In her study at home in North Bennington, 2018. Interview still frame courtesy of Stephanie Black.
牙买加·金凯德（Jamaica Kincaid）于1949年出生于安提瓜（Antigua）的伊莱恩·波特·理查森（Elaine Potter Richardson）。她十六岁时，她的家人打断了她的教育，使她在纽约担任保姆。随着时间的流逝，她将自己置于另一条道路上。她从曼哈顿的新学校转到新罕布什尔州的弗朗西尼亚学院，并在《玛格南照片》和《青少年》杂志上工作Ingenue。在70年代中期，她开始写信乡村声音，但它在The纽约人，在那里她成为城镇部分的常规专栏作家，一切都为她改变了。她的早期小说（其中大部分也出现在该杂志上）被收集在在河的底部（1983年），这本书像她的谈话故事一样，宣布了她的主题，风格，散文的不可思议的纯洁。她已经出版了小说安妮·约翰（1985），露西(1990),The Autobiography of My Mother（1996），Mr. Potter(2002), and现在看(2013). A children’s book,Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip，1986年发行。除了收集Talk Stories(2001), her nonfiction works includeA Small Place(1988), a reckoning with the colonial legacy on Antigua;My Brother(1997), a memoir of the tragedy ofAIDS在她的家人和两本关于园艺的书，My Garden (Book)（1999）和Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya(2005).
Kincaid divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a professor of African American studies at Harvard University, and Bennington, Vermont, where her large brown clapboard house with yellow window trim is shielded by trees. She has two children from her marriage to the composer Allen Shawn, the son of the former纽约人editor William Shawn, and in the living room she displays on a table—proudly, apologetically—productions from the arts-and-crafts camps and classes that her son and daughter attended over the years. The study where she writes is a sunroom surrounded on three sides by windows. The terrace that starts at the back door ends in a border of stones; the lawn, planted with thousands of daffodils, slopes down to a thickly shaded creek. Nearby are a vegetable garden caged against wildlife and a cottage in which lives Trevor, her bearded young assistant. Over some twenty years, Kincaid has made what my partner, the poet James Fenton, calls a “plantsman’s garden,” full of rare species. Her hundreds of plants are layered into a composition of informal design, expressive of her refined aesthetic and untroubled eccentricity. She has plants that move her because of how they look or how they behave, or because of their histories.
This conversation began at a public event at the 92nd Street Y in 2013, and was picked up again in her Vermont kitchen eight years later, in the summer of 2021, when the social restrictions of the pandemic had, for a time, eased. Jamaica Kincaid is a generous host. She cooks with flair. Her big, broad-frame glasses evoke the Italian movie stars of the sixties. The years have gone by, but she is still tall. Her voice is as musical as ever, high-pitched, the Anglo-Caribbean lilt beguiling. She is a presence; everything begins to happen when she talks. In person and on the page, Kincaid’s is a literary voice. She is alive to the advantage in the irony that her literary heritage had not predicted her, exalted, brave, free.
面试官
您的家人为什么将您送到美国？60年代中期，伦敦是否仍然是英联邦文化中心的帝国之都？
JAMAICA KINCAID
如果他们在伦敦认识任何人，他们会把我送到那里。但是他们没有任何长期计划。这个想法不是我会建立自己，然后让我的家人加入我。我只是被派去支持他们。我的父亲 - 我的继父 - 生病了，父母有三个孩子。我最小的兄弟的到来使我们陷入了一种我们从未知道的贫困。它曾经是您牺牲大孩子的农业家庭中的传统。我记得被送走的黑暗 - 当时对我不知道的一种痛苦。直到那时，我只从书中知道的是想家。我想我第一次在勃朗特人中遇到了它。
面试官
So there wasn’t any excitement in it?
KINCAID
Not at all, because I was going as a servant. I remember walking in the hot sun to one of the American bases in Antigua—past the crazy house, as we called the lunatic asylum, and the dead house, where the bodies of people who died in the hospital were put until they were collected by the undertaker—to be interviewed by an American soldier’s wife. I was very bitter about it because I had before me what seemed to be a successful future. I might have gone to the University of the West Indies. I would have gotten a scholarship. It seemed cruel even to other people because I was known as what we called a “bright child.” No, there wasn’t any cause for celebration, though my mother did make me a new dress and see me off to the airport.
面试官
Homesickness—this kind of interrupted love—is a big element in your work.
KINCAID
Well, perhaps, but I never really felt I belonged even in Antigua, even when I was little. My mother came from Dominica, and the thing about those little islands is that people from one island or the other don’t like each other. She was an outsider in Antigua, and she looked different. She was part Carib Indian, and they used to call her the Red Woman.
I suppose that my work is always mourning something, the loss of a paradise—not the thing that comes after you die, but the thing that you had before. I often think of the time before my brothers were born—and this might sound very childish, but I don’t care—as this paradise of my mother and me always being together. There were times when my mother and I would go swimming and she would disappear for a second, and I would imagine the depths just rolling over her, that she’d go deeper and deeper and I’d never see her again . . . And then she would pop up somewhere else. Those memories are a constant source of some strange pleasure for me.
I was pulled out of school to take care of my youngest brother while my mother went to work, and when she realized I hadn’t been looking after him properly, that I had been reading instead, she gathered all the books I had stolen from the library over the years and burned them. You can probably tell from my writing that I’m obsessed with notions of justice and injustice—those things that are wrong that can never be made right.
Nowadays if I were to be homesick it would be for Vermont, which is strange. But perhaps it makes sense—I grew up in a place where I saw the sea every day and, near the end of my life, I’m living in a place where the water has run out.
面试官
Did露西出现一种感觉，您需要以某种方式将到达美国的到达 - 检查或抛弃它？
KINCAID
并不是要把任何东西都放在我身上，以说明发生了什么事。露西is about the making of a person. You can see in it the sentimentality ofJane Eyre。A sense of, I’m all alone in the world, and I have integrity. You might want this, but I will do that. Lucy stops sending her salary home, and I did stop sending mine. I still have the clothes I bought at Bonwit Teller. I was the best-dressed nanny you ever saw.
面试官
Were you refashioning yourself?
KINCAID
I loved dressing up and going out. You might say that was the influence of my mother. By the time my youngest brother was born her life had collapsed on her, but she was a very elegant woman when I was young. I used to be ashamed to be seen with her because she was so sexy—men of all ages would stop her and talk to her. I remember she wore her hair in a French roll, and she wore what they called a hobble skirt.
After I moved to New York, I modeled for people like Steven Meisel. I clearly had one of those eating problems, but I didn’t know what they were. I didn’t know that there was anything about me that had a name, that could be diagnosed. I ended up smoking Lucky Strikes, just because I liked the way it looked, the gesture. For some reason, I decided to cut off my hair and bleach it blond. I dressed in old clothes, thrift-shop clothes.
I styled myself to look like no one else. And I also knew I didn’t want to write like anyone else. When I started writing Talk pieces atThe纽约人, I tried to get away from the anonymous “we” they used. They had very good writers, but they were these old, stout white men. I hated the we. I had such contempt for a certain kind of writing, which I would now call “white writing.” It was so dull and mannered.
