A review by thebacklistborrower
The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

 
Yet another book from the “30 Books to Celebrate 30 Years of Writers and Company”, and I sure changed my feelings a lot through this book. The book is a retrospective of the life of the narrator, Xuela, from when she was a small girl up to her present as a woman in her 30s, in the fictional island of Dominica.

Cw: abortion, infertility

There were a lot of twists and turns to my feelings of this book. When Xuela was young, I was quite annoyed reading the book, as she is represented as very precocious. Her first words were a fully formed, grammatical, sentence in English (not the Carib language spoken locally). Whether or not this is a case of an unreliable narrator, I didn’t like it. However, as Xuela grew into her precociousness, I started to really like her. She revels in the physical, sensory world, and never apologizes for it. And so often characters are wracked with indecision over courses of action, or uncertainty over their lives and their place in the world, but not Xuela, and I found this refreshing. She did exactly what she wanted to and never questioned it. 

These courses of action include a nearly lethal abortion by a herb-woman, resulting in lifelong infertility, affairs with a handful of men, and identifying as a boy for a period of time to make her living. All throughout, she is confident, and the language Kinkaid uses is beautiful, stark, and, in some cases, like a slap to the face (in the best way possible). The derision that Xuela has when discussing the colonizers was hilarious and sharp, as was her language regarding poor lovers.

In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The emotion of the story and the reflection were beautiful, and its written so well. Kinkaid stunned me to wordlessness, made me literally laugh out loud, and, if I were the crying sort, I would have cried too. Be sure to read this book for the story of a life in a fictional Barbados from the perspective of a strong, independent, black woman.

 
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