Poets

Born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John’s, Antigua in May 1949, Jamaica Kincaid received a British education and had a very close relationship to her mother. At nine years old, when her three brothers were born, her relationship with her mother began to deteriorate as she neglected her. At seventeen years old, she was sent to work to the United States as an au pair for an American family, Kincaid lost touch with her mother and did not send money home. She changed her name so people from her native land, especially her family, would not know that she was writing. She began to write for the New Yorker and had a weekly column named “The Talk of the Town”. Kincaid now lives and teaches in Vermont. (Her Story: Jamaica Kincaid: life events)
One of the main influences, if not the most influential, in Jamaica Kincaid’s writing is her relationship with her mother. In an excerpt from her 1985 novel, Annie John, we can see this:
“My past was my mother; I could hear her voice, and she spoke to me not in English or the patois that she sometimes spoke, or in any language that needed help from the tongue; she spoke to me in language anyone female could understand. And I was undeniably that-female. Oh, it was a laugh, for I had spent so much time saying I did not want to be like my mother that I missed the whole story: I was not like my mother- I was my mother. And I could see now why, to the feeble attempts I made to draw a line between us, her reply always was "You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me." I had, at that very moment, a collection of letters from her in my room, nineteen in all, one for every year of my life, unopened. I thought of opening the letters, not to read them but to burn them at the four corners and send them back to her unread. It was an act, I had read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another, but I could not trust myself to go too near them. I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.” (Her Story: Jamaica Kincaid: Key Influences and Themes)
This correlates with what Paule Marshall says in her essay, Poets in the Kitchen, “using everyday, speech, the simple commonplace words- but always with imagination and skin- they gave voice to the most complex ideas.” One can see this in Kincaid’s writing, not only the influence of her mother, but the way she spoke. They are both saying the same thing in different words. Marshall says that “the group of women around the tale long ago” were her main influence and Kincaid without noticing had also been taught “narrative art” by listening to her mother and reflecting on their relationship in later years.

Works Cited:

Her Story: Jamaica Kincaid: Key Influences and Themes. (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2009, from BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/kincaid_key.shtml
Her Story: Jamaica Kincaid: life events. (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2009, from BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/kincaid_life.shtml