Context
Elaine Potter Richardson, who later became the novelist and essayist Jamaica
Kincaid, was born in 1949 in St. John's, the capital city of the Caribbean island of
Antigua. By Kincaid's own account, she was a highly intelligent but often moody
child, and she became increasingly distant from her mother as the family grew in
number—an estrangement that would later become a central theme in her fiction. As
she matured, Kincaid also became estranged from the social and cultural milieu in
which she found herself. Too ambitious and intellectually curious to be satisfied
with her career prospects in her tiny island home, she was also becoming alienated
from the mostly white, European tradition handed down to her through her colonial
education. At seventeen, Kincaid moved to New York to work as an au
pair while continuing her studies, eventually earning a scholarship to
Franconia College in New Hampshire. Dissatisfied, she left school after a year and
moved back to Manhattan, where she began working as a magazine and newspaper
features journalist. During this period, Elaine Richardson changed her name to
Jamaica Kincaid in a symbolic act of self-definition and freedom from the “weights”
of personal and political history. As Kincaid herself put it in an interview with
the New York Times Magazine, the new name represented “a way for me
to do things without being the same person who couldn't do them—the same person who
had all these weights.”
Kincaid's big break came when she was hired as a staff writer by The
New Yorker, and the magazine's editor, William Shawn (famous as a judge
of talent and an exacting critic of prose) became her mentor. Kincaid's first book
of short stories, At the Bottom of the River, was published in
1983, and her first novel, Annie John, followed two years later.
Kincaid's early fiction, such as the much-anthologized story “Girl,” often focuses
on the mental world of a young girl much like the young Kincaid, with particular
attention to the nuances and rhythms of Caribbean English. This evocation of the
speech of the islands is reminiscent of the poetry of Derek Walcott (of St. Lucia)
and Edward Kamau Brathwaite (of Barbados), and the stories of At the Bottom
of the River have often been compared to prose poems. Kincaid's
treatment of the lingering effects of slavery and colonialism on the minds of those
descended from slaves and from the once-colonized Caribbean “natives” places her in
the company of the Trinidadian novelist V. S. Naipaul and the Dominican novelist
Jean Rhys, as well as the poets just mentioned. However, Kincaid's primary
allegiance in her fiction—more than any affinity she might have to a movement or
school of writing—is to her own vision and voice.
In addition to her fiction, Kincaid has produced a steady stream of
nonfiction, beginning with her brief “Talk of the Town” pieces for The New
Yorker and continuing more recently with her essays on gardening for
the same magazine. A Small Place was, in fact, first meant for
The New Yorker, but it was rejected as too harsh and angry in
tone. The essay has been controversial since it first appeared in book form in 1988.
Since then, it has gradually found its place within the English tradition of
anticolonial travel writing, a tradition stretching back to Jonathan Swift's
mercilessly satirical writings on Ireland in the eighteenth century and including
George Orwell's classic essay “Shooting an Elephant,” as well as works by such
writers as Graham Greene and the American Paul Theroux. Kincaid's essay has also
been important to “postcolonial” theory, a branch of literary studies that is
concerned with understanding how a colonized people both internalizes and resists
the colonizing culture. A Small Place has come to be seen as a
perfect example of a postcolonial text: in it, a former colonial subject turns the
greatest tools of empire, culture, and language into weapons directed against
imperialism itself.
