Before Jamaica Kincaid gave the opening address for Caribbean Heritage Week, The Herald talked to the prizewinning author about her Caribbean background, her work and why she became a writer.
The Herald: How do Christopher Columbus' journals, which you will be reading from tonight, play into the theme of Caribbean Heritage Week?Jamaica Kincaid: Columbus was the first language of our heritage, our present, the first account we have of what the place we live in was like, so that seemed appropriate.
How does your own Caribbean heritage figure into your work?It doesn't so much figure in it as it overwhelms everything. Most of my work is entirely from the experience of being born of people who are from there, whose roots go deeply there, so it's overwhelming. But I like to be overwhelmed.
When you were 16 and left Antigua -I was sent away.
When you were sent away, you didn't know you were going to be a writer. When did you decide to pursue writing?I was in college in New Hampshire, Franconia College, and I wanted to write. It wasn't a decision - I don't remember it as a decision. I just wanted to write. I left and moved to New York and said I was a writer and shortly after I began to be published. ... It's possible that I always wanted to write since I was a child, but there was no possibility, it was like wishing you were a princess or something.I always read, and I always imagined myself as a writer, but as a writer who was dead, like Charlotte Bronte. I liked Charlotte Bronte very much. I used to pretend I was her and that I was living in Belgium, alone.
What else did you read that influenced you?I read "Jane Eyre" for pleasure, but the big influence on me were the things I had to read in school - the Bible, the King James Version, a dictionary my mother gave me when I was seven years old - and I read it. It was a birthday present. That was a big influence in a strange way."Paradise Lost" - I had to copy books one and two when I was seven as a punishment, and it had the desired effect - it made me admire Lucifer, and I wrote a book about a character called Lucy who was also very rebellious.Also English literature, the grand, mainly the dead white men kind of literature. Lots of Shakespeare and English history. I really knew not much about the Caribbean and the place I grew up in so much as I knew about England.
You're teaching at Harvard now. What is it like working with students and younger people?Oh, it's lovely! They remind me of myself when I was their age and just starting to write, though they're in a much more privileged position than I could ever imagine. It's lovely to see young people, I love young people.
What are you working on now?I can't tell you that, because I don't know! People always ask that. It's really a question - I have to give you some advice - not to ask a writer. If they tell you, don't believe it.
In your last book, "Among Flowers," you wrote about traveling in Nepal. You have described the barrier between a tourist and the place he is visiting as a sort of inescapable hostility that someone feels when there is someone visiting their home. How did it feel being a tourist after you said you felt that way about traveling?The position of a tourist, of someone like me, in my social situation and prosperity, visiting a place like that, is something most people growing up in a place like this, in a dominant society, wouldn't think of. But I grew up in a place that was like Nepal, a place that invites the gaze of people with more money than the native people have. I was very aware of my position as someone able to shape their reality, in the sense that I could describe them. I had the power to describe them, and to make that description translate just by writing about them and their situation, to make it translate into something that would possibly change their reality in a way that they had not determined. Being aware of that kind of situation I did as much as I could not to describe them. I felt I was transgressing enough taking the seeds of plants that were native of them to bring back to my garden in Vermont. That was enough. There's practically no anthropological or ethnographic description of the people. The people I met I tried to interact with in as human a way as possible.
Is that what Columbus was doing, describing?Columbus? No, he was taking possession. I'm not in a position to take possession because I live in a country that will do it for me.
