Kincaid, Exile

8/2/2019 Kincaid, Exile

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3amai,ca KiV\caid aV\d' the~eV\ealo9Y o f ExileB e lin da E dm on ds on

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~ would like to begin this p, ..per with a series O f . q.uotations from the fiction. and non-fiction of Jamaica. Kincaid. The first quotation is from the novelLucy . Kincaid's sequel of sons ro her first novel A nn ie Jo hn .

At the very beginning of Lucy the reader is introduced to Lucy, an Antiguan aupair who lives with an American f am i ly in New York. Lucy is obsessed with the idea ofa rerum to her homeland:

I II b o o ks r ha d re a d ... s om eo n e wo uld suffe r from hom es ickn e s s . A pe rso n wuuld le a ve a norvery nice situation and go somewhereelse, somewhere a lor bener, and then long to go backwhere it W;IS not very nice.Tdow impatient I woul d become with such a person, fo r I would feel[hat Iwas.in a not very nice situation myself and how I wanted to go somewhere else. Bur nowLrco. felt that [ wanted to be back where I came from. I knew where lstocd there. IfI had hadto draw a pkture10f my furure chen , Irwould have been a large gray [latch surrounded by black,b la c ke r. b la c ke s t.If we read Lucy as a ficrive version of Kincaid herself - a dangerous conflatiou, I

realize, bur nevertheless an irresistible one given the innumerable similarities - thispassage suggests that Kinc-aid experiences a desire - albeit desire thar is conflicted anddevoid of nostalgia - for the Caribbean homeland.I Jamaica Kincnid, Lucy (New York: Penguin, 1990, p. 6.SmallAxc5. March 1999: pp , 72-79rSSN 07990537


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Let us contrast this quotation from Lucy to the author's 'real life' ruminations onher current mode of self-imposed exile from her homeland:

[When I was g row in g up ... J I wa s ve t}' inflLlellced by D ic ke n s, M ilto n , Shakespeare , a n d [h eBib l e ; bUI a fte r I re a d the s e o the r thin gs [he re Kincaid i s r e fe r ri n g to e xp erim e n ta l re a li st writingsuch as i\ lnjn Robbe-Griller's] I knew, for instance, rhar J would never g o back ro Anr i gua , [hatTwould never be able to live comfortably in Antiguo again, I somehow fdt free of the WestIndies. in a strange way . which is to ~ay that I couldn't live there agnin in the way that I hadl iv ed th ere before, that if J d id live [here again it woul d have to be under some other terms. Jthought [hat,! could never go home because itwould kill me, drag me down. It was a total acto f l iberar ion ."Lest we mistake this for a political position, let LIS note that, like V.S. Naipau],

Kincaid emphatically deniesthe political narnre of her writings; "When I write I don'thave any politics. I am political in the sense that I exist. When I write, I am concernedwith the human condition as I know i[.,,3

It is particularly noteworthy that, in both quotations. ruminations about the ideaof the return to the homeland are framed within [he context ofliteran.ttej the characterLucy refers to "books [she] has read" 011 the subject before she states her own feelingson return, while Kincaid makes the decision not to rerum to Antigua only after havingread European experimental Iiterature. This suggestS to me a certain causativerelationship between Kincaid's imaging of 'exile' and her consumption of canonical or'high modernist' European literarure, Since the positioning of European canonicalliterature within Caribbeanist discourse is, de facto, a political event, I propose thatKincaid does indeed hold political views regarding the Caribbean. These ideas aredearly in evidence in A Sm all P !acc, and yet that polemic is not unrelated to her viewson the psychic alienation of the C:l!Iibbean femalesubjecr, as depicted in her novelsand interviews. The connection between Kincaid's concern with European canonicaldiscourse and her politics vis-a-vis the Caribbean are tied in both subtle and. unsubtleways to the meaning of literary authority, as represented by the history of [he discourseof exile, in Caribbeanisr discourse. This paper will attempt to conrextualize Kincaid'sversion of literary exile by situating her within the exile discourse of earlier Caribbeanwriters,

Kincaid is not usually - if ever - described as a writer 'in exile', and has never tom y knowledge described herself with (his term, despite the striking similarities2 Jamaica, Kincaid, Interview w ith S el wy n Cudjoe. "jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project", in Caribbean

WOlrlm W rifm : E J'S i~ YS; ' (1m t he F ir st Intemationa] C~1Ijinl1Ct', ed..Selwyn R Cudjoe (Wellesley: CalalouxPublkarions. 1990). p. 223.

3 Jamaica: Kincaid, telephone i ntervi .wwid, Gi ovanna COy; On 3 Ap,ril1986. reprin tcd in Clov,uno Covi, 'J arnaicaKin ca id an d [he Res~(;I11CC to Ca n o n s ", in Out o/fhtKil1nbll l l Caribb"lIl1 Wo1t la , tltld.LilmuItI'I!, cd . C aro le B oyceDavies and. Elaine S;lVO!}, Fide (Trenton: Africa World, Press, 19(0), p. 353,

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between her reasons for staying away from the homeland and those of other Caribbean- male - writers who are categorized 'in exile'. Like her character Lucy, Kincaidentered the USA as a domestic labourer, and therefore had a very different entry intothe metropolitan societies of Europe and America rhan did orher "literary exiles' suchas V.S. Naipaul, C.LR. James and Geo.rge Lamming. I assert that the di.Frerence inperception is embedded in the crurency of two key words in the Caribbean author'slexicon: 'exile' andjmmigranr'.

These two related yet opposed terms of national subjecriviry carry a weight ofmeaning in [he literary history of the anglophone Caribbean. A s is commonly known,a first generation of Caribbean writers wrote 'in exile', usually in London or, in thecase o f the French Caribbean, Paris. Naipaul i s [he most famous of these Caribbeanwriters in self-imposed exile, yet Naipaul is certainly nor the Dilly We$( Indian who haspositioned himself thusly, Of indeed the first to gain currency from this particularrelationship to the Caribbean. There are scores of books on West Indian narrative thatfeature the term 'exile' prorninently.andone can scarcely Bnd a text on Caribbeanliterature that does nor refer to the canonical figures as "writing in exile".4

The exile referred to is conceived of as a kind of double exile .. On the one hand,(here is the internal exile of the intellectual from society as an alienated or inauthenticWest Indian subject. On the other, there is the exile of self-imposed physicaldisplacement &on1 the Caribbean, from which (he author can now "objectively" viewhis society and his relation to it. The premise undergirding the larter view is thatphysical distance in the meeropole is necessary for eventual reintegration into theCaribbean landscape, such as Him Plant must undergo in Claude McKay's BananaBottom.

McKay, and ocher emigrant writers such as Lamming and J ames, conceived of thiskind of exilethen as a necessary componem of 17fltiotlt;lism, and indeed Edward Saidcontends chat "the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel's dialectic ofservant and master, oppositions informing and constituting each other. Allnationalisms in [heir early stages develop from a condition of estrangement. ,.5However, the fact that, historically speaking, exile for West Indian writers meanschoosing to live in the country of the ex-colonizer from whom he seeks relief at home4 For discuss ions of exile inanglopbone Caribbean narrative see, For example, George Lamming. T b 1'~4,um of

Exik (I960; reprint, London and New York: Allison and Busby. 1984); Gareth Grimms, A DOI,b/ebile (Loudon:Cakkr, 1978J; MRry Lou Emery, j~ /m flJ ry s a tW ( ,r ld 's E nd : N ov tb o jC " /r ", ia l. alid SOflJi l E"ik (Austin; Universi tyoF T "KlL' Pre",.'..1990); and Simon Gikandi, chapters 1 and 2 . of W ritin g in L im bo : Mod~miJm e nd C ar ib be anLit.mltTm (Irhaca and Landon: Cornel! University Press, 1992J.

5 S~~ Edward Said, "Reflections on Ex i l e " , GTa",,, 13 (Autumn 1984): 162.

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L 'd l' 1 ,,,. J " " 6C . [ Lam . ,causea.as ammtnge reate y puts It, certain camp .icanons . efta-my, . mmg:schoice of England was made ea sy because his generation owned British passports at therime of leaving. But it is of key importance of course, that the only female literarysymbol of nationalist-In-exile, McKay's Bita Plant in B an ana B ottom ..rra :veL s [0 B E l i N d AE d M O N d SEngland IO be educated, and thus cannot be confused with a mere immigrant who goesthere to work.

Unlike exile and nationalism, i"'1P'l'ligration and nationalism are not perceived tohave any relationship to each other. The immigrant's motives are to make money(often, in [he Caseof West Indian women- who constitute the largest portion ofWest Indian immigrants to the USA7 - to support families 'back home'); herfocus is on 'making it' in the rnetropole, as opposed to the apparently loftier almsof the exile, who remains preoccupied With m e meaning of the native land in oneway or another,

The reasons for [ravelling to rhe rnerropole, rhen, [he conditions of thatjourney, are of far more importance than [he f:K[ of actually being there, becausethe capacity in which the Caribbean national travels to that society will dictate howthat society will 'read' the immigrant (right down to the difference between a.domestic labourer visa and a professional H-l visa). Consequently, the immigrantwho comes to. Europe or America to be a scholar is l ikely to have a different sort ofexperience of the First World based on his or her ability to illusrrarea facillly withthe signifiers of the European and American professional classes than one whocomes under less prestigious conditions. Significantly, the blurb on the front pagesof the earlier versions of Naipaul's books published in England notes that he beganto write after he. came to England to do a university course and that "He basfollowed no other profession".

This is not rosay that West Indian migration ro England was simply a traffick ofscholars on their way to university: the vast majority of immigrants to England from

6 See Lunming, TJlf P / e t l S f l W ofExi/~,p. 24.7 The phe no rn en o n o f a lurg d y r~.rnruee rn i grn ~ io n fro ll 1rh e C a ri bbe a n to the U SA ha s be en do cum en ted by s ev e r a l

sources; 50C, among others, Philip Kasinltz, Ca ri bb c fl 1 1 Nao Y o r k : Black I m m i g T l l 1 T C s and rht P o l i t i C 5 afRau (lthacaa 'l d L0 1 .I d ,, ": C"m~tl Ullillmity Preu , 1992); DeW - re sM . Mo r/ im l :T Im p R o y S . B r yc e- Ln POTU, F~'nlll~b",nWIDJIJ tr J.tJ,~Unlt.d S"".,., Caribb",,,, Lasi.. Amm:.an "TId Aftican E"fjJui."r;cl 311d Gl,.jbb~an /71lmi!l""ti07J tu Ih. U,,#t'li St'M~s(W ashin g to n , DC: S rn ith scn lan In srin rticn , R IIE S Occa s io n a l P ape rs n o s . I a n d 2, 19i11.3J1d 1983);0Ii"" Sen i o r ,Working Mi"lcil!f: Women j- Liue: in th e E n gl is h- Sp ea kin g C ar ib be an (Lo ndo n: Jam e< Curre y, 199 '1); Ch ris ti n e Ho ,"The Inrernationalizarlon o f Kinship and the Ferninizarion o f Canbbcan Mig.rar ion" . Hum" " Organ iz 4 .I .i 01 l52 , ITO.l (1993}; and Shellce Colen," 'Like a Mother to Them'e Stratified Reproduction and West Indian ChildcaeeWQrken ;a~ d E mplo ye rs in N ew Yo rk", in CU1Iceivillg.th. N ,w W orld O rtU r: l 1u G lob ,J Po/iNN of&productilJ1J, e d .Faye D. Chi,.bLirg aild Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: UIlj,v~Isil)'oFC"j i fomia rre~5. 1995) .

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the Caribbean were the rural poor who, like their conremporary counterpartsmigrating to m e USA , were interested mainly in England's economic benefits.Moreover, I do not mean [Q imply that al! male West Indian writers wenr rouniversity, o r that even those who did so never had to engage in the same kinds ofphysical labour that other immigrants did out of financial necessity. My argumenr isnot a materialist one. Rather, my poinr is that, with the authority of the university orprofessional credentials in the background, West Indian male writers, writing fromEngland in self-imposed exile. gained a certain kind of literary authority by theirparticular negotiation of the space between 'home' and 'exile'. Shortly put, [heirinrellecrual labour became the source of their cultural capital.

Unlike the exiled writer, identified as he is with the professions. The immigrantauthor brings no cultural capital to bear in his invocation of literary authority. Incontrast to the glamoured image of the educated - jf torrured - exile, thinking andwriting in a 'cultured' cosmopolitan centre where he ca n finally be understood, (heimage of the immigrant calls to mi.nd very different scenarios: depressing urbansweatshops and low-status jobs; physical, nor intellectual, labour. The question ofcommercial and cultural value undergirds the importance of these signifiers, and (heirvalue is predicated on their power [Q invoke authority, As such, my poinr is [hat theseterms have acquired g en d e r e d connotations in anglophone Caribbean narrativesthrough their STa tus a s signifiers of commercial or cultural power elsewhere. Theseconnotations affect the author's construction of both the authorial self and that self'srelation to the nation thatis being written into existence.1 would like to make it emphat ica l ly clear at rh is juncture that I am not arguingthat Kincaid is not as valued in international literary circles as the canonical malewri rers: quire the conrraryl Her connections to a powerful publishing family in theUSA, as well as ro m e New Yorker magazine and Harvard University are wellknown. What L am imerested in here are the caregories of literary analysis hat weas literary critics use to assign meaning to particular works and particular authors.In other words, What is at stake in the assignment of key words of Caribbeanistdiscou rse?

Exile implies. as we have seen, a distance from and therefore an understood'objectivity' towards the place of origin, the 'homeland', It also implies enforcedbanishment, the condition of political enemies of a nation - dethroned monarchs,writers whose novels inspire dissent. and so forth. Exile is usually defined in terms ofexpatriat~on, the stare of being driven away by some law or edict from one's nativeland, explains Shari Bensrock, Thus, exile is "etymologically conjoined with the law of

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the farner/ruler whose law effects and enforces expatriaring".8 However. Rob Nixoncontends that

exile, in the domain of literary history, possesses a very specific genealogy that by this stage hasle s s co d o w ith banishment a n d ostracism than with a powerful current o f twentieth-century B E l i N d AIirerary expectations in rheWe.s[" Wrirers domiciled overseas" .. commonly imagine and EdMONdSOdescribe themselves as living in exile because it is a term privileged by high modernismandassociated with the emergence of the rnerrppolis as a crucible for a more international, rhoughs ti ll Eu r ope an - or American-based culture.9Simon Gikandi challenges this reading in the Caribbean context, arguing that,

unlike me European literary experience, "exile is not a subjective quest by meCaribbean avant-garde to escape their fixed and fetishized places in the colonialculture". He goes on to quote Jean D'Cosra and Barbara Lalla, editors of a collectionof eigh reenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaican texts: "The experience of e x i l e iscentral to Jamaican history and [0 the making o f language in a Jamaica which spelledb . h . ,C f' 1 ,,10arns .menr lor most 0 ItS peop e.D'Costa and Lalla are referring (0 boththe exile of the black Jamaican slaves fromtheir native Africa, and that of the English landowners and overseers who would ratherbe home in England. What Gikandi's example does not address, however, is mequestion of the consequences of this ancient exile for the black West Indian subjecr. Aneighteenth-century black slave speaking in the banished African rnorher-rongue is indanger of colonial retribution; a twentieth-century black West Indian intellectualwriting novels in English, hardly. The relationship of [he anglophone Caribbean writer'in exile' to the state is dis t inct ly different from that of, say, African writers in exile,who have often received swift and severe punishment for their literary critiques of (hestare. (I am rhinlci.ng particularly of Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose D C " / I Z ' lon the Cross landed him in jail, as did his efforts at establishing a people's open theatre;also, Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who, like Ngugi waThiong'o, must live in exile in [he West for fear of retribution from the Nigeriangovernment. At last repon Soyinka has been charged with treason in absentia by theNigerian government.) The difference between the two finds irs basis in rhe originaryrelationship of the English-speaking Caribbean to Victorian England, where the aim ofthe latter [Q produce 'gentlemen' in the forme.r is tied ro England's vision of the8 See Shari Benstock, "Exparriare Modernism", in Wm nm S W riting and Exj/(, ed, Mary Lynn Brae and Angela

Ingram (Chapel Hill and London: Universiry of North Carolina Pres" 1989), p. 24.9 Rob Nixon, L on do n C al lin g; v .S . N aip a" I . l 'os tcokmi l ll Ml lndurin (New York and Oxford. Oxford University Press,

1992), p. 25.10 Se c Simon Gikand i , Inrroducrion, Writ ing ill Limbo. p. 26. Also, Sec Je an D 'C os m a nd B a rba ra L al la , e ds ., Voi"s i..Ex il e [ ama ic a n T.xlloJrb, 18 th f ind 191h Centuria (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Pless, (989), p. I.


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Caribbean as a crossroads of civilization and savagery. If authorship i s a gentlemanlyanribure, then the very act of l i terary production in the Caribbean necessarily has avery different - more benign - relation to the state's conception of itself Exile maywell be necessary for the Caribbean writer, bur not necessarily under the sameconditions as fo r Africar, or other Third World writers.Therefore, I would like to suggest an alternative reading of Caribbean 'exile' thattakes into account both Benstock's and Nixon's formulations. I wish co gain from theformer thegendered connotations it reveals within the term, and in the tatter, theclassed connotations therein ('class" referring hereto global hierarchies rhat pas iriandoe 'developed' countries of [he Wesr at the top of the global social ladder). Theclarification of these meanings of exile should illuminate my reading of Kincaid'sversion of exile and return ..

If exile fat Bensrock is predicated 011 the banishment of [he writer bypatriarchal authority, [he place 'he' is banished from, the native land, the matria, ismarernalized. Simi l a r ly , Freud equates exile from one's native land with exile fromthe mother: the nostalgia for the home country is in actuality a nostalgia for themother's bodr.ll The land-as-mother thus plays the object to the exile's subject status.A return of the exile to the 'motherland' is then a reappropriation of it. The matria isthe 'internal exclusion' of patria, "the other by and through which peiria isdefined". Its exclusion or 'exile' therefore is [he very condition of patriarchy's

. -". . I .' . d" 12 B k' b ildexistence, smce metria IS a ways E xpatrU {[e _ . enstoc s argument ui supanLuce Irigaray's assertion that Western patriarchal culture is founded on a "symbolicmatricide". This symbolic function of women leads to women'sexile tlJ women withinpatriarchal culture. Irigaray believes that because the woman-mother consriruresrhe foundari.on af patriarchy, [he nation itself, she cannot exist as a subject withinthe patriarchal natlon:

And so woman will no! yet have taken [a] place ... Experienced as all-powerful where "she" ismost radically powerless in her indiffe rend arion. Never here and now because she is thareverywhere elsewhere fmili whence the "subject" continues to draw his reserves, his re-sources,yet unable [0recognize ehem/her.13

11 See.Sigmund Frend, "The Uncanny" {"Das Unheirnliche"), in S ta nda rd Ed it ia n olthe Comp fm Pr y~bo" 'g i. r. ti W{Jrk.r fS ' :gmrmd Freud, trans. and ed, James Strachey ll.ondcrc Hogmh [""'s. 1955), quoted in Samaruhs Heigh, "TheRetuxnof Africa'. Daughters: Negri l l lc le" l ld the Gendering of Ex i l e" [paper presented at [be African LireracureAssociation confarence, Guadelope, 1993), p. 13. I am indebred [0Sarnarrrha Heigh's r~"",ing aflri!l'lJ"al'. B,,"'to~kand Freud i . l l my reasiug our.of rhe meanings of ...tile and 'rnorhedand' here,

12 Shari Bensrock, "Expatriate Modernism", in Womms Writirrg.ttrd Edl~, ed, Mat')' Lynn Btoe and Angela Ingram(Chapel Hill and London: Universlry of Norrh Carolina Press, 1989). p. 25.

13 See L U G " Irig(lray. J7JJs S , , , , ~ W J J ;c h isNo: O,..;(lrhaca: Cornell UoiYetsil}' Press , 1985), pp . [68-69.

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This reading suggests that, contrary to the public association of exile with masculinestatus, its hidden, real meaning is to be found in the female role, which isalways/already exiled from national subject status that it yet constructs.

However, the limitation of this reading is that it cannot account for Kincaid - or B E l i N d AEdMONds(indeed other writers in self-imposed exile such as Naipaul - for whom the primaryemotion elicited by the rnerherland is not nostalgia but ambivalence or even repulsion,unless we reconsider rhar colonialism and irs aftermath of neocolonialism are, likeI ". . f -1'1' f d c: . 1[14. ngaray s woman ,a State er perpetual ale m, 0 an j,,,m rtseIt."

If for Kincaid her lost Caribbean self is one associated with poverty and immigrantlabour, she recuperates a new, intellectual" Caribbean self, paradoxically, by her psychicand physicalexile, She does this with a literary gesture inkeeping with that of so manyof her masculine counterparts in Caribbeanisr discourse: her ficrlve and. non-fictivereferences to 'highbrow' or canonical European/American texts effectively dear a spacethat replaces the image of the labourer with that of the reader and producer of texts.For Kincaid, therefore, exile becomes an essential component in the construction ofthe modern Caribbean se.l(15

14 In SUppOfr o f th is co nclus io n .S im on G ika nd i po in ts O!-Lt tha r a g en e ra rio n o f Ca ribbe a n write rs co n ce ive d o fcolonialism 1'; a state of "perpetual exile", a referenee ro the ps ych ic. n lie na tio n o f ,be Caribbean intellectual fIOm hi ssociety. Sec Gibndi, Writi~igin Limbo, p, %.

15 T Ill s d is cuss io n o f [he d e fin ..lion! o f cx .il" in m od e rn is t a n d Ca ribbe a n lite ra ture is bo rrowe d from chapte r 6 o f mybook , M" ki ,. rg M e n, Gmdtr. Liurary AU fh ~l '''l J; t I" d W o rn "" ~ \ 'i 7r it ir Jg i n C a ~j bb 'f in . N tJ .n :" #v ~ (D urha rn an dLondon: Duke Un i .vc.r$ityP=, 19991.

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Kincaid, Exile