Jamaica Kincaid
| Jamaica Kincaid | |
|---|---|
| Born | Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson May 25, 1949 St. John's, Antigua |
| Nationality | Antiguan |
| Ethnicity | Caribbean American |
| Education | Franconia College |
| Genre | Fiction, memoir, essays |
| Notable works | |
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Harvard as the "Professor of African and American studies in Residence" at Harvard during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both praised and criticized for its subject matter because her writing largely draws upon her own life and her tone is often perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that many writers also draw upon personal experience, and thus to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not valid criticism.
Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John's, Antigua, in 1949. She grew up in relative poverty with her mother, a literate, cultured woman and home-maker, and her stepfather, a carpenter. She was very close to her mother until the first of her three brothers were born in quick succession when she was nine years old. After their births, Kincaid felt that she was neglected by her mother, who thereafter focused primarily on the needs of her younger brothers. Kincaid later recalled, “our family money remained the same, but there were more people to feed and to clothe, and so everything got sort of shortened, not only material things but emotional things. The good emotional things, I got a short end of that. But then I got more of things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect.” In a New York Times interview, Kincaid also said that “The way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me.”
Kincaid was educated in the British colonial education system, as Antigua did not gain its independence from England until 1981. Although she was intelligent and frequently tested at the top of her class, her mother removed Kincaid from school at age sixteen to help support the family when her third and last brother was born because her stepfather was ill and could not provide for the family any more. In 1966, her mother sent her to Scarsdale, an upper-class suburb of New York City, when she was only seventeen to work as an au pair. However, after this move, Kincaid refused to send money home. Additionally, "she left no forwarding address and was cut off from her family until her return to Antigua 20 years later.”
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