Autobiogrpahy Of My Mother

7 Pages 1711 Words

Many of Jamaica Kincaid's writings contain characters not unlike herself and upon reading her works or summaries of them, one would discover Kincaid to be a hardened Carribean woman with a work history of waiting on others and a personal history of suffocation and desolation. “The Autobiography of My Mother,” written by Kincaid in 1996, attempts to explain a mother from the point of view of a child who never knew her; a child who wrestles with this lost and must accept her mother as the person her own self could have been. With a strong tone of detachment, Jamaica Kincaid creates an autobiographical character who lives in extreme loneliness because she never had a family, most specifically a mother- a very important factor in creating an individual's identity. Kincaid’s character uses her furious will to attempt to define life as it would be if one rejected all the things that immediately define them at birth: family, heritage, language, etc. comes to the knowledge that to live underneath an identity is a crime.
The character in this excerpt defines herself as a child without a mother. She explains her emptiness with dark imagery and metaphors to “a bleak, black wind” and tells how she would always look over her shoulder “to see if someone was coming... I was just looking for that face, the face I would never see, even if I lived forever.” She also talks about how not understanding any type of her own history made her “vulnerable, hard, and helpless; on knowing this I became overwhelmed with sadness and shame and pity for myself.” Instead of being in a state of grievance, this character has replaced her sadness with pity for herself. The character is able to recognize her situation and replace intangible feelings with feelings she can act upon: pity. The pity she has for herself causes her to disassociate herself from relationships with anyone, not allowing anything to touch her emotionally.
The child's ...