Abstract
Through locating the instances of unreliable narration and scrutinizing the mode and performative nature of the narrator’s account in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), this essay argues that the novel exposes the pathology of colonialism. More precisely, by reading the novel alongside David Scott’s description of what would constitute a moral and reparatory history, and Kehinde Andrews’s work on the psychosis of whiteness, the essay suggests that Kincaid’s text constructs the history that Scott advocates and reveals the psychology that allows the legacy of slavery and colonialism to continue.
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Notes
- 1.
I deliberately use the lay term “maniac” here as opposed to a medical term for two reasons: first, the characters in these novels do not display any symptoms that can be straightforwardly associated with a specific diagnosable mental illness; second, as Evelyn O’Callaghan points out, “it is foolhardy to attempt even a tentative medical diagnosis of a fictional character” (90)—according to Lillian Feder it is even “absurd” (cited in O’Callaghan 91).
- 2.
Incidentally, the snakes may also remind us of Kincaid’s novel Lucy, in which the protagonist connects herself with Lucifer from Milton’s Paradise Lost to explain her rebellion against her mother and colonialism. A similar Miltonian connection may exist in The Autobiography of My Mother, in which Xuela tells us that she was born into, and lives in, a “false paradise” (32) and that a picture on the wall in Eunice’s house (the washerwoman with whom she lives when she is very young) is entitled “HEAVEN” (9).
- 3.
The sex scene mentioned in this list reminds us of another incident in the novel: when Xuela is later living with a white man (who will become her husband) and his wife, the first time that she has sex with him she ties her own wrists together, which can be read as a performance of slavery as it overtly depicts for us an image of bondage. Gary E. Holcomb and Kimberly S. Holcomb use S/M theory to analyse the novel and they argue that “[t]he psychodrama plays out the taboo (white male master/black female slave) in a way that fascinates us while it repels. Regardless of our own subject positions as readers, we become voyeurs of colonial history. Knowing that Xuela controls the scene does not comfort us but instead involves us in both the construction and subversion of colonial ideology” (972).
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Romdhani, R. (2018). Performing Delusional Evil: Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother. In: Ledent, B., O'Callaghan, E., Tunca, D. (eds) Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98180-2_7
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