"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."
Thus begins the harrowing fiction-based autobiography of Xuela, a Caribbean woman left stranded at birth by the death of her Carib mother, and who would eventually be extricated from her father's world as well.
Through Jamaica Kincaid's vividly stark yet overwhelmingly poetic tale "The Autobiography of My Mother," the reader is exposed to the anguish, struggle and introspection correlated with Xuela's metaphorical journey and her coming of age.
The novel is set in Dominica, a small island in the West Indies, two generations after the end of slavery. Appropriate for the general mood and underlying tone of the novel, Dominica provides a wretchedly impoverished, immoral setting in which Xuela attempts to define herself.
The abhorrent denizens of this conquered wasteland are a few corrupt, deceitful and wealthy men who cheat great numbers of poor, entrapped inhabitants of their pitiably insufficient earnings.
The man whom Xuela comes to identify as her father, a half-Scottish and half-African avaricious police officer, was one of the main wealthy bosses of the island. The reader comes to despise this pathetic man, defined and protected by his superficial mask, and is brought to further sympathize with Xuela and her own tragic emotional state with each harsh, deplorable interaction.
Her father does not love Xuela, nor does he know how to love. She says, "When my mother died, leaving me a small child vulnerable to all the world, my father took me and placed me in the care of the same woman he paid to wash his clothes. It is possible that he emphasized the difference between the two bundles ..."
She lives the first few years of her life with this laundress, neglected and undernourished, unwilling to speak until age four. Opting frequently in her convincingly devastated, tempermental states to ponder the sea, she does not find tranquillity within the waves but rather hears "the anger of water boiling in a cauldron resting unsteadily on a large fire."
Such a well depicted, oddly paradoxical scene is typical of the dramatic departure from traditional themes and motifs. The sea, in all of its glory and beauty, delivers only negative connotations to Xuela's tortured psyche.
As she grows older, Xuela is brought to live at home with her father and is put under the authority of his wickedly spiteful new wife. Their relationship is accursed from the outset, as Xuela's stepmother attempts first to starve and later to murder her stepdaughter out of jealousy.
Sensing the rather bold necessity for Xuela's relocation, her father decides to send her to board in the house of his wealthy acquaintance Jack LaBette while she attends a school with a more rigorous curriculum.
It is during her term in the LaBette household in which Xuela begins to discover herself physically, as her body matures and Jack becomes her first of a series of lovers.
Through shockingly explicit detail, the reader learns of the great pride Xuela finds in her erotically sexual being. It is through this sensuality Xuela begins to define her one-dimensional sense of self-worth.
The reader is at once dismayed and intrigued by Xuela's sexual escapades and bodily self-adoration, with an odd fascination with the blatant self-confidence and liberation for expression she possesses.
Admittedly selfish with her love, she develops a talent for aborting pregnancies, adamant that she shall never bear a child of her own.
The death of Xuela's father leaves her feeling ironically lonely: "I did not love my father, I grew to love not loving my father, and I missed his presence, the irritant that was this loveless love."
She moves with her husband to a remote plot of land to rest, all too cognizant of the weariness intrinsic in the strain of realizing her own morbid history and eternally dismal state of being.
Xuela dwells on her history, although she claims to care only for the present. She believes that all that is history is defeat and nothing more.
Indeed, what she knows of her history is tragic, and the only redeeming factor lies in the unsolvable mystery of who her mother was and for what she stood.
She frequently dreams of her mother descending down a ladder to meet her in a long white gown exposing only her heels, and this proves to be one of the few, if only, descriptively tranquil scenes depicted in the novel. Thus, it seems that Xuela's inherent struggle and devastating loneliness can be ultimately correlated to this lack of certainty of the bond she needs to feel human -- the bond with her mother.
Kincaid structures her novel in a rather soap-opera-esque, cyclical style. Xuela scrutinizes her torturous psyche through stream-of-consciousness, often visiting and revisiting various eras of her life as her soul, or lack thereof, abets her.
It is through this process of revisiting that the reader is familiarized with her obvious need for a maternal familial bond; whether it be with her own mother or with the children she would never bear.
The language Kincaid utilizes is powerful in its simplicity, bold in its exploitation, and shocking in its venomous honesty. She delves into and satirizes an aspect of human nature that most members of society are taught to mask and suppress, yet is so instinctual: selfish indifference.
"The Autobiography of My Mother" is a novel not for the particularly naive or sympathetic reader, but rather for one who relishes in the aftertaste of uncensored, unpredictable reality so often suppressed in mainstream media.
Jamaica Kincaid makes gallant strides in this novel, and the ultimate irresolution leaves the reader disturbed, unsettled, yet oddly intrigued.
