ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602090101
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: NIKO PRICE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Her floral-print dress is simple. Her feet are bare. Her hair is short. The look somehow evokes an image of a small place in the Caribbean, an island setting, a rural life.
But this is New York City, and Jamaica Kincaid is lounging on an ultramodern sofa in a trendy hotel, where even the doormen wear designer suits.
This is the big city where Kincaid made her home when she arrived from Antigua in 1966 at age 16. This is where she discovered freedom - and eventually writing.
This is where she fled to escape her family, where she looked after the children of an affluent couple, where she put herself through school, where she worked menial jobs, and where she became a writer for New Yorker magazine.
This is where she became the fearless, matter-of-fact, brutally honest and self-involved writer and person that she is.
So why is it that her writing is focused - almost obsessed - on the Caribbean? Maybe it is because she writes about growing up as an unhappy, lonely little girl, and the Caribbean is where she did that.
Her new novel, ``The Autobiography of My Mother,'' is about growing up as a dark-skinned woman in a world created by foreign men who despise all that is black and female.
The tone is not bitter, but the images of isolation are devastating. The result rivals V.S. Naipaul's vision of the darkness below the bright allure of the Caribbean.
The narrator's mother dies as narrator is born, and her father hands the baby over to the woman who does his washing - the baby in one bundle, his clothes in another.
``It is possible that he emphasized to her the difference between the two bundles: one was his child ... the other was his soiled clothes,'' she writes. ``He would have handled one more gently than the other ... but which one I do not know.''
As she grows up, the narrator eventually returns to the care of her father and his new wife, a jealous woman who tries to kill her with a cursed necklace; but the narrator puts the necklace on the dog, and it dies instead.
The book tells of the girl's journey through life, leaving the countryside for the capital at 14 to pursue her studies, being initiated into sex by the friend of her father in whose house she lives, and vowing never to have a child.
``The impulse to possess is alive in every heart,'' she writes, ``and some people choose vast plains, some people choose high mountains, some people choose wide seas, and some people choose husbands; I chose to possess myself.''
The book is about the Caribbean and about the discovery of herself - two things that are intimately intertwined for Kincaid. The Caribbean is the dark and frightening world in which she grew up, and she must understand it to understand herself.
``I think I have a need to understand what happened to me as an individual and the group of people I'm from,'' she said. ``I want to make sense of my life, of this group history.''
Kincaid's Caribbean is a mystical place, a land seen through a little girl's eyes and passed through a filter of time and distance.
The distance and the time have given Kincaid the opportunity to refine those memories into their most essential, most meaningful aspects and paint a captivatingly honest picture that would embarrass many Caribbean intellectuals in its directness.
``It would seem to be necessary to my writing to be in a place unlike what I'm writing about,'' said Kincaid, who now lives with her husband and two children in Vermont.
``The Autobiography of My Mother'' is set on the island of Dominica in the beginning of the century when it was still a British colony. She tells of how colonialism has played games with people's minds, how it has turned the people of the island against one another.
``You cannot trust these people [her schoolmates and neighbors], my father would say to me, the very words the other children's parents were saying to them, perhaps even at the same time,'' she writes.
``...It was as if we were all in competition with each other for a secret prize, and we were afraid that someone else would get it; any expression of love, then, would not be sincere, for love might give someone else the advantage.''
``The Autobiography of My Mother'' is the least explicitly autobiographical of Kincaid's books, but the world it depicts is drawn very much from her childhood experience.
``When I first left home, my mother told me I must never know fellow Antiguans because they would be jealous and hold me back,'' she said.
After she came to New York, she did not return home for 20 years; when her mother wrote her in the beginning, she left the envelopes unopened.
``I didn't speak to my family,'' she said. ``I didn't like them, and they didn't like me. I did what I thought was sensible and distanced myself.''
Her isolation - like that of the narrator in the book - was complete, in part imposed by society, in part imposed by herself as if to spite the system that denied her that love in the first place.
``I thought that the person I might become would be unwelcome to [my family],'' she said. ``And I'm fairly right.''
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Jamaica Kincaid's new book, ``The Autobiography ofby CNBMy Mother,'' is about a dark-skinned woman growing up on a Caribbean
island. color.