ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
“What I am writing now is not a journal; a journal is a daily account, an immediate account of what occurs during a certain time. For a long time after my brother died I could not write about him, I could not think about him in a purposeful way. It was really a short time between the time that he became sick and the time he died, but that time became a world. To make a world takes an eternity, and eternity is the refuge of the lost, the refuge for all things that will never be or things that have been but have lost their course and hope to recede with some grace, and even I believe this to be true, though I also know that I have no real way of measuring it. His death was imminent and we were all anticipating it, including him, but we never gave any thought to the fact that this was true for all of us, too: our death was imminent, only we were not anticipating it . . . yet.”
TITLE—My Brother
AUTHOR—Jamaica Kincaid
PUBLISHED—1997
PUBLISHER—Farrar, Straus and Giroux
GENRE—literary nonfiction memoirish
SETTING—Antigua & Vermont
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—an elegy for a life lost to more than just death, motherhood, family relationships—esp birth family vs chosen family, the nature of familial love, AIDS, Antigua, the legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean, survivor’s guilt, secrets, identity & purpose, the choices available to us & the choices we make, queerness, grief, funerals & cemeteries, how we honor ourselves by honoring our dead, the color blue, a survivor’s homage—a sibling’s homage, one of the best books about death I’ve ever read
“His face was sharp like a carving, like an image embossed on an emblem, a face full of deep suffering, beyond regrets or pleadings for a second chance. It was the face of someone who had lived in extremes, sometimes a saint, sometimes a sinner.”
Summary:
"Brilliant writing and thinking… My Brother... is about life and death. It's about how economic and emotional poverty corrode the body and the soul." — MEREDITH MARAN, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“This is another chapter in Kincaid's quest to come to terms with the way politics and history, those two generalities, shape human assumptions in the most specific and idiosyncratic manner." — BETSY WILLEFORD, The Kansas City Star
“…transforming tortured memory into emancipating elegy." — NICK CHARLES, People
"If it is impossible to go home again, it is equally impossible for most of us to stay away… Kincaid renders that ambivalence (the tension between revulsion and attachment) so precisely, she makes it seem almost bearable.” — JOAN SMITH, San Francisco Examiner
My thoughts:
Reading a Jamaica Kincaid book is like watching someone do an autopsy on your soul, exposing your deepest secrets and the root of your most visceral emotions, and this book has exemplified that experience for me the most of any of her books so far.
I was *stunned* by this book. I had trouble putting it down. In fact, I only managed to put it down twice and each time unintentionally right before the two biggest bombshells of the book. I couldn’t believe the degree to which I related to Kincaid’s experience of her relationships to her family members (both birth and chosen), her coping with contradictory feelings of compassion & anger, love & hatred, understanding & resentment, and even her relationship to her own sexuality.
Uncensored, unfiltered, brutally honest and transparent, this book excelled in emphasizing the contradictions between the things Kincaid was doing to help her brother, her choosing to help, to be there with him and their mother, while they all went through her brother’s decline together, and the terrible thoughts and feelings she was having in spite of her decisions. She was so far from being a hero, probably further even in her own mind than in the eyes of her family, and yet there she was—back home among a family that in many ways wasn’t a family to her.
Is it possible to turn your back while still facing forward? Humans are complicated. Life is complicated. Family is complicated. Love is complicated. And this book more than any other I’ve read to date has managed to translate the complexity of all of those contradictions into an artform that reminds us why art is so essential to appreciating our existence as humans in a world we only pretend to understand.
Not to mention the writing style! The syntax! The tone and cadence—the organic, emotional flow of her reflections. The vivid use of color, the parenthetical clarifications, the repetition of “I don’t know. I don’t know.” all conveying such a desperate desire to be as clear and honest as possible in a passionate attempt at excavating not just her feelings but the way such a world could cause such a complex hurricane of mercilessly contradictory emotions and reactions. And the ending! Whew. I already want to reread it.
I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in taking a deep dive into exploring the themes of death, family relationships, and grief. This book is best read after reading her other books in order of publication leading up to this one. It deeply enhances the whole experience.
Final note: It’s still wild to me that the book I thought I was going to struggle with the most of hers ended up being my favorite and the most resonant of all of Kincaid’s books that I’ve read so far. This readalong of all of her works is turning out to be one of the best and most important reading experiences of my life. 🫶🏻
“I became a writer out of desperation, so when I first heard my brother was dying I was familiar with the act of saving myself: I would write about him. I would write about his dying. When I was young, younger than I am now, I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life. When I heard about my brother's illness and his dying, I knew, instinctively, that to understand it, or to make an attempt at understanding his dying, and not to die with him, I would write about it… And so I wrote about the dead for the dead…”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Season: November—Samhain & All Souls’ Day
CW // *graphic*: AIDS, terminal disease, grief (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Further Reading—
- everything else by Jamaica Kincaid—best read in order of publication
- WHEN WE WERE BIRDS by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
- THE STAR SIDE OF BIRD HILL by Naomi Jackson
- KRIK? KRAK! by Edwidge Danticat
- HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK by Zora Neale Hurston
Favorite Quotes—
“And when I picked up that book again, The Education of a Gardener, I looked at my brother, for he was a gardener also, and I wondered, if his life had taken a certain turn, if he had caused his life to take a different turn, might he have written a book with such a title?”
“I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are, why they invent a self that bears no resemblance to who they really are, why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.”
“The plantsman in my brother will never be, and all the other things that he might have been in his life have died; but inside his body a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems able to satisfy and stop.”
“I am so vulnerable to my family's needs and infuence that from time to time I remove myself from them. I do not write to them. I do not pay visits to them. I do not lie, I do not deny, I only remove myself. When I heard that my brother was sick and dying, the usual deliberation I allow myself whenever my family's needs come up—should I let this affect me or not?—vanished. I felt I was falling into a deep hole, but I did not try to stop myself from falling. I felt myself being swallowed up in a large vapor of sadness, but I did not try to escape it.”
“If I should bring it up, she says it is an old story ("e' a' ole time 'tory; you lub ole-time 'tory, me a warn you"), and for my mother an old story is a bad story, a story with an ending she does not like.”
“This part of Antigua was considered the country then, and I was terrified of the darkness, it was so unrelieved by light even from other houses; also from the house where I lived I could see the St. John's city graveyard, and it seemed to me that almost every day I could see people attending a funeral. It was then I decided that only people in Antigua died, that people living in other places did not die and as soon as I could, I would move somewhere else, to those places where the people living there did not die.”
“It was for my own peace of mind that I said it; I wanted it to be real to me, that my brother was suffering and dying from AIDS; hearing that he was sick and dying was new to me and so every opportunity I got I would say it out loud: "My brother is sick from and dying of AIDS."”
“[Dr. Ramsey] said that people who are not HIV-positive give up too soon on the people who are, but that he tries to keep everybody alive, because you never know when a cure might come along. He said that—you never knew when a cure might come along—and I could not tell if, in that, he was asserting native Antiguan foolishness or faith in science. Antigua is a place in which faith undermines the concrete.”
“In a place like Antigua, I suspect, the use of drugs is not about the dulling of pain in a useless life but about providing and extending pleasure.”
“Antiguans are not particularly homophobic so much as they are quick to disparage anyone or anything that is different from whom or what they think of as normal.”
“My own life, from a sexual standpoint, can be described as a monument to boring conventionality. And so perhaps because of this I have a great interest in other people's personal lives.”
“We are not an instinctively empathetic people; a circle of friends who love and support each other is not something I can recall from my childhood.”
“I used to do exactly this when I was a child: lie in bed with my feet resting on the windowsill and in the sun, because my feet then were always cold. I would read books then, and this whole scene of me lying in bed and reading books would drive my mother to fits of anger, for she was sure it meant I was doomed to a life of slothfulness, but as it turned out, I was only doomed to write books other people might read.”
“…but what I really meant was, no, I can't do what you are suggesting - take this strange, careless person into the hard-earned order of my life: my life of children and husband, and they love me and love me again, and I love them.”
“Whatever made me talk about him, whatever made me think of him, was not love, just something else, but not love; love being the thing I felt for my family, the one I have now, but not for him, or the people I am from, not love, but a powerful feeling all the same, only not love. My talk was full of pain, it was full of misery, it was full of anger, there was no peace to it, there was much sorrow, but there was no peace to it. How did I feel? I did not know how I felt. I was a combustion of feelings.”
“He was not meant to be silent. He was a brilliant boy, he was a brilliant man. Locked up inside him was someone who would have spoken to the world in an important way.”
“And I began again to wonder what his life must be like for him, and to wonder what my own life would have been like if I had not been so cold and ruthless in regard to my own family, acting only in favor of myself when I was a young woman.”
“When I was a child, I would hear her recount events that we both had witnessed and she would leave out small details; when I filled them in, she would look at me with wonder and pleasure and praise me for my extraordinary memory. This praise made an everlasting mark and nothing anyone could do made me lose this ability to remember, however selectively I remember. As I grew up, my mother came to hate this about me, because I would remember things that she wanted everybody to forget.”
“He lived in death. Perhaps everyone is living in death, I actually do believe that, but usually it can't be seen; in his case it was a death I could see.”
“I was thinking of my past and how it frightened me to think that I might have continued to live in a certain way, though, I am convinced, not for very long. I would have died at about his age, thirty-three years, or I would have gone insane.”
“We are all acquainted with death; each moment, each gesture, holds in it a set of events that can easily slide into realities that are unknown, unexpected, to the point of shock; we do not really expect these moments; they arrive and are resisted, denied, and then finally, inexorably, accepted…”
“For the magazine I wrote for all of my writing life so far was like the place in which I had grown up; it was beautiful, an ideal of some kind, but it had been made vulgar and ugly by the incredibly stupid people who had become attracted to it.”
“…I only wanted to be happy and happy and happy again, with all the emptiness and meaninglessness that such a state would entail.”
“But these words, "I'm sorry," which sometimes are said with a real depth of feeling, with true sincerity, sometimes just out of politeness, are such a good thing to hear if you are in need of hearing them, and just then I was in need of hearing those words, "I'm sorry," "I am so sorry.” I did not love my brother, I did not like my brother, I was only so sorry that he had died…”
“…the future never being now; only it actually comes, the future, later.”
“I was so tired of him being in this state, not alive, not dead, but constantly with his demands, in want, constantly with his necessities, weighing on my sympathy, at times preying on my sympathy, whichever way it fell, I was sick of him and wanted him to go away, and I didn't care if he got better and I didn't care if he died. That was just the way I felt, that was the only thing I felt just at that moment when he would not die and when he would not live; I only wanted him to do one or the other and then leave me alone.”
“I felt anger, my anger was everything to me, and in my anger lay many things, mostly made up of feelings I could not understand, feelings I might not ever understand, feelings that everyone who knows me understands with an understanding that I will never know, or that someone who has never met me at all would understand as if they had made up my feelings themselves.”
“…and that is one of the reasons to outlive all the people who can have anything to say about you, not letting them have the last word…”
“I did not get in her way, I was inside on the bed lying down, but in any case, I no longer got in her way, I had removed myself from getting in her way, I was in a position in my own life that did not allow for getting in my mother's way, she could not curse me, I no longer needed her.”
“I liked books, I liked reading books, I did not like anything else as much as I liked reading a book, a book of any kind.”
“I joined a group of people sitting in chairs waiting and waiting for the doctor, and we waited not in joy, not in anger, but more as if we were in a state of contemplation, as if we were seeing the whole panorama of life, from its ancient beginnings in the past to its inevitable end in some future, and we accepted it with indifference, for what else could we do? And this is the way people wait, people all over the world wait in this way, when they are powerless or poor, or both at the same time.”
“…in spite of all the people I had been close to who had died, I never believed in it, the very fact that they had died; I now know that I thought of them as being somewhere else, someplace that I now no longer visited, or had never visited and would never visit, for they were there and I was here and had chosen to be here and not to join them at all; they had not died, they were only someplace else.”
“I could not have become a writer while living among the people I knew best, I could not have become myself while living among the people I knew best—and I only knew them best because I was from them, of them, and so often felt I was them—and they were—are—the people who ought to have loved me best in the whole world, the people who should have made me feel that the love of people other than them was suspect.”
“And his life unfolded before me not like a map just found, or a piece of old paper just found, his life unfolded and there was everything to see and there was nothing to see; in his life there had been no flowering, his life was the opposite of that, a flowering, his life was like the bud that sets but, instead of opening into a flower, turns brown and falls off at your feet.”
“I shall never forget him because his life is the one I did not have, the life that, for reasons I hope shall never be too clear to me, I avoided or escaped.”
“Which Devon was he? All of them, I suppose; and which did he like best, and which one of his selves made him happiest? I cannot tell this, and perhaps neither could he.”
“It was because I had neglected my brother when he was two years old and instead read a book that my mother gathered up all the books I owned and put them on a pile on her stone heap, sprinkling them with kerosene and then setting them alight; I cannot remember the titles of these books, I cannot remember what they were about (they would have been novels, at fifteen I read only novels), but it would not be so strange if I spent the rest of my life trying to bring those books back to my life by writing them again and again until they were perfect, unscathed by fire of any kind.”
dinahrachel's review against another edition
4.75
One I haven't read before, so glad to read it, fills in lots of missing pieces and is a raw coming together of many griefs. I heard her say she didn't want to write a book in this way again and I can very much relate to that, and see why.
constant_reader_19's review against another edition
4.0
A book my students were talking about from their English class. Had to check it out. I enjoyed Kincaid's style of writing and her very honest account of the last months of her brother's life.
barnstormingbooks's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
slow-paced
3.5
This was a hard read for me. Mostly because I also lost my brother when he was in his 20s, but under very different circumstances and while Kincaid watched her brother’s slow descent from HIV into AIDS, my brother died of addiction in a somewhat unpredictable manner.
Kincaid's signature style of writing in spirals, slowly developing an idea throughout a paragraph that can last pages is on display in this text. Also, as a reader I better understand Annie John and An Autobiography of My Mother, now that I see where Kincaid pulled from her own life and strained relationships with both Antigua and her family for those books and where the fiction seems to come in.
Overall, I felt more connected to the narrative in her novels than I did here, maybe it is the way that Kincaid explores her feelings that feels a little at arms length vs the rich depth of her fiction. There is a dissonance that is not explored in this text, the fact that Kincaid moves back and forth from stating that she loves and doesn’t love her brother, while putting herself into debt finding medical resources for him… There is a deeper conversation she could have had with herself on her actions as love vs. duty that I would have appreciated, but again that is just my own reading of this story. Maybe I’m putting my own thoughts and guilt from my own brother’s passing onto Kincaid’s work. Either way when a book makes me explore my own feelings or experiences there is huge value to that work.
careinthelibrary's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.5