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The Autobiography of My Mother

by Jamaica Kincaid

3.71 of 5 stars 3.71 · rating details · 1,830 ratings · 141 reviews

Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the haunting, deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, grows up in a harsh, loveless world after her mother dies in childbirth. Xuela’s narrative provides a rich, vivid exploration of the Caribbean and the pervasive influence ...more

Paperback , 228 pages

Published January 1st 1997 by Plume/Penguin (first published 1995)

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Apr 21, 2008 Jessica rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: love-and-other-indoor-sports

I am way to the left on criminal justice issues and am strongly opposed to capital punishment, but if there is one group of offenders forcing me to reconsider my commitment to the values I hold, it is probably that comprised of people who write in library books. I'd like a grant for a study researching both people who write in library books and people who engage in loud, long cellphone conversations in otherwise quiet and enclosed spaces (e.g., the bus from the Port Authority to Kingston, NY; th I am way to the left on criminal justice issues and am strongly opposed to capital punishment, but if there is one group of offenders forcing me to reconsider my commitment to the values I hold, it is probably that comprised of people who write in library books. I'd like a grant for a study researching both people who write in library books and people who engage in loud, long cellphone conversations in otherwise quiet and enclosed spaces (e.g., the bus from the Port Authority to Kingston, NY; the train from Penn Station to Philadelphia). My theory is that there's a great deal of correlation between these two behaviors, and studying the subjects who engage in them would add to the body of scientific knowledge that could be used in the future to develop a program wherein perpetrators of these acts could be grouped together and transported to an out-of-the-way location; because honestly, I really don't believe in capital punishment, but even my lefty views must admit that some citizens infringe upon the rights of the rest of us in completely unacceptable ways. Therefore, I propose mandatory relocation of library-book-writers and obnoxious-cell-phone-users to a distant and underpopulated island.

A cold and ugly island, though, not a beautiful one like Dominica, where The Autobiography of My Mother is set. Though as Jamaica Kincaid makes clear, life on a Caribbean island isn't just always a Jimmy Buffettesque lark in the sand.

I liked this book, though I'm sure not everyone would, and I managed to enjoy it despite the infuriatingly stupid underlining and marginalia of a previous NYPL patron. It's the story of a girl whose mother died giving birth to her; this motherlessness defines the main character's identity and life, which the story chronicles. Much of the novel is about colonialism, and it is very brutal and intense, with a great deal of human cruelty, sex, and masturbation. I thought it was good. It really took me into the existence of someone I couldn't relate to at all, in a way that was both interesting and satisfying, and it made me think about colonialism and power in a new way. What more do we want?

One of the things I liked a lot about this book was that it did a lot of "telling" instead of "showing." When I took fiction-writing class in college, the standard go-to criticism of pretty much anything I or anyone else wrote was, "You do too much telling ; you need to do more showing! " This seems to be the infallible rule of writing workshops, that "telling" is about the worst sin one can commit and "showing" is just an absolutely great thing to do, but honestly, I've never accepted this dogma at all. What the hell is wrong with some good old telling? I like being told things sometimes. Seriously! Who decided this was such a horrible thing to do? I like telling, and I like to be told, provided it's done right. In this book, the narrator tells you all sorts of things, and it's great. It's what makes the novel work. I am sure that if Jamaica Kincaid had shared the draft of this book with a gaggle of undergraduates, they all would have been on her ass about all the telling and would have explained that she needed to show more. To which I say: screw them! All those fiction workshop kids might take a deep breath and settle down, lest I decide to expand criteria for my island.

Anyway, this book wasn't flawless or amazing, but I did enjoy it. I felt no driving passion to get through the story and wouldn't have been upset if someone had taken it away from me halfway though, but I did like reading it and don't feel that time was wasted at all. ...more

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Apr 06, 2015 Claire McAlpine rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: around-the-world , fiction

Let me say from the outset, I absolutely loved this book, its language, its voice, its poetry, the complexity of its narrator, who could be so distant yet simultaneously get so under your skin. There is a raw but brutal honesty to it, that disturbs and is to be admired at the same time, it is so full of contrasts and so compelling and beats its rhythm so loud, I almost can't describe it.

In the autobiography of my mother, we encounter Xuela Claudette Richardson, who narrates her life looking back ...more

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Jul 25, 2014 Althea Ann rated it 3 of 5 stars

A somewhat longer and more complex work than the other book I just read by Kincaid, 'Annie John.' Similarly, though, it deals with fraught and complex emotional relationships. Or lack of relationships. The narrator here is a woman, Xuela, whose mother died in childbirth; and who lets that lack define who she is as as person.

Her father is a distant and venal man, and Xuela doesn't think much of him. By necessity, she is essentially on her own. However, as the book progresses, she seeks something( ...more

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May 28, 2011 Vasha7 added it · review of another edition

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 could not have known at the beginning of my life that this would be so; 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 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 could not have known at the beginning of my life that this would be so; 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: at my beginning was this woman whose face I had never seen, but at my end was nothing, no one between me and the black room of the world. I came to feel that for my whole life I had been standing on a precipice, that my loss had made me vulnerable, hard, and helpless; on knowing this I became overwhelmed with sadness and shame and pity for myself.

So opens The Autobiography of My Mother , a fierce, complex discourse on love and lack of love in the context of colonialism. Although this paragraph sets up many of the themes that will be developed in the course of the book, it is not to be accepted as definitive. For one thing, this is the first and only time the narrator, Xuela Claudette Richardson, will represent herself as helpless or vulnerable. It's true, there's little if anything she can do to change the circumstances of her life; but she takes complete control of the way she lives in those circumstances. And she only rarely expresses pity for herself.

I'll admit, it took me a while to warm up to this book. Xuela's voice makes no attempt to conciliate the reader. Also, many of the statements she makes clash with each other; at first these contradictions irritated me – was the author being careless? Just throwing poetic phrases together? For just one example of many, she writes "I could say [my husband] loved me if I needed to hear I was loved, but I will never say it." – but she did say so a couple pages earlier. However, I came to realize that these were deliberate choices of the author. Most often, Xuela will both speak of herself or others as not loving or incapable of love, and also speak of them loving or being in love. This destabilization throws into question, for one thing, what she even means by "love". It is not safe to assume that this is obvious, even in context.

One thing Xuela never expresses is uncertainty – even when she contradicts herself, she makes her statements with a tone of absolute authority. She is determined to control her own voice, at the end of her life as she is telling her story, just as the course of her life has been ruled by her self-possession, her fiercely independent determination to be sufficient to herself and please herself, and no-one else. This has sometimes led her to ruthlessness. She is capable of feeling sympathy for others, occasionally, but will not allow herself to do so in any way that might make her vulnerable. Consider the following paragraph (which also demonstrates the author's control of style):

My life was beyond empty. I had never had a mother, I had just recently refused to become one, and I knew than that this refusal would be complete. I would never become a mother, but that would not be the same as never bearing children. I would bear children, but I would never be a mother to them. I would bear them in abundance; they would emerge from my head, from my armpits, from between my legs; I would bear children, they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god. I would bear children in the morning, I would bathe them at noon in a water that came from myself, and I would eat them at night, swallowing them whole, all at once. They would live and then they would not live. In their day of life, I would walk them to the edge of a precipice. I would not push them over; I would not have to; the sweet voices of unusual pleasures would call to them from its bottom; they would not rest until they became one with these sounds. I would cover their bodies with diseases, embellish skins with thinly crusted sores, the sores sometimes oozing a thick pus for which they would thirst, a thirst that could never be quenched. I would condemn them to live in an empty space frozen in the same posture in which they had been born. I would throw them from a great height; every bone in their body would be broken and the bones would never be properly set, healing in the way they were broken, healing never at all. I would decorate them when they were only corpses and set each corpse in a polished wooden box, and place the polished wooden box in the earth and forget the part of the earth where I had buried the box. It is in this way that I did not become a mother; it is in this way that I bore my children.

This paragraph expresses, for one thing, all the love and sympathy she could not or would not allow herself to feel. The fates of these imaginary children are those of her real-life half-siblings; and more figuratively, her husband, who "became all the children I did not allow to be born"; she spoke of wanting to push him into an abyss, but not in anger.

The pain of the book arises from her circumstances, in Dominica, as one of the people she always calls "the defeated" – the Carib and African people. There would be a lot more to discuss about this, but I will leave it for now. She writes:

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. 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. ...more

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Jan 19, 2009 sdw rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

What does it mean when a first person story of the life of a woman, defined largely by her sexuality and her quest for identity, is entitled The Autobiography of My Mother ? What does it mean when the narrator's mother dies at the narrator's birth and can only be grasped through the narrator's imagination? What does it mean when the motherless child can not be come a mother herself, not for a lack of fertility, but instead "freeing my womb from burdens I did not want to bear . . .burdens that w ...more

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Aug 29, 2013 K.m. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: shock-and-awe

Having read the Poisonwood Bible recently, I can't help making a comparison, and it is woefully put to shame by this. Kincaid speaks to the complexities of identity on the rift between conquering and defeated people. Able to contain the sometimes contradictory parts of herself and her history, Xuela, the protagonist, reflects on the circumstances of a life shaped by race, class and gender. She is insightful and thoughtful, and while addressing her life in post-colonial (if it really is post) cir ...more

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Aug 21, 2009 Libbyrosof rated it 5 of 5 stars

About a third of the way through this riveting, beautifully written book (what a stylist!) I began to read it as an allegory--about power, ethnicity, wealth--as well as a personal account of ethnicity and this woman's road to self-invention. Ultimately, this turns out to be how all of us construct identity, and the bogus scaffolding on which we construct it and our lineage. The book is passionate and surprising.

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Apr 26, 2015 Leslie Graff rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the best of what post-colonial literature can be - hauntingly beautiful and deeply sad. Kincaid's voice is deceptively simple, repeating simple sentences throughout that grow in meaning as you read. The narrator is compelling if not always relatable. She does not love easily or when she is asked to. She does not feel rage either, she simply exists in her own truth. She accepts her fate but also resists it by becoming her own person with her own thoughts that are never given in response t ...more

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