Kincaid's 'Autobiography of My Mother' touches the heart

"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.