Friday, January 20, 2006
Coming Back to Jamacia
I saw Jamaica Kincaid read about 10 years ago. It was the kind of rare experience in which a single person standing in front of the room pulls her whole audience into that odd state akin to being gathered around the primordial campfire.
Rapt, we listen as a village elder tells one of the identity-establishing stories of the tribe - execpt in this case, the 'tribe' is the human beings and the point of her tale is, in essence, 'this is one of the things it can mean to be human.'
If I were a better person this would have sent me scrambling for more of her work. Well, I guess it did, but it took a while. While Annie John's reputation may have a good deal to do with its quietly scathing critique of the inequities of colonialism, it was the honesty and perspicatcity with which Kincaid approached adolecent freindships and the changing nature of mother-daughter interaction that pushes me to reccomend this short novel to everyone I know who's engaged in rearing an adolescent.
Rapt, we listen as a village elder tells one of the identity-establishing stories of the tribe - execpt in this case, the 'tribe' is the human beings and the point of her tale is, in essence, 'this is one of the things it can mean to be human.'
If I were a better person this would have sent me scrambling for more of her work. Well, I guess it did, but it took a while. While Annie John's reputation may have a good deal to do with its quietly scathing critique of the inequities of colonialism, it was the honesty and perspicatcity with which Kincaid approached adolecent freindships and the changing nature of mother-daughter interaction that pushes me to reccomend this short novel to everyone I know who's engaged in rearing an adolescent.
# posted by IzzyThePush @ 10:58 AM 
