Jun 4

June is Caribbean Heritage Month in the United States but it is also Read Caribbean Month, an initiative and reading challenge created by Caribbean book blogger BookofCinz. This month on Life Is In Love With Me I’ll be dipping into some of the worlds, books, poems, and written-down visions that Caribbean minds have given to the world.

I love everything about Caribbean creativity - our oral storytelling abilities, our song-like speak, our flamboyance, our folk, our archiving, our pride in our many histories, so much so that we create our own language systems - we speak and know that we will be heard. This month, I’ll be sharing a few Caribbean writers who I have read, studied, or am excited to explore their archive of writing. You can head to the Calabash Archives to look into some of the Caribbean authors I shared last year.

Today we are sitting with the work of Jamaica Kincaid, a writer from the island of Antigua who moved to North America, where she currently resides. Kincaid’s work is prolific. As a novelist, essayist, and gardener, her work has been highly acclaimed since her debut in 1978. Jamaica Kincaid’s legacy has been undeniable across and beyond the diaspora, creating rich discussions about colonialism, loss, identity, and living in the inbetweens of them all. Her style is fluid, and her work often weaves non-fiction alongside fiction to get to the beating heart of stories that center around family life, girlhood turned teenagehood on a small island, social observations, and crumbling systemic structures in lush, thriving lands. Her interest in nature finds its place in her essays about gardening and botany too, as well as her book An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, in collaboration with Kara Walker.

Jamaica Kincaid was among my first introductions to deeply vulnerable and play-no-games prosaic writing that felt, to me, like pure poetry. It was the most Caribbean thing I had found bound in book on the shelves of my university library. Everything I read from Kincaid commanded attention with retellings that sit, limber yet unmistakably rooted, between the realms of beauty and sternness. Her lyrical style of writing merged with her deeply charged and convicting way of calling out systems of oppression and exploitation spoke to me and everyone I spoke to about her. I found this in Annie John, a coming-of-age novella and I heard it clearly in her book A Small Place. A Small Place is not only a look into the root cause of neo-colonial tourism and the infrastructures that make plentiful room for power imbalances and removal of culture and livities integral to land and peoples, but the account is also extremely personal, an echo of past and present thoughts so that travelers looking for an island vacation will not be able to do so without knowing the reality of what their idea of ‘paradise’ actually is. A Small Place helped me establish the ways that I would like to participate in travel and the role that travel writing can hold when it is honest and bravely assertive. Her explorations of family life and bound-up identities in Caribbean homes is also always one of my favorite things about her writing.

If you’re new to Kincaid’s works, a few places to begin would be:

A Small Place

Annie John

The Autobiography of My Mother

Lucy - a semi-autobiographical book

Have you ever read any of Jamaica Kincaid’s work? Which pieces have you most connected to?

It's Read Caribbean Month :: Jamaica Kincaid