At the opening night reading for PEN’s World Voices Festival of International Literature, Jamaica Kincaid chose to read not from her newest novel, See Now Then, but from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The Reader caught up with the renowned Caribbean novelist after the reading to discuss mythology, race, and playing pretend. In the interview below, Kincaid explains that anger is a legitimate response to oppression, and that, if she weren’t black and female, the anger in her writing would not be considered grounds for dismissing it.
American Reader: Could you speak a little more about your decision to readParadise Lost tonight in place of your own writing?
Jamaica Kincaid: Oh, at a certain point my own writing is not so interesting to me. I’ve read it; I wrote it; and I wanted to do something that was unusual. It’s literature. And Paradise Lost is a complicated poem. I found in it—as a 7-year-old it formed very much my feelings about tyranny and about injustice—simplified, because the poem is very complicated.
I just wanted to read something that would not be what was expected. I tend to do that in my writing. I was almost sure people wanted me to read from my writing, but I never give people what they want.
AR: You said in an interview recently that you feel that the conventional plot, that traditional writing, is actually what is artificial because thinking doesn’t work that way. I was wondering, what do you feel like would be lost in your writing if you adhered to that conventional plot of “and then…and then…”?
JK: For me, simply—it would bore me to tears.
I enjoyed the woman from Cambodia [novelist Vaddey Ratner] very much. And I thought, “Isn’t that wonderful? Why don’t I write like that? That’s something everybody will read.”
But I couldn’t do it. For me, if I were to do it, there is a kind of truth that would be lost. I think that it isn’t true that you look and are helpless when your father is…you’re angry, you’re all sorts of… There are all sorts of things that the conventional way of saying this suffocates. I am interested in a kind of life that the convention would suffocate.
AR: In Mother Jones recently you spoke about this period of extreme self-styling, when you had blonde hair and painted eyebrows. Then, in another interview, you said you pretended to be Charlotte Brontë. What has always drawn you to pretending, and what is the connection, for you, between pretending and the search for truth?
JK: I think the times when I was wearing disguises—for example, as a child pretending I was a writer—there was a truth to it in that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know it was possible. It was an aspiration.
When I was wearing outlandish things, they were presentations. They were an attempt, actually, to mask a truth. And then when I no longer felt it necessary, I abandoned it and was myself. But they are sorts of attempts to be in a truth. For one, the truth seemed unavailable—to be a writer—and the other was to hide the fact that I wanted to be a serious person.
AR: In the past, much has been made out of anger in your writing. But also, in person, in readings and interviews, you’re very funny, and I was wondering what do you think the link is between anger and humor, and how do they both serve you?
JK: People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do. But if they’re white, they won’t say it. I used to just pretend I didn’t notice it, and now I just think I don’t care.
There are all sorts of reasons not to like my writing. But that’s not one of them. Saying something is angry is not a criticism. It’s not valid. It’s not a valid observation in terms of criticism. You can list it as something that’s true. But it’s not critical.
You may not like it because it makes you uneasy—and you can say that. But to damn it because it’s angry…. They always say that about black people: “those angry black people.” And why? You’re afraid that there might be some truth to their anger. It might be justified.
I promise you, if I had blonde hair and blue eyes this wouldn’t be an issue. No one ever says, “That angry Judith Krantz…” or whatever.
AR: You’ve actually said something similar about your new book. There’s all this discussion about it being autobiographical, and I’ve heard you say, it’s because you are black and a woman.
JK: Yes. I am somehow not supposed to use my life in any way. Let’s say it’s true. What’s wrong with that?
People draw on their life all the time.
AR: Right, it’s not a critical stance.
JK: I couldn’t—I can’t for the life of me understand why people would go looking to see if there were parallels. There are always parallels. Charlotte Brontë was a nanny, was a governess. What’s the big deal?
It’s not a valid criticism.
I think—especially with this last book, I thought, “Is there something about me that just makes people annoyed?” I’ve always thought people were sort of annoyed at me. My life does seem improbable. Here I am, this young black woman, just from nowhere and I’m writing for the New Yorker. Then I’m doing this, and I’m doing that—yes, it’s annoying.
I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I’m writing for the New Yorker, I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
I remember my friend, George—people used to say to me, other women, when I was young and at the New Yorker: “How did you get your job?” And I would say, “Well, I met George Trow, and he introduced me to the editor.”
And they’d say, “No, no, no. How did you get your job?”
And I said to George, “I don’t know why they ask me this.” And he said, “Oh, just tell them your father owned the magazine.”
And so the next time people said, “How did you get your job?” I said, “Oh, my father owned the magazine.” And it stopped.
Because that made sense. But that I actually worked and was talented— “How did you get your job?” And I think sometimes there is a bit of that leftover, like, “How did you get here?”
And I don’t seem to care what people think. I write—from the time I started writing I’ve been writing the same way. And people have been saying the same shit about it: “She’s angry. The sentences are too long.”
My first short story is one sentence, 300 words long. My writing has always been criticized for this, this, this. I think that people just think, “Why the hell won’t she stop it? We’ve told her we don’t like it. She keeps doing it.”
That’s the way I write. It’s never going to stop. And the more it makes people annoyed the more I will do it. And it’s actually really good writing. I’m a good writer. They should just say that: “She’s a great writer.” I am.
I’m sorry.
AR: No, that’s fantastic.
JK: Actually, you make me realize that I am pissed. Not at you, but at this perception that I am pissed—I’m really pissed at it.
No. They should just say it, “This is really a good writer.” And, “A lot of the other shit that you like isn’t good writing.”
[laughter]
AR: Your new book is engaging with the passage of time, and I was just wondering what made you want to write on that topic now?
JK: Why doesn’t somebody write about that? That is a pretty unusual thing to do in contemporary writing. It’s an unusual thing to do.
Let me see—I won’t name names, but of all the men who write those doorstoppers, is anybody interested in such an interesting theme? No. I just—I don’t care what people think. I will write what I write; I will do what I do.
So, yes, that is the subject of the book. It’s the scaffolding on which the other things are placed. It’s a serious attempt to understand something. You can say I failed at it. I think I failed at it. But for me, the failure is only the opportunity to try it again.
AR: Last thing—in your new book, you have this substitution of mythology for your own biography. And so, when you started reading “Paradise Lost” tonight, it was striking to me that you would substitute a great myth for your own work.
JK: Yes. The thing about invoking myths in everyday life, as we call it—that’s how you really are thinking. You are not you, but—in your mind’s eye, something bigger than you is going on. And I wanted to allude to that, to allude to the fact that things are bigger than—we are bigger than the thing we see. We stand still, and then we are bigger, and move around much more. I wanted to say that.
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>via: http://theamericanreader.com/a-conversation-with-jamaica-kincaid/
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Jamaica Kincaid on Writing
and ‘Outlaw American’ Culture
By Nathan Rostron, Published: February 19, 2013
Jamaica Kincaid has won acclaim for work that blurs the line between fact and fiction in novels such as “The Autobiography of My Mother.” Her latest book,“See Now Then,” her first novel in more than 10 years, intimately details a marriage’s painful disintegration. While Kincaid’s own marriage to composerAllen Shawn ended just over a decade ago, the author insists that fiction is not autobiography. She told Bookish about discovering “Lady Chatterley” as a 10-year-old in her home country of Antigua, wanting to be both African-American and a hippie, what it was like to create the “rodent”-like husband character in “See Now Then” and her wild days at “The New Yorker” with Ian Frazier.
Bookish: What’s the book that you love, but no one who knows you would expect you to love?
JK: [Laughs.] “Lady Chatterley’s Daughter,” by a writer I do not know. It was full of sex, unlike “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” I couldn’t understand why “Lady Chatterley’s Daughter” was not banned [in Antigua] but “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which has nothing of interest in it at all–it’s Lawrence’s worst book–was. I don’t think anyone has even heard of “Lady Chatterley’s Daughter.” It was published by Penguin in the ’50s. It’s the best. It’s for people who know nothing about sex, a 10-year-old girl living on a tropical island. Yes, that would be me.
[With “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”], I had to read it in the dark under the house away from my mother’s eyes. I kept turning the page looking for the banned parts. It’s just like two little things, two sentences or something in a chicken coop, or in a hut in the woods. It’s nothing! And I was so disappointed. And then there was “Lady Chatterley’s Daughter”–in those days Penguin was a cheap publisher of Perry Mason books and so on. And page after page was just full of incredible things that I’d never heard of, and just the very words themselves I’m sure made my little flat chest grow fat.
Bookish: Which books have influenced on your own writing?
JK: I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book. You can see the influence on me, the way I repeat words, and each repetition is meant to convey a separate meaning. And the Bible, the way I begin a sentence with a conjunction sometimes, or the way I begin in the middle and there is no end, really. And “Paradise Lost,” but for a more complicated reason.
Bookish: In your novel, “See Now Then,” the main character, Mrs. Sweet, remembers how she was forced to copy out book one of “Paradise Lost” as a punishment. Is that something that you had to do as a child?
JK: That actually did happen to me, yes.
Bookish: Given that it’s now one of the most important books to you, do you still consider it a punishment?
JK: You would conceive it that way now, but at the time I had to do it overnight. I grew up in a house without electricity. It was not done to make me the person I became: It was done to make me the opposite of the person I became. By nature, I’m the sort of person who can make lemonade out of something worse even than lemons–but it was regular punishment. This only reveals that you are American, you know. [Laughs.]
Bookish: How so?
JK: You Americans–and I’m an American too, by adoption–instinctively, Americans think that everything will turn out for the best, especially if it does turn out for the best.
Bookish: But at the time, you did not imagine that it would turn out for the best?
JK: No! I thought I would die. I couldn’t see, and my fingers were cramped; my mother was ashamed of me because I had misbehaved.
Bookish: Does the main character of your book, Mrs. Sweet, consider herself American, or is she still an immigrant in her own mind?
JK: I would say in her own mind she’s an immigrant. Though her interest in the brand of things would suggest that she’s been Americanized.
Bookish: Do you think that it’s possible for someone who comes to America after her personality has already been formed to become fully “American”?
JK: It’s different for everybody. Some people embrace the whole thing and become Republicans and racists and so on. That’s very, very American. The first thing some people would do when they come from some parts of the world is to become white, which is very American–to be white. And then you have someone like me: Not only did I not become white, I really wanted to be an African-American. I’ve always wanted to be. I always loved American popular culture when I was a child, even though everything I read was from the mother country, England. But yes, I think it is possible. Look at John Sununu. I don’t know if it’s his family, or he, who comes from Lebanon (or Syria or wherever his people come from), but the first thing he does is to be an asshole.
Bookish: What did you do to make yourself feel more African-American?
JK: I was just very interested in African-American style–Ebony magazine. When I was growing up, I wanted to look like one of those Negro ladies, and I would try to make my hair like that. I would just pretend I was a young girl in Chicago, probably, or Harlem. I had this romantic view of African-American life. I didn’t understand racial discrimination because I grew up in an all-black place; I thought people who were racist were badly brought up.
Bookish: So you wanted to be African-American, yet you went and lived in Vermont for decades–not traditionally a hotbed of African-American culture.
JK: That’s true, but the other thing I’ve always wanted to be was a hippie. When once I got to America I fell in love with hippie culture, and I’ve always wanted to live in the country and grow organic vegetables. When I was young I used to love psychedelic drugs. I used to take them all the time. I love hippie culture. I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture.
Bookish: “See Now Then” is a portrait of the disintegration of a marriage between Mrs. Sweet and Mr. Sweet. There’s a surface sweetness to the story, yet something darker lies underneath.
JK: Yes, that’s the point. Everything about it is the opposite of sweet. I could have called them Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but it wouldn’t have brought out in me the very opposite of sweet to write about. Partly the way I write, when I put something down is to give myself another clue. In a way I am my own reader.
Bookish: There’s a thread of Greek mythology that runs through the novel. Mrs. Sweet’s children are called Heracles and Persephone, and, like Hades, Mr. Sweet keeps Persephone locked away from Mrs. Sweet. What did weaving that mythology allow you to do in the book?
JK: It allowed me to glancingly talk about the relationship between fathers and their daughters and the vitality of sons and the dangers they pose to their fathers, and the mourning mothers feel for the loss of their children and so on. It’s just what it says. I kind of don’t want to interpret it too much for the reader because then you lose the magic; you might lose the pleasure of it.
Bookish: Mrs. Sweet is also a writer, and she has a private room off the kitchen where she writes. Do you have a space where you sequester yourself away from the world in order to write?
JK: I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance. There were so many things that wanted to interfere with me writing–my upbringing, my childhood, people in my career doing despicable things–and nothing stops me, really, not a bad review, not a bad thing, nothing.
Bookish: Mr. Sweet: He is so vividly described as “a rodent” or “an old prince”–he’s a fearful and yet imperious man. Is he one of the darkest characters you’ve created?
JK: You know, the first mammals were rodents. We evolved from rodents (laughs). I wasn’t trying to be dark; I was just trying to write out of an adult understanding of life. My observation of people at a certain stage in their life was like that. We don’t always understand what’s happening to us, and we try to make a social reality out of our internal one. It wasn’t meant to be dark or derogatory; it was just meant to describe something (laughs). I’m not terribly familiar with someone like that.
Bookish: I have to ask, because the book does echo your biography–how much of you and your ex-husband are in these main characters?
JK: About my ex-husband: I feel terrible that people immediately go to that for him because he’s not in the book as himself. It’s been a long time, 12 years, since I was married, so I wasn’t thinking of him. But about my own life, I find a lot of things in my own life of interest to me. We just live in a different time, where you think if a writer said something, oh it must be them. But it’s not him, it’s not me, it’s a piece of writing. But it is true that a writer draws from the things they know.
Bookish: I think readers are intensely curious: They want to know not just about the book, but about the writer, too.
JK: You know what’s wrong with readers is that they’ve begun to confuse writing with the things they see in People magazine. But I wish they would reserve some of themselves for not wanting to know the kind of things they want to know. Read the book and then close the book. Any answer a writer may give them about the origins of the book and the author’s real life will ruin their imaginations. It’s very important part of a healthy person’s life, an imagination.
Bookish: I want to return to the past once more. There’s a moment in the book where you write, “George said to Sandy, ‘You know, one of us will have to marry Jamaica.'” Was thatIan Frazier–a.k.a. Sandy Frazier–and were you talking about your days at The New Yorker?
JK: Yes, that’s true. And the George is George W.S. Trow.
Bookish: Is there a memory of your time with those two and working at The New Yorker that still sticks with you?
JK: Oh, it was as if all the fun I never had in school–I never had friends who loved and were loyal to me when I was child–it was if someone said, “Here! Now you get it.” They were the best friends I could have had, and I was so lucky to know them, and they told me I was funny. I didn’t know that I was funny. I didn’t know one could be funny, and they showed me. George, one time I used the word “utilized,” and he said, “You must never use that word,” and he went out and bought me Fowler’s guide to English usage. He brought me up.
We just would make each other laugh. George belonged to a club that at the time didn’t admit women or Jews or, especially, black people, and he couldn’t take us. And one day when he was going off to it–it’s a club called the Knickerbocker Club–and one day when he was going off to it Sandy said, “Oh, so George, you’re going off to the Niggerblocker Club?”
And George was furious with us! And we laughed so hard, but Sandy and I told our children that joke, they were appalled that we knew someone who belonged to a club like that. You see how it’s not funny anymore?
Bookish: It’s not. And yet–
JK: But it was–we just thought it was funny that he belonged to a club. It’s the things like that.
Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include “At the Bottom of the River,” “Annie John,” “Lucy,” “The Autobiography of My Mother” and “My Brother.” She lives with her family in Vermont.
>via: http://www.bookish.com/articles/jamaica-kincaid-on-writing-and-outlaw-american-culture