Reviews with content warning for Abortion - Autobiografía de mi madre

“And what do I ask? What is the question I can ask? I own nothing, I am not a man. I ask, What makes the world turn against me and all who look like me? I own nothing, I survey nothing, when I ask this question; the luxury of an answer that will fill volumes does not stretch out before me. When I ask this question, my voice is filled with despair… The population of Roseau, that is, the ones who looked like me, had long ago been reduced to shadows; the forever foreign, the margins, had long ago lost any connection to wholeness, to an inner life of our own invention…”

“…a master cannot be a friend. And who would want such a thing, master and friend at once? A man would want that. It is a man who would ask, What makes the world turn, and then would find in his own reply fields of gravity, imaginary lines, tilts and axes, reason and logic, and, quite brazenly, a theory of justice.”

TITLE—The Autobiography of my Mother

AUTHOR—Jamaica Kincaid

PUBLISHED—2022 (orig. 1996)

PUBLISHER—Picador (orig. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

GENRE—literary fiction

SETTING—Dominica

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—first person narrator—septuagenarian MC reflecting back on their life, stream of consciousness writing style, cycles of violence, the real vs the “unreal” & how colonialism tries to gate-keep & destroy entire realities, Indigenous & African diasporic lifeways & beliefs & living realities, loveless family dynamics, systemic patriarchy, Seeing & visions, faith vs fear, what one believes—whose beliefs, shamelessness, marginality

“To say that we had seen this boy float out to meet a woman surrounded by fruit, and then vanish in the swollen waters in the mouth of the river, was to say that we lived in a darkness from which we could not be redeemed. I then and now had and have no use for redemption.”

My thoughts:

This was a fascinating and thought-provoking book. Written in the voice of a very old woman reminiscing on and recollecting her life, and employing dry, blunt observations, using an economy of words, much like an elder who is conserving her energy and very much told in an elder’s voice.

Though most of Xuela‘s characterization comes from statements that she makes about herself, there were a few subtler, excellent moments of her characterization that I loved: 1)“and it is spring (I am not familiar with this, I cannot find any joy in this, I think people associated with it are less than I am but I, Xuela, am not in a position to make my feeling have any meaning)” and 2) “his skin was thin and pink and transparent, as if it were on its way to being skin but had not yet reached the state that real skin is; it was not the skin of anyone I have loved yet and not the skin I dreamed of…” The many different subtle and unsubtle subversions in this book were I think my favorite thing about it.

I also loved the discussion around performance as relates to gender, race, and identity, even as a whole social and cultural phenomenon. And how Xuela was depicted to be who she is without performance or even really self-critique or -analysis. Especially in comparison to the character of her father: Xuela took no responsibility for other ppl’s judgment of her—so that she could hold on to herself—whereas her father’s entire identity was only defined by other people’s judgments—losing whoever “he really might have been”.

I can kind of see why some reviewers call her work “pessimistic”. I understand why a person might want to believe that that is what this work is: a pessimistic view of a particular kind of human experience, of human life. Kincaid actually speaks to this desire *in* the book (her “sermonette”). But I think to dismiss the book as a purely bleak and pessimistic monologue, is to underappreciate the deeper messages of Kincaid’s writing and to underacknowledge the damage done by the forces of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery as depicted by the characters in this novel, and even to risk aligning oneself with the very perspective whose incalculable harm is responsible for the very misery and hopelessness about which she is writing.

I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy stream of consciousness narration and a literary, philosophical challenge. This book is best read in the summertime. You’re going to want to recharge with some easy warmth and vitamin d during and after this one.

Final note: On to MY BROTHER next! I love how each of her books contributes to a larger dialogue between all of the interconnected themes and characters/perspectives.

“…and no matter how swept away I would become by anyone or anything, in the end I allowed nothing to replace my own being in my own mind.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.75

Season: Summer

CW // animal cruelty & death, abortion, sexual content (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

everything else by Jamaica Kincaid—reading her work in order of publication has been extremely rewarding
SULA by Toni Morrison—TBR
ON A WOMAN’S MADNESS by Astrid Roemer
“of colour” by Katherine Agyemaa Agard—TBR
A REGARDED SELF: CARIBBEAN WOMANHOOD AND THE ETHICS OF DISORDERLY BEING by Kaiama L. Glover—TBR
BLACK LOOKS: RACE AND REPRESENTATION by bell hooks—TBR
THE ANNOTATED MRS DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf, edited by Merve Emre—bc Kincaid in AUTOBIOGRAPHY: “… to condemn yourself is to forgive yourself…” 👀 & stream of consciousness, sociocultural critique

Favorite Quotes—

“My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind. …I only came to know this in the middle of my life, just at the time when I was no longer young and realized that I had less of some of the things I used to have in abundance and more of some of the things I had scarcely had at all. And this realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward…”

“He was poor, but it was not because he was good; he had not done enough bad things yet to get rich.”

“In a place like this, brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is sometimes the only thing freely given…”

“…everything in my life, good or bad, to which I am inextricably bound is a source of pain.”

“I had been warned repeatedly by her not to touch this plate, for she had seen me look at it with an obsessive curiosity. I would look at it and wonder about the picture painted on its surface, a picture of a wide-open field filled with grass and flowers in the most tender shades of yellow, pink, blue, and green; the sky had a sun in it that shone but did not burn bright; the clouds were thin and scattered about like a decoration, not thick and banked up, not harbingers of doom. This picture was nothing but a field full of grass and flowers on a sunny day, but it had an atmosphere of secret abundance, happiness, and tranquillity; underneath it was written in gold letters the one word HEAVEN. Of course it was not a picture of heaven at all; it was a picture of the English countryside idealized, but I did not know that, I did not know that such a thing as the English countryside existed. And neither did Eunice; she thought that this picture was a picture of heaven, offering as it did a secret promise of a life without worry or care or want.”

“…on the wall behind the wooden table and chair was a map; at the top of the map were the words "THE BRITISH EMPIRE." These were the first words I learned to read.”

“I was not afraid, because my mother had already died and that is the only thing a child is really afraid of; when I was born, my mother was dead, and I had already lived all those years with Eunice, a woman who was not my mother and who could not love me, and without my father, never knowing when I would see him again, so I was not afraid for myself in this situation. (And if it is not really true that I was not afraid then, it was not the only time that I did not admit to myself my own vulnerability.)”

“And she said that she hoped I would learn to tell the difference between the two: love and hate. To this day, I have tried to tell the difference between the two, and I cannot, because often they wear so much the same face.”

“The stretch of road was new to me, and yet it had a familiarity that made me sad. Around each bend was the familiar dark green of the trees that grew with a ferociousness that no hand had yet attempted to restrain, a green so unrelenting that it attained great beauty and great ugliness and yet great humility all at once; it was itself: nothing could be added to it; nothing could be taken away from it.”

“No love: I could live in a place like this. I knew this atmosphere all too well. Love would have defeated me. Love would always defeat me.”

“She spoke to me then in French patois; in his presence she had spoken to me in English. She would do this to me through all the time we knew each other, but that first time, in the sanctuary of my room, at seven years old, I recognized this to be an attempt on her part to make an illegitimate of me, to associate me with the made-up language of people regarded as not real—the shadow people, the forever humiliated, the forever low.”

“…he was a part of a whole way of life on the island which perpetuated pain.”

“The more he robbed, the more money he had, the more he went to church…”

“From the moment I stepped out of my bed in the early morning to the time I covered myself up again in the dark of night, I negotiated many treacherous acts of deception, but it was clear to me who I really was.”

“That she did not think very much of the person who was most like her, a daughter, a female, was so normal that it would have been noticed only if it had been otherwise: to people like us, despising anything that was most like ourselves was almost a law of nature.”

“…but the person they saw was an expression of my father's desires, an expression of his needs; the personality they were observing was like a suit of clothes my father had made for himself, and eventually he wore it so long that it became impossible to remove, it covered completely who he really was; who he really might have been became unknown, even to himself. …a painful life, a copied life, a life whose origins he did not know.”

“And I learned, too, that no one can truly judge himself; to describe your own transgressions is to forgive yourself for them; to confess your bad deeds is also at once to forgive yourself, and so silence becomes the only form of self-punishment: to live forever locked up in an iron cage made of your own silence, and then, from time to time, to have this silence broken by a designated crier, someone who repeats over and over, in broken or complete sentences, a list of the violations, the bad deeds committed.”

“…I would not allow the passage of time or the full weight of desire to make a pawn of me.”

“It was almost as if I sensed a danger and quickly made myself a defense; in seeing the thing I might be, I too early became its opposite.”

“…the burden of my life: the short past, the unknown future.”

“The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.”

“…and perhaps because I no longer had a future I began to want one very much. But what such a thing could be for me I did not know, for I was standing in a black hole. The other alternative was another black hole, this other black hole was one I did not know; I chose the one I did not know.”

“I had carried my own life in my own hands. …and no matter how swept away I would become by anyone or anything, in the end I allowed nothing to replace my own being in my own mind.”

“Neither this woman nor the tree became a symbol of anything to me. I had come to know that I would rather be all dead or all alive, but never half of one and half of the other at the same time… His mother believed in obeah. His father held the beliefs of the people who had subjugated him. He was not dead; he was not alive.”

“She insisted that I was not my father's child, and that even if I was his child, I was illegitimate. The look of awe and bewilderment that alternately crossed her face when she realized that I welcomed this characterization made me pity her. I wished somehow she would draw inspiration from me. Why am I not valued? is the question she wanted to ask the world, the world as constituted by her mother and her father; but she could not ask such a question, she could not begin to suspect there might be an answer.”

“It also signified defeat yet again, for what would the outcome have been of all the lives of the conquered if they had not come to believe in the gods of the people who had conquered them?”

“There was hardly a day of my life that I did not observe some incident to add fresh weight to this view, for to me history was not a large stage filled with commemoration, bands, cheers, ribbons, medals, the sound of fine glass clinking and raised high in the air; in other words, the sounds of victory. For me history was not only the past: it was the past and it was also the present. I did not mind my defeat, I only minded that it had to last so long; I did not see the future, and that is perhaps as it should be. Why should anyone see such a thing. And yet…and yet, it made me sad to know that I did not look straight ahead of me, I always looked back, sometimes I looked to the side, but mostly I looked back.”

“…a poor man driven out of his mind by a set of events that the guilty and the tired and the hopeless call life.”

“…people who are sad do not sing at all.”

“There is a certain way that life ought to be, an ideal way, a perfect way, and there is the way that life is, not quite the opposite of ideal, not quite the opposite of perfect, it just is not quite the way it should be but not quite the way it should not be either; I mean to say that in any situation, only one or two, maybe even three out of ten, things are just what you have been praying for.”

“…my self was the only thing I had that was my own… The impulse to possess is alive in every heart, and some people choose vast plains, some people choose high mountains, some people choose wide seas, and some people choose husbands; I chose to possess myself.”

“…a blankness that they hope to fill …with the usual things: time divided into years, months, days, or something like that.

They, too, would have made a fetish of the ordinary: the outer skin of the penis, the thin membrane at the opening of the vagina; they, too, would have made things, utensils from a variety of materials, in a variety of shapes, for a variety of uses; they, too, would have observed some violent occurrence in nature the earth rupturing, seas where dry land used to be, darkness where light used to be and would have found in these occurrences promises of some kind, ways to live by, rituals, and a sense of specialness, for they had been spared; and they, too, would have had myths of beginnings and myths of ends.”

“For my father, the sea, the big and beautiful sea, sometimes a shimmering sheet of blue, sometimes a shimmering sheet of black, sometimes a shimmering sheet of gray, could hold no such largesse of inspiration, could hold no such abundance of comfort, could hold no such anything of any good; its beauty was lost to him, blank; to look at it, to see it, was to be reminded of the despair of the victor and the despair of the vanquished at once; for the emptiness of conquest is not lost on the conqueror, faced as such a person is with the unending desire for more and more and more, until only death silences this desire; and the bottomless well of pain and misery that the conquered experiences no amount of revenge can satiate or erase the perpetration of a great injustice.”

“…they brought her up, baptized her a Christian, and demanded that she be a quiet, shy, long-suffering, unquestioning, modest, wishing-to-die-soon person.”

“It is possible that he appeared as yet another irresistible force, the last in her life; it is possible that she loved him passionately.”

“It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.”

“I had never ceased to observe myself, and at the time I could see that what I had lost in physical appeal or beauty I had gained in character. It was written all over me; I did not fail to arouse curiosity in anyone capable of it.”

“…there are many wrongs that nothing can ever make right, the past in the world as I know it is irreversible.”

“…a world cruel beyond ordinary imagining…”

“And yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.”

“The depths of evil, its results, were all too clear to me: its satisfactions, its rewards, the glorious sensations, the praise, the feeling of exaltation and superiority evil elicits when it is successful, the feeling of invincibility I had observed all of this firsthand. All roads come to an end, and all ends are the same, trailing off into nothing; even an echo eventually will be silenced.”

“I am of the vanquished, I am of the defeated. The past is a fixed point, the future is open-ended; for me the future must remain capable of casting a light on the past such that in my defeat lies the seed of my great victory, in my defeat lies the beginning of my great revenge.”

“Romance is the refuge of the defeated; the defeated need songs to soothe themselves, they need a sweet tune to soothe themselves, for their whole being is a wound; they need a soft bed to sleep on, for when they are awake it is a nightmare, the dream of sleep is their reality.”

“… to condemn yourself is to forgive yourself…”

“He was so sure inside himself that all the things he knew were correct, not that they were true, but that they were correct. Truth would have undone him, the truth is always so full of uncertainty.”

“This account is an account of the person who was never allowed to be and an account of the person I did not allow myself to become.”

Content Warnings

2treads's review against another edition

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challenging reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I always enjoy the levels of self-awareness that Kincaid infuses her main characters with. You don't have to like them. They do not care because they know who they are and how they exist within their community. It is interesting that her characters would be viewed as selfish by some while others would clearly see their actions as being of someone who is choosing themself.

The ways in which the people, place, experiences drew reactions of glee, disgust, and commiseration from.me, made me think of similar stories within my own community and, by extension, my country.

I can see how the unfolding of events and the prose might throw some people off, but this way of relationships stories is so common in my country, where a subject mentioned in a memory or retelling launches the legs of a directly connected story or branches into something new yet similar.

Content Warnings

holasisoymaca's review

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dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

"Hablar de mi situación, decírmela a mi misma y a otros, es algo que haría siempre a partir de ahí. Fue por todo esto que terminé siendo tan consciente de mí misma, tan atenta a mis propias necesidades, tan interesada en satisfacerlas, tan alerta a los agravios, tan pendiente de mis placeres. A partir de esta expresión de dolor borrosa e infantil, mi vida cambió y yo me di cuenta."

Siempre me resultó muy difícil reseñar autobiografías y este libro no es la excepción. Situada en la isla de Dominica, la historia de Xuela (la protagonista) comienza con su nacimiento y el fallecimiento de su madre durante el parto. Es a partir de esta primer gran pérdida que Xuela construye su identidad:
"Y este sentido de pérdida y beneficio me hizo mirar hacia atrás y hacia adelante: en mi origen estaba la mujer a la que nunca le había visto la cara, pero en mi final no había nadda, nada entre la oscura habitación del mundo y yo."

Su madre una "carib", su padre un policía avaricioso, hijo de un colonizador escocés. Desde pequeña, Xuela no sólo aprende a vivir una vida sin amor, sino que a partir de las historias de sus padres también comienza a entender que su identidad también está atravesada por su género, etnia y clase social, pues en ese momento la isla estaba colonizada por los británicos. Sin embargo, aunque sabe que el mundo esta dividido entre los vencedores y los vencidos, no deja que nadie la defina. Quiere manejar ella misma su propio destino.

La escritura es dolorosa y bellísima en partes iguales. La construcción de Xuela es brillante, sus reflexiones y el relato de su vida diaria me parecen fundamentales para poder comprender los impactos que tuvo la colonización europea en África, Latinoamérica y el Caribe. ¿Quiénes cuentan la historia y cuántas visiones existen sobre el mismo acontecimiento? ¿Qué discurso(s) logra(n) la hegemonía? ¿Cómo eso afecta en la construcción colectiva de la identidad? ¿Es igual en los hombres y las mujeres? Son algunas preguntas en las que no pude parar de pensar mientras leía este libro.

Una lectura clave para reflexionar sobre el antirracismo, la maternidad, el deseo y la identidad. Muero por volver a leer a Jamaica.

Content Warnings

careinthelibrary's review against another edition

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3.0

In my journey through Jamaica Kincaid's work this year, this stands firmly in the middle (so far). I liked it, but it's not a new favourite. I see ripples of similar themes and refrains in her work and this one fits into that pattern and builds on it. For Jamaica Kincaid fans, this is a good one. If you are new to her work, I recommend <i>A Small Place</i> and <i>Annie John</i>.

Content Warnings

cygnetbabe's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Content Warnings

thebacklistborrower's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Yet another book from the “30 Books to Celebrate 30 Years of Writers and Company”, and I sure changed my feelings a lot through this book. The book is a retrospective of the life of the narrator, Xuela, from when she was a small girl up to her present as a woman in her 30s, in the fictional island of Dominica.

Cw: abortion, infertility

There were a lot of twists and turns to my feelings of this book. When Xuela was young, I was quite annoyed reading the book, as she is represented as very precocious. Her first words were a fully formed, grammatical, sentence in English (not the Carib language spoken locally). Whether or not this is a case of an unreliable narrator, I didn’t like it. However, as Xuela grew into her precociousness, I started to really like her. She revels in the physical, sensory world, and never apologizes for it. And so often characters are wracked with indecision over courses of action, or uncertainty over their lives and their place in the world, but not Xuela, and I found this refreshing. She did exactly what she wanted to and never questioned it.

These courses of action include a nearly lethal abortion by a herb-woman, resulting in lifelong infertility, affairs with a handful of men, and identifying as a boy for a period of time to make her living. All throughout, she is confident, and the language Kinkaid uses is beautiful, stark, and, in some cases, like a slap to the face (in the best way possible). The derision that Xuela has when discussing the colonizers was hilarious and sharp, as was her language regarding poor lovers.

In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The emotion of the story and the reflection were beautiful, and its written so well. Kinkaid stunned me to wordlessness, made me literally laugh out loud, and, if I were the crying sort, I would have cried too. Be sure to read this book for the story of a life in a fictional Barbados from the perspective of a strong, independent, black woman.

Content Warnings

nicoleisalwaysreading's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

vivid and complex with extremely poignant connections between self and nation, inward and outward expressions of identity. would absolutely love to discuss this in a seminar format but unfortunately it’s just me all alone right now in complete awe at Jamaica Kincaid’s mind!

Content Warnings

bookdragon217's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

"My impulse is to the good, my good is to serve myself. I am not a people, I am not a nation. I only wish from time to time to make my actions be the actions of a people, to make my actions be the actions of a nation."

I started this one on my vacation to Costa Rica and I have been thinking about it ever since. The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kinkaid is haunting, introspective and thought provoking. The writing cuts deep to the core. As a reader you are challenged to contemplate on the writer's innermost thoughts and process the historical context that has contributed to some of her beliefs and shapes this story.

Kinkaid's portrayal of Xuela, the protagonist, as flawed but not devoid of deep introspection and questioning was my favorite aspect of this character study. It starts off as a story about grief. Xuela's mother dies during childbirth so she never gets to meet or bind with her. However, the grief of love that develops stays with her & shapes her relationships with people & ties her closely to her island's history with colonization. Even Xuela questions her grief all the time because she doesn't understand how she can feel such great loss over someone she never met. She questions what love is and what it feels like. It makes her an observer of life at times, rather than a participant. This very grief also makes her have fierce autonomy over her own body, shapes her feminism, & keeps her from getting too close to anyone.

Kindkaid masterfully tackles these main themes:
🌴 lasting impacts of colonization in the Caribbean
🌴 autonomy over sex & female bodies & ability to birth
🌴 the exploration of the meaning of love
🌴 grief from the womb, absent parents, lack of love
🌴 how absence of love shapes people
🌴 mixed identities and power
🌴 older men preying on young girls
🌴 how grief makes you an observer

Ultimately the writing keeps you hooked. It was keeps you moving forward through the darkness of this book. Kinkaid makes excellent choices in how she tells this story & it is one that you have to experience personally in order to fully understand how powerful it is. Every line is intentional & makes you question what you think you know.

Content Warnings

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