Jamaica Kincaid’s Writing and the Maternal-Colonial Matrix

Abstract

Acknowledged as one of the leading women writers from the Caribbean, Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 in St John’s, Antigua. At the age of 19 she left the island for the United States, where she took various jobs before establishing herself as a writer. Kincaid’s father was a carpenter and cabinet-maker. Her grandmother was a Carib Indian, and her mother, Annie, is from Dominica. In 1966 Kincaid went to the United States to pursue her education. She attended college for one year, but became alienated before the second year started and dropped out. Soon afterwards she began to submit freelance articles to magazines, two of which were published in Ms.. With the help of her friend George Trow, she became a contributor to the New Yorker. From 1976 to the present, she has been a staff writer for the New Yorker, contributing some 80 pieces, a few as letters with her name attached, some unsigned, to the ‘Talk of the Town’ section, and over 14 short stories. Her first volume of short stories, At the Bottom of the River, published in 1978, presented modernist dream visions of life in Antigua. Her best work to date is the coming-of-age novel, Annie John, which appeared in 1983. Her collection of short essays on Antigua, A Small Place, was published in 1988.