and today I'm awash in it.
JK: Yes.
DB: And in its sadness...
JK: That's alright, to be...
DB: Yeah. No, I like to be awash.
[LAUGHTER]
JK: Yes.
DB: There's so much sadness and then not sadness and then, and it is as if... And loss and no loss...
JK: Yes.
DB: And ambivalence, and all kinds of things in there. And I think, I know you are talking about your brother in it and his death from AIDS, and yet sometimes it is as if you are talking about something so much bigger too.
JK: Yeah. That...
DB: His death is large, but so much.
JK: Yeah. But then we all... Yes, and we all will die and I suppose that will be large too. I guess what surprised me is that when he died on... And yeah, especially when he died, I think it surprised me that it wasn't ordinary. And no one had told me that each, each death was... Oh, I suppose people had told me and I just hadn't noticed because I'm very superstitious... No, not superstitious. I'm very afraid of death and actually find it overdone. I think too many people have done it. And… It might be one of those things that could go out of fashion, and so I think I hadn't paid attention to other people's grief, to what other people, when they looked so sad, I just thought it was... Perhaps if I looked closely, I would catch it too. So I never paid attention, and I was just amazed at how special it seemed, how unique it seemed, and I... But it was this thing that everybody has done. So yeah, I was...
JK: I still find it strange, actually, and I think there must be something wrong with the way I feel about it because other people seem to have these experiences and go on, but maybe they don't, and maybe they haven't told me. But in particular... In a way this interview could enlighten me in some way too. I had a writer, and she's probably, perhaps in this room, if I'm lucky, from Trinidad, call me, and she said that this book I just published was very controversial. So I thought, wow, not again. Because I did write a book before that people found controversial, but though I didn't. So I said, "Well, what was controversial about it?" And she said, "Oh, you know, the subject." Because in the West Indies, or certainly where... Parts of the West Indies where I'm from, people still didn't discuss or are unlikely to admit that this disease had come close to them. And I was wondering if you knew if this was as so or...
JK: It just sort of strikes me as a bit late, really, to be still squeamish about it.
DB: Yeah. I think, I think it is. And I think you've explored well in the book this business of shame.
JK: Yeah.
DB: Over the ordinary in a way.
JK: Yeah.
DB: And how that works. And also of course, machismo in the Caribbean which...
JK: Yes, but strangely I hadn't associated certainly the Caribbean that I knew of with machismo or because men where I'm certainly in Antigua where I'm from, they seem extremely foolish. And I do think that on the whole, men seem extremely foolish. They seem terribly unstable and...
DB: That's at the core of machismo.
JK: Is it.
DB: Isn't it?
JK: Yes.
DB: There's something ridiculous and...
JK: Yes.
DB: And moving on about it.
JK: It's a real... Yes. It's a mass then, I can see. All right. But, I think that where I'm from anyway, that we didn't take it very seriously. It was quite clear that women had a better understanding of something. I'm very, female identified, I suppose. Which ought to be obvious, but we women are also a strange lot and don't often like ourselves very much. But as for, yeah, I've always... Where I'm from, women seem to have a larger grip on things, a stronger grip on things. And men seem, unless, of course, they're sort of a, they hield to a straight line for, instance, they have one wife and a set of children with only her. Where I'm from, that's highly unusual, or used to be. Well, that would seem to be a sign of instability.
DB: But I also think that we have these, that it is true about the women that we know and the women that populate the works of women writers from that region. But it is such a paradox. It is a powerless powerfulness or a powerful powerlessness in these women that we know.
JK: It would seem to be so but that I sometimes wonder if it's because we only define power as something… if it has a great effect on large numbers of people on the world, then it's power. But if it has effect on, just, one person, then it's not, and in my case, in my familial case, and I'm sure you can find it in yours, too, I experienced, greater feeling, violence, love, whatever, in one individual more than I did from... And I would, I would characterize my experience as being, an engagement with power. Even though I've never been in the British Navy or anything like that, so I think, no, it's not. And it might be a mistake women make to think that the things that men do are the only things worth doing...
DB: And I do like women withhold power.
JK: Yeah.
DB: Yes.
JK: Yeah. It's very interesting. And it's very interesting to, and very important, I think, perhaps to realize that the things men do are extremely wrong and we needn't do them.
DB: Yeah.
JK: We might just leave that alone.
DB: Yes.
DB: I think so. I think so. At the end of your book, A Small Place, I'll go with that one because you had mentioned it earlier, there is a beautiful kind of lamentation or incantation to the paradox of beauty and hardship in the Caribbean. You say "it's as if then the beauty, the beauty of the sea, the land, the air, the trees, the market, the people, the sounds they make were a prison. And as if everything and everybody inside it were locked in, and everything and everybody that is not inside it were locked out." How do you feel now since that piece when you go back to Antigua?
JK: Fairly much the same. Antigua is one of those places that remains the same, and I think everybody counts on that. Certainly the people who will visit it as tourists, will count on its unchanging-ness because then it'll be just so much trouble to go look for another place. And the people there, count on it being unchanging, because then it would be so much trouble to adjust to something new, something different. It is unchanged. Yes. They... actually, when it does change, it changes for the worst, but not for the visitor, only for the worst, for the people who actually have to live there. It is, it is one of those strange places I see. It's locked in... Well, we all are to some degree, all of us in this part of the world, more than say, I mean, for instance, the people in Bosnia and that part of the world are not locked in the moment that began with a sentence that goes like this, "In the year 1492…" But we, for the most part in this part of the world are locked in such a sentence.
JK: … and the people in Antigua and in places like that. Places like you and I are from, though, I will limit it to what I know, which is Antigua. I'm not... are locked in a volume that begins in the year 1492, but then even more so, they're locked in a particular paragraph that would begin... That the beginning of that paragraph would be, "And Columbus sailed by waved and named it after a church... " because by that time he had run out of names for people who were close to him or who meant anything to him. So he just began to name places after landmarks in Spain somewhere. And Antigua is one of those, a little church somewhere that he might have had some particular feeling about. Well, that little church that he might have had some particular feeling about is what my history is trapped in. That little church, that little name. And so we will begin in this little paragraph, and we are in this little paragraph, and none of us seem to know how to get out of it. Every effort one of us makes is met with derision, and anger, contempt. None of us really know how to... If one of us does know how to do it, the rest of us will not allow the one to... Will not admit the view of the one, how to get out of this. It just isn't admitted. It remains trapped in this volume. And in particular, this paragraph, a small paragraph, mind you, very small.
JK: And yet it's a small paragraph, shall I go on with this metaphor, shall I continue?
[LAUGHTER]
DB: I like it, yes.
JK: It's a small paragraph. Unless, of course, the people in the paragraph were to come across a sentence that ends with the Battle of Trafalgar. The Battle of Trafalgar is a huge event in the volume of the English people. But, even though the people in the paragraph of Antigua, and Antigua itself plays a large part in that thing called Trafalgar Square, the Battle of Trafalgar, it really doesn't come up. So they... the people where I'm from they've been a part of large events, but, conveniently, when it's not suitable, they're not in it at all. And they have no way of claiming, I mean, it would be very appropriate for the people of Antigua to really make a history or just to reflect on the parts that they have played in all sorts of things in this large volume. But they're unable to, they're trapped. You see, if you were writing a book, you would just sort of trap them again and again in little words like, and, but, and maybe a semicolon, they'd be trapped in it.
DB: That's interesting. Now, did you you reach out of that paragraph with your...
JK: I've tried...
DB: In writing, yourself?
JK: No. I've tried to reach out of the paragraph. I've tried, but it would be impossible for me to say that I have succeeded. And I don't really so much wish to succeed. I only wish to make the effort.
DB: Yeah. But you have, you know.
JK: Well, thanks.
DB: I think your work does. And it leads me to my next question. When you began writing which writers were in your firmament, did you see your work in the context of, let us say, other Caribbean novelists? And at that time, you know, the generation before us, mostly male sort of Lamming and Lovelace and Naipaul, say ...
JK: Well...
DB: When you began to write, did you...
JK: No, I in fact had had no idea that there was such a thing as the West Indian writer. And I met Derek Walcott, who we had the same editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and well, it's very flattering to me how I met him. So I won't tell you, it reflects very well on me.
DB: Do we wanna know?
No, no, no. No, no, no. It's very embarrassing.
DB: Oh, go on.
JK: It's not... It's only embarrassing to hear myself saying that... Telling you that someone, I greatly admired praised me in public and now that I've said that.
DB: Okay.
JK: And I was very young. But anyway, after I met him, he said, Well, have you read... And he made a long list of names that I had never heard of Lamming or any of these people. And I said, no, And he made me a reading list. And I read them and I was glad I hadn't read them...
DB: Before.
JK: Yes, because, it would've been very discouraging.
[LAUGHTER]
DB: What do you mean of that? Certainly had visions of the novels.
JK: Well, yes, I know. And, yes, these, as with these... Well, Naipaul would've been very discouraging to have read if you hadn't written before, because, and Naipaul is simply very discouraging. [LAUGHTER]
JK: Even though he's a most wonderful writer. I... But it's really, you have to, well, just go on, read it and go on. And then the other people, and this is really very... The other list that he had... The people on the list for the most part, these men, I... Especially George Lamming, and since I think Canada is still a free country, so I can... I will just speak these things very freely. I thought George Lamming read like those sort of tiresome old men in something who was on the crew of... Well, Trafalgar, one of those ships and this very pompous man writing. And so I didn't like that at all. And then the other things, they were all alright, and you really can see, I think, the history of certain, again, the British West Indies writing changing with this generation of women, and then lots of people who are after us, because they were just sort of not...
JK: … not interested in the English tradition of writing. They were somehow free of that, and because they were free of that, they could find their own voices, which is in the English tradition. But because they didn't care about it, because it wasn't for them. They just were able to do something new, I mean, you read Merle Hodge. I think, people don't quite understand how wonderful... Well, maybe they do and they haven't told me again. Merle Hodge is... And all those, you know, long good sould, all those... They're so vital, they're so new. They're also our... It's a way of finding out something about an intimacy of history. They're intimate with history and it seemed to me and this is a gross generalization, but that's the thing with generalizations, they're gross.
[LAUGHTER]
JK: It seemed to me that the men I had read were... I couldn't write like that. They had a formal-ness about it.
DB: Yes.
JK: They had... They actually still believed in something called respectability.
DB: Yes.
JK: And the women didn't seem to.
DB: Yes. Yes.
JK: So I'm glad I had not read them. Strangely enough, Derek is not like that. Derek Walcott, I shouldn't be calling him Derek, 'cause he's...
DB: Oh, well … but he is sometimes, every once in a while, a line or two about a woman gets cast in...
[LAUGHTER]
JK: Yes. For Derek. Well, yes, but that shouldn't deter us.
DB: No, not at all. Not from Walcott.
JK: It shouldn't deter us.
DB: No.
JK: Yes.
DB: We forgive him that.
[LAUGHTER]
JK: We don't do even have to.
DB: His moments though.
JK: Yes.
DB: Okay. But you know, it was interesting to me when I first came to your work, having read them before. And the departure your work made from them in terms of their work, that was always about a young person, growing up in the Caribbean against the backdrop of kind of colonialism, nurtured and pushed by an ambitious and self-sacrificing mother or aunt or grandmother.
JK: Yes.
DB: Which, you know, in some sense, we all have that.
JK: Yes. It was very true.
DB: And to be educated and go away and return as a successful man or something, or if not returning, then at least the success was living abroad too. And you made these departures suddenly in Annie John. It was not a boy whom all the community's aspirations were lodged in.
JK: Yes.
DB: It was a girl.
JK: Yes.
DB: Who had been told by a mother how to be a good girl, a decent girl also. With the assumption that decency might be unavailable to her.
JK: Yes.
DB: Yes. And your plain speaking-ness about it, so that their mothers were always completely comforting. Completely...
JK: Yes.
DB: But your mother suddenly shook everything.
JK: Well, I wish we were talking about someone else. So for that time we are speaking about me. But I can tell you that the thing that I can see that this generation we are talking about did, let's just stretch again a metaphor that the comforting mother is the mother country.
DB: Yeah.
JK: And that has all the hopes concentrated in the young man. But the young man grows up and meets complete disappointment. And this actually... Or some sort of block, there's some sort of wall and these novels, they end... There is no real triumph, there is no way out. But this novel actually parallels and mirrors the situation that we were in, in relation to the mother country. Here... I mean, when I think of the things that I had to memorize, I used to know all the kings of England, all about their little dealings, their ins and outs, their... how sad they were, how happy they were, how... I knew all this stuff, the geography of the world, the history of the British Empire. And then what to do with it.
[LAUGHTER]
JK: I mean, there is just a point, what to do with it. The Empire did nurture all these minds, all these people, but none of us... We grew up, and then there was absolutely nothing to do, but to go to London and shrivel.
DB: Go away.
JK: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
JK: And I think that what perhaps the women of my generation or the women, period. I think even say someone like Jean Rhys. She represents something too in this. What we did was to say that the mother's nourishing was really an illusion, that it was what to do, what were we going to do when we grew up to be women. We couldn't... We were prepared to be women with minds, but then the reality of our lives was that we were women trapped in, as again, these paragraphs, these small sentences. And I think that we simply said, this is the truth. It wasn't that we were going to do something else. I don't know that I say in any of these books or these characters do anything else. They haven't gone off to be Madame Curie or something. But they do have the ... state the reality of the situation is that the nurturing mother turns out to be in the end a bit of a worm in your apple. I do say that.
DB: That's really interesting because of course men could, within their location in the society, think about, let us say coming back to be ministers, doctors, lawyers, etcetera. Women, this was not part of their purview. So of course it shook all of that.
JK: Yes. And they come back to replicate this society that was so stunting to all of us. And they really never ...
DB: Knowingly too, at times.
JK: Well, yes. And they never really examined … I mean really, I don't mind utter misery as long as I know the truth of it. And I think in many of our situations we were in utter misery and not knowing the truth of it, pretending it was something else. When I could just see my father every day getting up and putting on his little brown felt hat. It was very hot the felt hat in the hot sun. It is what an Englishman...
DB: My grandfather put on a suit.
JK: Well, there you go. That's what an Englishman looks like.
DB: White a shirt and a dark suit.
JK: Yes, again.
DB: Every day. And a hat.
JK: Yes. And what you could see in it were people reaching for dignity, because a dignified person dressed like that. But rarely a suit and a hat can't give you something you don't have.
DB: Yes. You write women frankly, like honestly, and without romanticism. Your women are clear sighted, awfully clear sighted, awfully self-critical too. Not simply clear sighted though. In reference to other people, but in reference to themselves too, they arrive at some kind of grim conclusion that the world is just perhaps a little hopeless. And that is the truth of it. And they act with a kind of also a studied kind of distancing, self-preservation. I like your women.
JK: I'm glad you said that.
DB: I like your women. I was wondering there. And maybe you've answered this already: how did you come by this honesty? What about their world affords them this kind of sightedness?
JK: Gosh. I've been told that so much now, in the last two weeks that I'm honest and I just want to say quickly that I'm just as capable of deceit and dishonesty and lies as anybody in this room, if not more so. But I think that when I'm writing, I mean, one of the reasons I repeat and go back is because I ... so much when I'm writing, I want really, I want clarity and truth. And even though I understand that the truth has many different things about it and they might even be conflicting.
DB: But you do do that with your lines too. You do go back and say, "Not so. Else." That's the wonderful thing too about.
JK: This is true, but it's only because for me, when I'm writing I would like it to be clear. But when I'm not writing, I am not clear at all. And yes, as for this truth, I'm sorry I've gotten saddled with it, because it makes me sound very virtuous and I'm not. I really am not. And I insist on it, I insist on not being virtuous. But I don't know. I hadn't ... People ask me all these questions about my work and so on. I of course don't quite know how to answer them, 'cause I hadn't written with any sort of idea in mind that I'd be asked about it. And I of course would never really read my work unless someone asked me to. I don't go back and read it. It doesn't interest me once I'm finished with it. So … you know, the truth, I'm glad it seems truthful because I do think that actions between human beings should be informed by the truth as much as possible, simply as much as possible. Because so much is always at stake, especially for the person you're interacting with, a child just for instance is powerless. It's very important that it be truthful and honest. But...
DB: Well, you know, it is a gift, and I think it is a gift that we need. Your women also narrate themselves, you write in the first person.
JK: Yes. I don't know how to do that other thing, that ... Yes. I don't know. And I don't know how to write dialogue. I tell you all the things that are generally considered great that I can't do. I can't write dialogue and I can't write in any other way but I. I don't... Yes, I'm... And so since you feel so ... let me just point out that the flaw of this great thing, something you could say that was very bad about me or a fault in me, in what you just described, that I write in this way, that I'm deeply narcissistic. I just thought I'd tell you that. I know you might be thinking it. And I also wanted to...
DB: Which leads me to my other question.
[LAUGHTER]
JK: She was thinking it too.
[LAUGHTER]
DB: As someone deeply familiar also with narcissism, your women do not fall in love. They fall in love with themselves perhaps, but they do not fall in love. They never surrender to falling in love. And also a feature of their narrating themselves to, sex is lust, curiosity, exploration.
JK: Yes.
DB: It's self-conscious, which is not a bad thing. I think we ought to sift out these things as in Lucy, or The Autobiography of my Mother, or Annie John for that matter.
JK: Annie John was in love, but then she was...
DB: Yes, with the red girl.
JK: Oh, and Gwen. But Gwen in particular betrayed her.
DB: You've all read Annie John. Yes? Good.
0:32:42.0 JK: You should say no, just to annoy.
[LAUGHTER]
JK: But they do not fall in love.
DB: In love. I'm not suggesting that they should. I just wanna know how you...
JK: Well, yes. Now, I... Yes. I have to, In regard to narcissism, I was just wondering if it was a sort of regional and not only regional but cultural experience. I don't know if you attended this conference I once went to, I think it was in Trinidad.
DB: For the women writers?
JK: The women writers. Yes.
DB: No, I didn't make it.
JK: Yes. And it was very interesting. I think I'll even name names sometime.
DB: Oh, okay.
JK: Just to be disreputable. But... Should I name? Only because I wouldn't want to... well. Anyway, I was with... Two things happened. I was with two rather grand women, a bit older than I am, writers. One lives in... They both live in America, actually. And they were both in workshops, in some Harlem workshop in the early '50s. And one of them has gone on to be, you'll guess who they are. To be widely known and very well thought of. And the other one has more of a minor...
DB: Paule Marshall.
JK: Paule Marshall and Rosa Guy, yes.
DB: Rosa Guy. Okay.
JK: And they were... Let me see. Rosa Guy was being given an honour, some sort of honour. And it was that afternoon that Paule Marshall went off to view Tobago, so she couldn't show up. And then when they met, they were... They had known each other when they were young, and so they were... And Paule Marshall's a very... Had always been sort of a West Indian girl, even as she's older. And Rosa Guy has always been a West Indian, great big sexpot which she still is. And they just both continued this relationship as they knew each other. Paule Marshall became more girlish and Rosa Guy became more flirtatious. And they wouldn't listen to each other at all. They were both only … and you can say it's a rivalry of women and so on, but they so distinctly reminded me of my mother.
JK: And then there was one... These are brilliant women. All these women. You've never seen anything like it. This is extraordinary women, gathered for this conference. And they were supposed to... There was one panel where people were supposed to talk about literature. And lo and behold, everyone of them got up, threw away their lectures and started to speak about their lives. And I thought this is only my mother, but it's a whole...
[LAUGHTER]
JK: I just was surrounded by these characters who were so familiar. And I began to wonder if it was in any way, I don't know, limited to us. I've never been with women more narcissistic than I am when I'm with a West Indian woman. And you're quite free to now throw the vegetables at me.
[LAUGHTER]
DB: But how about falling in love here now?
JK: How about... Well, we've fallen in love with ourselves.
DB: With ourselves.
JK: Yes. And it must be said that the West Indian woman has a particularly beautiful self, so I don't blame her.
[LAUGHTER]
DB: I wanna know how we're doing for time. I'm having a great time.
JK: So am I, actually.
DB: I have a sneaky suspicion. What are we?
Speaker: About five minutes more. And then it's on to questions.
DB: Are you kidding? We haven't touched the surface. Anyway, I think also the other departure that you make in your work in At the Bottom of the River, which I know you said you'd never write anything like that again, but okay. I am so interested in how you explore, unlike the generation of Caribbean writers, let us say before you. The homoerotic as well in that work, like...
JK: The homoerotic, she said.
DB: The homoerotic.
[LAUGHTER]
DB: In, for example, in Annie John and her love for the red girl in particular. And in that piece, a beautiful, beautiful passage in the story in At the Bottom of The River called, In the Night.
JK: Oh, yes.
DB: Now I'm a girl, but one day I will...
JK: Yes.
DB: That's such a lovely, lovely passage. He says, I don't have time to read it. It says, "But one day I will marry a woman, red-skin woman with black bramble bush hair and brown eyes, who wear skirts that are so big and I can easily bury my head." It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
JK: That's just a description... Well, that's just purely a description of my mother, really. I've never understood, I don't understand that. It's so clear that women... Where I'm from anyway, have these extraordinary, intimate relationships. My mother and her friend were always exchanging these remedies for regulating their menstrual flow or regulating... I think I've put it this way. They were always trying to strengthen their womb to carry a child or strengthen their womb to repel a child. And it seems to me deeply erotic, these intimate conversations. And I remember somebody coming over when I was last, what was... One time I was visiting my mother recently. And my mother offered her some food and she said, "Oh, I can't. I've just taken my maiden blush tea." And that was ... Oh, yes. She was having her period or about to have her period or something. But I don't know why they're not ... Of course in America, well, we're not in America, we're in Canada, so maybe you're slightly different.
DB: Well...
[LAUGHTER]
JK: Yes. But in America, you needn't ... People have always thought that I was writing about, in those relationships about actual sex between people, because in America we are not quite able to imagine the gesture to something and without the actual doing of it. And oftentimes the greatest pleasure is to be had in some things, and there are a few of them, the greatest pleasure to be had from them is the gesture, not the actual thing. And so, yes.
DB: No, I think what you allow in your work is that sensuality. An admission of that sensuality that people share. And without the social kind of strictures of having them formed in a particular way.
JK: Yes. But you know what, I think it's that we are very vulnerable to these feelings of shame. And I think in our case, they're terribly misplaced, because what we really feel ashamed about is what happened to us historically. But, I think if we all were to sink into the history, this great humiliation, we'd just throw ourselves into the sea. So instead, and perhaps it's a great survival tactic, I might have to write a self-help book on this, how to survive a deep humiliation is to turn it into shame about the little things you do. The little things that are essential to doing, which is to having your very best, deepest love affair with someone who looks just like you, but without actually doing anything about it. You might not really want to get into a certain aspect of it, but your deepest of most abiding love, might be just your dear friend, Gwen. Perfectly. Perfectly. Wonderful.
DB: Two questions and then I'll open to the audience. One, you don't write in dialect, it appears in parenthesis.
JK: That's right. Yes.
DB: Why?
JK: Well, I no longer understand dialect, and I didn't learn to read and write in dialect. A. It was told to me that, it was made disgusting. I wasn't allowed to do it. But I have no... My attachment to writing, comes from a certain source. It comes from the King James version of the Bible for instance, or Milton or Shakespeare, something like that. I don't know how to write in dialect. Not only that, I no longer even understand it. And I'm sure, there's much to be made of that fact that I no longer understand it, that when I go back to Antigua, everybody has to slow down. And actually my little niece just last January was teaching me and my children how to speak what she calls Antiguan. And, and we had a great time. My children remember it better than I do, how to say it. And I think also I may have... Perhaps psychologically I resisted, I think, because one of the things I noticed about the dialect and it may be different in other places, but I noticed that it was always in the present. And I did not like that. I do not like...
DB: It is in the present. Even the past is in the present.
JK: Even the past, everything is in the present.
DB: I come yesterday.
JK: And I thought that that was psychologically... That was a psychological stricture, because then you can't really lay out things in front of you. If you're going to cram everything in now, then you won't have any time to consider it. So I like to have everything in front of me, including the future, and then to wait. And so I do find that psychologically, and even psychologically, intellectually, unbearable. I want the present to be larger than just this.
DB: But, you know, it's wonderful how you do use it in the latest book, My Brother.
JK: Yes.
DB: When, especially when you quote your brother.
JK: Yes. Yes.
DB: Like when he says...
[DIALECT]
JK: Yes.
DB: That's it, it.
[DIALECT]
DB: It knocks against your standard in a interesting, interesting and deepening way to it.
JK: Well, I suppose in that case, I really did want the thing that was happening to impinge on the way I was writing. I wanted it to go... I also wanted to say that I was translating in some ways. And needless to say, many things will be lost in translation, as they say.
DB: Yeah. Okay. Last, my last question and then we'll have a few questions from the audience. You now live in the US. How do you construct home and... Oh, that's too big, isn't it?
JK: No, it's not.
DB: No.
JK: How do I construct it? I first of all live in a land-locked place, and I don't see water at all unless it falls from the sky.
DB: Doesn't that hurt?
JK: No.
DB: It hurts me sometimes.
JK: Really? No. I rather like it, because it makes me remember what I can't see, more than if I could see it every day. And also it makes me have, sometimes I say home and my family isn't sure what I mean. The home with them or the home I'm from, and I live in both places. And they slightly contradict each other. But again, I think that there's a truth in it and it's a truth that I like. It works quite well.
DB: About this...
JK: Yes.
DB: Balance.
JK: Yes.
JK: It's not a balance, actually it's a tug. But I seem to like living like that. I like to live with a bit of grit or some, something disturbing. Yes. I'm very comfortable, mind you, but I'm also very uncomfortable.
DB: Yeah. I sometimes wonder if that's not a feature of just how black people got brought to this part of the world. It's like some ancestral memory of this tug that we will... This discomfort...
JK: But you see, no doubt true, but I think it's a part of all of human life there. It's... I mean, let's say we had an ideal world, we live in. Just, there wasn't the question of race or sex or things like that. Just to get out of bed and to figure out who you are and to cross the room and pour the coffee, and not to be able to make sense of things until you know you've had a mouthful of caffeine, which is a drug. And just to sort of maneuver yourself through the day, to the car, to the boat, to whatever you have to do. I think that's very uncomfortable. I think just to be alive is very uncomfortable.
DB: I agree. There's a way the body resists being what it is and some...
****
RANDY: Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson in Antigua in 1949, and in her late teens was sent to New York City to work as an au pair. She spent some time in her early twenties, in college, before turning herself more fully to writing both fiction and non-fiction for places like The Village Voice and Paris Review. By 1973, her work was generating enough attention that she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid to distance herself from her disapproving family. Thereafter, she worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker and published a series of novels and works of non-fiction, including Annie John, A Small Place, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother. A longtime Vermont resident and the recipient of many American and international literary awards and honours, Jamaica Kincaid is Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
The audio recording of Jamaica Kincaid in conversation with Dionne Brand was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1997. It's used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives is produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, graphic design by Amy Haakmat and research support from Gregory Ellis.
For more about Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. You can also listen to all 26 episodes of season one as well with interviews and readings by Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Kramer, Lee Maracle and more. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives.