Kincaid, Jamaica

(Antiguan/US, 1949– )

Kincaid was born in Antigua and emigrated to the United States in 1966. She is (with Erna Brodber) the most original and controversial of the younger writers from the Caribbean. Her 1983 book of stories, At the Bottom of the River, excites with its mixture of apocalyptic imagery drawn from the Bible with snatches of folk-tale thrown in. The effect is often that of a prose-poem. The autobiographical novels, Annie John (1985), about a Caribbean girl growing to maturity, Lucy (1990), about a young Antiguan woman moving to New York as an au pair, and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), all have that lyrical quality. Kincaid's narrative style and idiom have become increasingly classical, losing the inflections of Caribbean speech and not yet acquiring an American flavour. The transition is underlined in My Brother (1997) depicting her brother's dying from AIDS: here, the brother's (Antiguan) language is put in brackets; a translation.

Jean Rhys. See BLACK & WHITE, CARIBBEAN  EM