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 Novelist
& Memoirist
Benaroya Hall, November 15, 1999
United First Methodist Church, May 5, 1992
Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Jamaica Kincaid’s passion for writing was passed on to her from
her book-loving mother, who taught her to read at the age of three-and-a-half.
Later in Kincaid’s childhood almost nothing could stop her from acquiring
a book. She confesses, “I stole money to buy books. It’s true.
I was quite a thief and quite a liar, and I’m sure the only thing
that stopped me was that I was never successful at either. I’ve always
been found out, and my lies all seemed so plausible to me, I never understood
why they didn’t work for other people. I suppose those were my first
ventures into ficiton.”
Born and educated in St. John’s, Antigua, in the West Indies, Kincaid,
in 1966, moved to New York City at the age of 17 and worked a series of
short-lived jobs to help support her family in Antigua. She began writing
in the early 1970s for The Village Voice and six years later she
was hired as a staff writer for The New Yorker. Since then she
has published several books including The Autobiography of My Mother
(National Book Award finalist, 1997).
Her passion for gardening began in Vermont where she planted only her
favorite flowers. She designed her garden so that its paths and beds wove
in and out like the shorelines of her native Antigua. In her book, My
Garden (Book), she gathers together all she loves about gardening
and plants, and explains it with the same sharpness and attention to detail
that she gives to her fiction. Currently, she lives in Vermont with her
husband and children, and she teaches at Harvard University.
Excerpt
taken from My Garden (Book) (1999)
I know gardeners well (or at least I think I do, for I am a gardener,
too, but I experience gardening as an act of utter futility). I know their
fickleness, I know their weakness for wanting in their own gardens the
thing they have never seen before, or never possessed before, or saw in
a garden (their friends’), something which they do not have and would
like to have (though what they really like and envy—and especially
that, envy—is the entire garden they are seeing, but as a disguise
they focus on just one thing: the Mexican poppies, the giant butter burr,
the extremely plump blooms of white, purple, black, pink, green, or the
hellebores emerging from the cold, damp and brown earth).
I would not be surprised if every gardener I asked had something definite
that he or she liked or envied. Gardeners always have something they like
intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the
reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy;
at any moment they like in particular this, or they like in particular
that, nothing in front of them (that is, in the borders they cultivate,
the space in the garden they occupy) is repulsive and fills them with
hatred, or this thing would not be in front of them.
*
* *
But we who covet our neighbor’s garden must finally return to our
own, with all its ups and downs, its disappointments, its rewards. We
come to it with a blindness, plus a jumble of feelings that mere language
(as far as I can see) seems inadequate to express, to define an attachment
that is so ordinary: a plant loved especially for something endemic to
it (it cannot help its situation: it loves the wet, it loves the dry,
it reminds the person seeing it of a wave or a waterfall or some event
that contains so personal an experience as when my mother would not allow
me to do something I particularly wanted to do and in my misery I noticed
that the frangipani tree was in bloom).
I shall never have the garden I have in mind, but that for me is the joy
of it; certain things can never be realized and so all the more reason
to attempt them. A garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely
satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden,
a completely satisfying garden—Paradise—but after a while the
owner and its occupants wanted more.
Selected
Works
At the Bottom of the River (1983)
Lucy (1990)
Annie John (1995)
The Autobiography of My Mother (1996)
My Garden (Book) (1999)
Web
Site Links
Interview
with Kincaid on Salon.com
News York Times reviews
of Kincaid's books
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