My Brother . - Farrar, Straus and Giroux - book reviews

Interview, Oct, 1997 by Brad Goldfarb

Were one to do an analysis of every review, feature story, commentary, and press release written about Jamaica Kincaid over the years, chances are one would find that the single word most frequently used to describe her work is honesty. Certainly this word, this characteristic, is what comes to mind when thinking about My Brother (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), Kincaid's first memoir. It is a breathtakingly deep account of the story of her family in Antigua, written after the AIDS-related death of her youngest brother, Devon. Devon, we learn through the words of his sister, was beautiful and gifted: a talented musician who shared her love for books, a promising athlete, a charmer of both men and women, a Rastafarian. But there were secrets in his past - not least of which was his role in a murder at the age of fourteen. Kincaid does not shy away from painting as complete a picture as possible of her family and her brother. In fact she's committed to it: She'll show us her mother's cruelty, us well as her brother's pain, his suffering, his loneliness - but also his selfishness, his destructiveness, his Inclination towards self-pity. As with any memoir, My Brother is as much about the person doing the writing as it is about "the subject," and the author is equally ruthless in her determination to give us a true account of herself and her own feelings. This is the source of is the source of her book's great power.

When you read My Brother, you understand the profound implications of the now-famous phrase Silence = Death. As Kincaid herself told me, more than any other project she has ever undertaken, this was a book that demanded to be written - the words flowed out of her fingertips so quickly she sometimes couldn't type fast enough to keep up. The process, she recalls, was agonizing and could only happen in the dead of night, after "the dishes were cleared away and everybody was in bed."

BRAD GOLDFARB: One of the big themes of My Brother is that to gain our own lives we sometimes have to separate ourselves from our families. For instance, there's a line in your book in which you acknowledge that you could not have become a writer among the people who knew you best.

JAMAICA KINCAID: Yes, this is true, in the same way that I see that my brother couldn't be a homosexual among the people whom he knew best. He couldn't live his life without fear. He couldn't live his life openly. It wasn't that people would have hurt him physically; it's that he would have been scorned. The mental pain was more than he could have accepted. And so, too, for me as a writer I think the mental, the verbal, the spiritual scorn from my community would have been more painful, in a way, than being stoned to death. There is something so deeply cruel about the place I am from.

BG: When you say "place," you mean Antigua.

JK: Yes, the place, and my family in it.

BG: Do you think your mother was typical in her sensibility and in the way she treated you and your brothers, or was it a uniquely creel situation?

JK: We had an extraordinarily intelligent and unusual person in our mother. Her way of humiliating us was just astonishing and harsh - very cruel and very painful. And in that way, coupled with the narrow-mindedness of Antigua - it's a narrow place with narrow people - in that way it was unique.

Someone was saying something to me recently about my mother and domesticity, and I said, "Oh, my mother was a domestic god, not a goddess." And she was. Within a place that's very domestic - as poor people in poor places usually are - even within that, we lived with someone who ruled the home like a kingdom.

BG: At one point in the book, you describe her as a force of nature, like a tornado or a wildfire.

JK: It sounds almost like bragging, but yes, she's quite remarkable, it must be said. It would have been just fine with me to come from someone less remarkable. An ordinary mother would have served me better, one that didn't require great distance to escape from.

BG: Silence seems to have been a requirement too. For the subjects you're writing about here, silence is a universal way of coping - and not coping. There seems to be a long tradition of not speaking to one another in your family.

JK: Right! But while conducting these enormous conversations with the person you're not speaking to in your head. In my case, of course, I carry on these conversations in books.

BG: I am struck by the fact that the same protective mechanisms - for Instance, the long silences between you and your mother - seem to have contributed to the tragedy around your brother. In his case, silence had another outcome. His inability to speak openly, to express who he was, perhaps cost him his life.

JK: [sighs] That will always be really painful. That's why the feeling of being able to speak freely is so important. And it's not just to speak freely, but to act in a way that is consistent with something you know to be true inside of you. I think it's almost a divine right, this right to self-realization. I think, Had I not had writing, that would have been me. Assuming we really are made in the image of God, to know oneself must be, could be, a way of knowing God. It always feels so tragic that Devon never knew who he might have been, or who he was. But it's fair to say he didn't.