Jamaica Kincaid

Jamiaca Kincaid

Few writers set the boundary between poetry and prose as eloquently and elegantly as Jamaica Kincaid does. Born on the island of Antigua, she has become one of the most influential and important authors of post colonial writing today. Jamaica Kincaid was born as Elaine Potter Richardson, in 1949 in St. John's, Antigua. At first, as an only child, Kincaid maintained a close relationship with her mother until the age of nine, when the first of her three brothers were born. The growing size of the family not only brought about a more in depth sense of their poverty, but also enhanced Kincaid's growing sense of isolation from her mother and her environment. Kincaid’s mother was unresponsive and often abusive and shipped her off to the United States at 17 to be an au pair (Kincaid insists on the word "servant" to describe her employment status during her interviews). New York Times Magazine journalist Leslie Garis writes, "Kincaid has never gotten over the betrayal she felt when she began to suffer from her mother's emotional remoteness" (Garis40). In Antigua, she completed her secondary education under the British system due to Antigua's status as a British colony until 1967.

At the age of 17, with a growing dislike for her family and a rising contempt for the subservience of the Antiguans to British colonialist rule, Kincaid left Antigua, bound for New York and a job as an au pair. After working for three years and taking night classes at a community college, Kincaid won a full-scholarship to Franconia College in New Hampshire. However, after a year of feeling "too old to be a student,"(Garis 55) Kincaid dropped out of school, returned to New York, got a job writing interviews for a teen-age girls magazine, and in 1973 changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid. Changing her name was, as Kincaid says, "a way for [her] to do things without being the same person who couldn't do them -- the same person who had all these weights"(Garis, 53). Kincaid, unencumbered by the "weights" of her past, began to write. Kincaid was "discovered" on the streets of Manhattan by New Yorker columnist George Trow, who made her a free lance journalist in the magazine by printing one of her articles in the "Talk of the Town" section. As a result, Kincaid met the editor of the magazine, William Shawn, who offered her a job. Kincaid later married Shawn's son, Allen, a composer and Bennington College professor, and they presently have two children. Kincaid then became a celebrated fiction writer (with such books as Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother) and gardening columnist.