A review by barnstormingbooks
My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid

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.