Jamacia Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid is a West Indian - born American novelist short story writer, essayist, and journalist. Kincaid began her legacy writing career as a magazine journalist. The Editors of the New Yorker found that Kincaid, an immigrant to the United States, could effectively distance herself from the insights on American culture. They often quoted her in their articles which eventually encouraged Kincaid to write for the magazines "Talk of the Town" column. When Kincaid began to write her fiction novels it proved a perceptive observer of her native Antigua. Jamaica Kincaid's work is a large portion of autobiographical stories and most of the stories often draw attention upon her childhood experiences on the Caribbean. In her fiction, which she is widely and best known, Kincaid examines the intense bonds between parents and children and the effects of the growth process on both generations. Her writing exposes elements from West Indians language folklore, and voodoo. Kincaid is viewed as a participant in the West Indian literary movement, but white colonialist values are rejected in favor of African or native West Indian modes of expression. Her emphasis on female characters and "emotional truthfulness" works in her feminist
Jamaica Kincaid's highly personal world is that of an unusual visionary. At the Bottom of the River, her first book, published in Britain last year, is a series of loosely connected text pieces. These sections together make up a picture of life as seen by a West Indian girl during the period between her growing into adolescents and her eventually motherhood. The book's area is the empire of things. It is unusual, to say the least, reading at first like a catalogue of proper noun. However it is through the increasing effect of these fractured descriptions that her world takes shape. Kincaid writes with concrete sensibility and is triumphantly modest. She achieves objective effects through an intensely subjective style. Her description of a man who is lost in a 'world bereft of its very nature', unaware of its connection to 'the above' and 'the below', delicately explains the separation many of us suffer from today in modern society. This is not a book for rationalist. It is not even a book to read straight through. But if you bear to dig deep, Jamaica Kincaid's writing may unlock a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed. Highly unfashionable, perhaps, but fascinating. It should be plain by now that this book is more poetry than text. It has the ring of poetry-actual refrains, at times, such as the repetition of "the slut you are so bent on becoming," that runs through the mothers warning in "Girl." Or, in "In the Night": "its breathing, the little baby. Its breathing, the little baby. It's moaning." Moreover, the aim of the pieces is not to report some specific event but to flood us with a mood or sensation. And that aim is realized, by and large. The ingredients of At the Bottom of the River are usually rather simple, even primitive. Many of the stories owe their structure to the folk tales of the Caribbean islands where most of them are set. They propose that things happen without any casual relationship, and they rely on repeated themes and phrases for rationality. Their language, which is often beautifully simple, also often adopts a gospel-like seriousness, rumbling with biblical echoes and echoes of biblical echoes. There is a strong sense of platform... "Either it was drizzling or there was a lot of dust in the air and the dust was damp," she tells us. "I stuck out my tongue and the drizzle or damp dust tasted like government school ink." Is this a dream, or is it real life? Come to think of it, are the two all that different? "Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the colored clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry...' These are the words that begin this unusual little book [At the Bottom of the River]-a collection of ten stories, none of them longer than a few pages, most set in some unnamed spot in the Caribbean. This is not a story. There is no linear progression, no neat plot. At the Bottom of the River is instead a beautiful chaos of images, dark and concrete, which hint at the dreams and nightmares involved as a
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2040
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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