Daddy Dearest

Jamaica Kincaid takes on a difficult task in her new novel, “Mr. Potter.” The narrator tries to describe a man she hardly knows--her father. Roderick Potter is a taxi driver on Kincaid’s native island of Antigua in the Caribbean. His outer life is uneventful, and his inner life ... well, because he can’t read or write and because the cruelties of history (the island’s and his own) have brutalized and numbed him, he has almost no inner life.

The narrator, who left Antigua then returned years later to visit her father’s grave, uses her literacy--the words and perspective Potter lacked--to exhume him, to vent her frustrated love and pent-up rage. In Kincaid’s trademark repetitive style, she hammers at Potter as if, like a coconut, his shell might split open to reveal sweet meaning or as if meaning might be conjured up by the simple act of drumming.

“Can a human being exist in a wilderness,” she asks, “a world so empty of human feeling: love and justice; a world in which love and even that, justice, only exist from time to time and in small quantities, or unexpectedly, like a wild seedling of some necessary or common food...? The answer is yes and yes again and the answer is no, not really, not so at all.”

The narrator is speaking of Potter but also of herself and of Potter’s father, Nathaniel, a descendant of the African slaves brought to work the sugar cane fields when Antigua was a British colony. The fields are “stilled now but with their history of horror unspeakable imprisoned in each stray blade, each stray stalk.” Nathaniel, likewise illiterate, was a fisherman. He had children by numerous women and refused to support or acknowledge any of them.

Potter has “a line drawn through him, for his father’s name did not appear on his certificate of birth.” His impoverished mother wearies of him and of life. She commits suicide by walking into the sea. The boy, nicknamed Drickie, is sickly and barely survives on a diet of scraps and abuse at the home of a schoolmaster. He takes in “cruelty and ugliness ... silence and indifference ... as if it were breath itself,” and he grows “dull and ugly, in the way of the forgotten.”

A result, the narrator says, balancing pity with condemnation, is that “the absence in him of fatherly feelings toward his own children, all of them, became a skin for Mr. Potter, not like a skin, but a skin itself, a protective covering, something that could not be lived without.”

Potter, lacking the literate person’s ability to conceive of his life as a human story amid many others, isn’t aware of how much he lives by mindless imitation. He becomes a taxi driver because the schoolmaster taught him to drive. He eventually owns three cars because that’s the number owned by his first boss, Mr. Shoub, a Lebanese refugee. He dresses as the schoolmaster did and, like his father, he has many unacknowledged children.

Potter’s aim is to glide through each day’s expected humiliations with a clean shirt, a shiny taxi and a few stock phrases and songs. He doesn’t identify with Shoub or with Dr. Weizinger, a Czech psychiatrist who escaped the Holocaust and makes a living on Antigua as a general practitioner. They could comfort one another, but Potter sees only their strangeness; they see only his ignorance.

The narrator, too, has a line drawn through the space where her father’s name should be. Her mother becomes one of the bitter former lovers who badger Potter in vain for money to buy school supplies for their children. This is territory Kincaid has explored before, in novels that include “My Brother” and “The Autobiography of My Mother”: lovelessness between people bound by blood.

Though her writing is full of feeling, Kincaid isn’t a sentimentalist. Try as the narrator will, Potter’s life yields little in the way of a story. The only drama lies in what she, the first literate member of the family, is able to make of it. And in that story, anger--”Should I have gone beyond mere wishing and walked over to him and grabbed him by the throat and squeezed him by the neck until his body lay limp at my feet?”--is at least as important as love.