Cruelty and Loneliness in an Island Paradise

On a crisp New England midday, it might have been tempting to stay in a room where peony-hued bookshelves exploded off walls the color of unripe mangoes. But Jamaica Kincaid issued an irresistible invitation--”Let’s go out, shall we?--and through a door framed in lime-green woodwork, she led the way to her miracle of a garden.

In a region known for maple trees, Kincaid cultivates bamboo. Frost gnaws at the air, and still her hibiscus blossoms bloom defiantly. Gentle in person, Kincaid is nonetheless a formidable force. Words perform artful somersaults upon her pages, and nature, it seems, is no less amenable. Kincaid folds herself onto a bench, and, with only a glance toward heaven, sun begins to beat down. She remarked, “I think the reason it works here is that it is so much the opposite that I am able to forget where I come from.”

But not for long, not for always. With her husband, composer Allen Shawn, and their two “somewhat brown” children, Kincaid, 48, seems to have created a small slice of Eden, complete with garden. She is from Antigua, a Caribbean vacation mecca that anyone who has not read her books might assume was the inspiration for her own personal version of paradise found. But every work proves that cruelty and pain and loneliness are Kincaid’s legacies from her tropical island childhood. Her latest book, “My Brother” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is no exception. An army of red ants savagely attacks the title character within days of his birth, and 33 years later, after he has died, a lizard runs up his mother’s leg at the graveyard. These are among Kincaid’s more benign recollections about the place, and the people, she has never left behind.

“That was one of the difficulties for people to live there, that they thought it was supposed to be paradise,” Kincaid said, her voice harsh. “They do not see people working hard and saving their money. They see people dressed casually, on vacation, spending money. They think the point of living is to have a good time and be relaxed and to be in paradise. And in that way, they dishonor the everyday nature of their lives. That is why I do not believe in paradise. It is death.”

Death hovers close in “My Brother”: death of the soul, death of the spirit, death of the body, death of the truth. Starting to write after 9 each night, then “staggering up to bed” at 4:30 a.m., she poured the story out in a matter of months last winter, following the death from AIDS of her brother, Devon.

“Why is it so new, why is this worn-out thing, someone dying, so new, so new?” Kincaid asks in this new work.

In a sense Kincaid lived her brother’s death, which is more than she would presume to say for his life. Kincaid was 13 when Devon was born, one of three boys her mother would bear by “this father who was not my father,” the man her mother married long after Kincaid’s father disappeared. By 17, Kincaid was on a plane, her first trip away from the island that for her was more inferno than idyll. Still bearing her given name of Elaine Potter Richardson, she was headed for New York to work as a nanny.

It was to be her salvation, but she could not begin to know it. As a girl she was punished and scoffed at for speaking so well, so precisely. Once, in a memory that returned to her as she was writing “My Brother,” her mother burned all her books, every last one. Kincaid explained: “I want to say, this is not a mother like your mother. This is a mother like you have never known.” Her mother, a recurring figure of evil in her work, berated her for daring to think she might write: “A dangerous thing, but by the time I realized it was dangerous, it was too late. I could not get rid of it.”

For contemporary literature, that proved to be a blessing, said Robert Steptoe, professor of English and African-American Studies at Yale University. “One of the great developments in literature in the second half of this century has been the presence of powerful new voices from the Caribbean who really have to be considered American voices as well as Caribbean voices. Jamaica Kincaid is one,” said Steptoe. In addition, Steptoe said, Kincaid has become an important presence in a category of writing called the immigrant narrative, in which individual stories play against the greater theme of coming to the New World, coming to the United States.

Kincaid tripped into the world of belles-lettres through a friendship with a New Yorker magazine writer, George W.S. Trow. Soon Kincaid was writing for the magazine herself, and before too long she was married to the son of the magazine’s then-editor, the late, legendary William Shawn. In between she took to wearing jodhpurs that made her long legs look like they reached to the sky. She cropped her hair and dyed it yellow. She wore flame-red lipstick.

Her first book, “At the Bottom of the River,” a dreamlike collection of short stories that made her a literary celebrity, appeared in 1983. Two years later, her novel “Annie John” was one of three finalists for the international Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. “A Small Place” raged about racism and corruption in Antigua. Next came more fiction, “Lucy” (1990), about a girl from the West Indies who goes to New York to work as a nanny. In 1996, Kincaid came out with “The Autobiography of My Mother”--despite its title, a novel.

The same year, Devon died. Only then did Kincaid learn that her youngest brother was homosexual. While dying, Devon often boasted about his sexual prowess. He made lewd remarks about female nurses. He alluded to old girlfriends. Now, Kincaid discovered, her brother had not contracted his disease from myriad encounters with women--but from many liaisons with men.

“When I look back now on his life as a heterosexual, I realize that it was an elaborate gesture, always so overdone,” she said. For Kincaid that facade came to represent much of what she loathed about Antigua. In “My Brother,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award, that animus sears every page.

“I cannot imagine not being yourself. I certainly can’t imagine not being a writer,” she said. “And so it crystallized a feeling that I have always had that I could not be myself in such a place.”

Now, she said, in the wake of Devon’s death, “I don’t even want to go back to Antigua anymore. It is such a demoralized place. There is something scary about it, the nights are so thick and scary. The ignorance, the desire not to know is so profound.”

Kincaid flew to Antigua immediately when she learned that her beautiful, gifted brother was ill. The book spares no details of the ignominy of dying of AIDS in a place like Antigua: Usually, she said, “three days, that’s it, they’re dead.” Kincaid determined that for her brother, the course would be different. “This might have been me, dying young. He and I were more alike than anyone else in the family,” she said. “I felt instinctively that of all the lives I might have had, this might have been me.”

So Kincaid took to tending to her brother, a fearsome task for a brother who did not want tending, not from this sister, anyway. She flew home to America and located AZT to send by Federal Express. “I went into debt to do this,” she said. “And I am not a particularly humane person.” It was perplexing, working so hard to help “these people that I had left, who had caused me such pain.”

The pain was once again fuel. Fiction or nonfiction, even when Kincaid is writing about her garden, the subject is always, somehow, her family. “I don’t know what I would write about if I didn’t have this incredible need to write about what happened to me. What happened in our history, in our family,” she said. More specifically, Kincaid never strays far from the impact of her demon-mother.

“In the end I am writing about the relationship between powerful people and not powerful people,” she said. “I don’t think anyone could destroy us as powerfully as she did.”

In “My Brother,” jarring, graphic descriptions of Devon’s final days are juxtaposed against bitter descriptions of the toll on Antigua, and on Kincaid’s own family, of class and British colonialism. Along with the secret of Devon’s homosexuality, his sister learns of his involvement in a murder at age 14. In every sense, the sores fester. The wounds erupt, and Devon’s skin turns deeper and darker, deeper and darker. In the end, his sister writes, he is unimaginably black, “as if his normal amount of pigment . . . had increased from some frightening source.”

Kincaid describes the precise fashion in which pus pours out of parts of her brother’s body, and in much the same way, her words spill forth onto the page. “I would not say that writing this book was purgative,” she said. Some might label the book cathartic, but only those who have never unmasked deep pain before strangers.

Inevitably, ministering to Devon brought Kincaid into proximity with her mother. But no other closeness resulted. They interacted, and still they clashed. If anything, their gulf grew wider. “What a memory you have!” her mother chastised, as Kincaid looked back on Devon’s birth. Her power of recall, Kincaid realized, was “perhaps the thing she most dislikes about me.”

To Kincaid, these troubling reminiscences are oddly precious. “I do not want ever to be rid of these memories,” she declared. Once again, in the serenity of her fine, fall garden, the ghosts of her youth seemed better locked away. But no, she said: “I am still haunted.” She writes, “I do it, to say ‘here it is.’ I don’t look for relief. I don’t even look for happiness.”

But then the door to the house swung open, and there was happiness. There was Harold, Kincaid’s lanky, basketball-loving fourth-grader. Could he go into town for a taco with Michael?

“First you have to do your Hebrew homework,” his mother reminded him. Harold groaned, the sound every mother has heard. “The rabbi expects it. I expect it,” said Kincaid, a Jewish convert. The door closes hard.

So maybe she has not sought happiness, “but I am so glad to have found some minute of happiness in each day, to have found some clarity, some love.” Kincaid smiled. Harold was finishing his Hebrew homework. Annie, 11, was at a friend’s house. Shawn was in his office, writing. The dishes from breakfast were still not quite washed, the flowers were still quite blooming.

“And I did find love,” she said. “I did find love.”