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Interview: Jamaica Kincaid, Author Of 'See Now Then' The marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet is anything but sweet. In Jamaica Kincaid's first new novel in 10 years, she traces the unraveling of a marriage. See Now Then follows the joy, pain and destruction that time can wreak on a union.

The novel opens with a scene of a seemingly idyllic home life in small-town New England. But it is soon clear the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet is anything but sweet.

Critics have drawn parallels to Kincaid's own life. Mrs. Sweet, like Kincaid, is an avid gardener; her marriage to a composer ends in divorce.

Jamaica Kincaid: Biography, Books & Short Stories

She adds: "It's painful, in its way, to be dismissed because, 'Well, it's about her marriage and revenge or something.' It's not that at all."

"It's not a book in the usual way of and then and then and next. It doesn't have what you'd call a traditional structure or a traditional narrative. But it's very structured, it's very mannered, actually, in the way your mind might work. I mean, I've come to think that the traditional way of writing is the artificial way that that's not the way things work at all. It's not the way thinking works."

"Time is the main character. Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people. I started out thinking, 'What is this thing we call time?' And it started in this way: Every day I see a photograph of myself taken when I was 2 years of age. And I would look at it and wonder, 'Well, what happened to that 2-year-old, where did it go?' ... And so it's from that really I began to contemplate all the things that had happened."

The Autobiography Of My Mother Audiobook By Jamaica Kincaid

"My own everyday life was not on my mind so much, but how to render something that had happened. How to make sense of it. You know, men write about their life all the time. You know, Norman Mailer would put himself in his books, and no one made it seem that he was doing something less. ... If I had looked different, my autobiography in the book, or any kind of autobiography in the book, would not be held against it. ... Sometimes I feel that there is a certain kind of book that I should have written, that is expected of someone like me: the travails of the black woman ... (The book is) not about the black woman, or the black this, it's about a human experience."is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, garder, and garding writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua (part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda). She lives in North Bnington, Vermont and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residce at Harvard University during the academic year.

She was very close to her mother until her three brothers were born in quick succession, starting wh Kincaid was nine years old. After her brothers' births, she rested her mother, who thereafter focused primarily on the brothers' needs. Kincaid later recalled,

Our family money remained the same, but there were more people to feed and to clothe, and so everything got sort of shorted, not only material things but emotional things. The good emotional things, I got a short d of that. But th I got more of things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect.[5]

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In a New York Times interview, Kincaid also said: "The way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me."

Kincaid received (and frequtly excelled in) a British education growing up, as Antigua did not gain indepdce from the United Kingdom until 1981.

Although she was intelligt and frequtly tested at the top of her class, Kincaid's mother removed her from school at 16 to help support the family wh her third and last brother was born, because her stepfather was ill and could no longer provide for the family.

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In 1966, wh Kincaid was 17, her mother st her to Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City, to work as an au pair.

After this move, Kincaid refused to sd money home; "she left no forwarding address and was cut off from her family until her return to Antigua 20 years later".

In 1979, Kincaid married the composer and Bnington College professor All Shawn, son of longtime The New Yorker editor William Shawn and brother of actor Wallace Shawn. The couple divorced in 2002. They have two childr: a son, Harold, the music producer/songwriter Levelsoundz, a graduate of Northeastern University; and a daughter, Annie, who graduated from Harvard and now works in marketing. Kincaid is presidt of the official Levelsoundz Fan Club.

This Will Not Be Generative

After three years, she resigned from her job to attd Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship. She dropped out after a year and returned to New York,

She described this name change as "a way for [her] to do things without being the same person who couldn't do them — the same person who had all these weights".

Kincaid explained that "Jamaica" is an glish corruption of what Columbus called Xaymaca, the part of the world that she comes from, and "Kincaid" appeared to go well with "Jamaica".

Annie John Audiobook By Jamaica Kincaid

Kincaid is a writer, whose work has be both praised and criticized for its subject matter because it largely draws upon her own life, and her tone is oft perceived as angry.

Kincaid counters that many writers draw upon personal experice, so to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not valid criticism.

As a result of her budding writing career and fridship with George W. S. Trow, who wrote many pieces for The New Yorker column "The Talk of the Town",

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He employed her as a staff writer in 1976 and evtually as a featured columnist for Talk of the Town for nine years.

Shawn's tutelage legitimized Kincaid as a writer and proved pivotal to her developmt of voice. In all, she was a staff writer for The New Yorker for 20 years.

She resigned from The New Yorker in 1996 wh th editor Tina Brown chose actress Roseanne Barr to guest-edit an issue as an original feminist voice. Though circulation rose under Brown, Kincaid was critical of Brown's direction in making the magazine less literary and more celebrity-orited.

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Kincaid recalls that wh she was a writer for The New Yorker, she would oft be questioned, particularly by wom, on how she was able to obtain her position. Kincaid felt that these questions were posed because she was a young black woman "from nowhere… I have no credtials. 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."

Talk Stories was later published in 2001 as a collection of "77 short pieces Kincaid wrote for The New Yorker's 'Talk of the Town' column betwe 1974 and 1983".

In December 2021, Kincaid was announced as the recipit of the 2022 Paris Review Hadada Prize, the magazine's annual lifetime achievemt award.

Through West Indian Eyes

Her novels are loosely autobiographical, though Kincaid has warned against interpreting their autobiographical elemts too literally: "Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidce."

Excerpts from her non-fiction book A Small Place were used as part of the narrative for Stephanie Black's 2001 documtary, Life and Debt.

She never feels the necessity of claiming the existce of a black world or a female ssibility. She assumes them both. I think it's a distinct departure that she's making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does. So that we can get beyond the large theme of racism and get to the deeper themes of how black people love and cry and live and die. Which, after all, is what art is all about.[8] Themes [ edit]

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Mother-daughter relationships, British and American imperialism, colonial education, writing, racism, class, power, death, and adolescce. In her most rect novel, See Now Th, Kincaid also first explores the theme of time.

Kincaid's unique style has created disagreemt among critics and scholars, and as Harold Bloom explains: "Most of the published criticism of Jamaica Kincaid has stressed her political and social concerns, somewhat at the expse of her literary qualities."

As works such as At the Bottom of the River and The Autobiography of My Mother use Antiguan cultural practices, some critics say these works employ magical realism. "The author claims, however, that [her work] is 'magic' and 'real, ' but not necessarily [works] of 'magical realism'." Other critics claim that her style is "modernist" because much of her fiction is "culturally specific and experimtal".