Jamaica Kincaid on “Putting Myself Together”

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1:34This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

1:43This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. All manner of writers have graced the pages of The New Yorker in the past century, including many of the greatest prose stylists of our time. But it's very rare to find one who nailed their unique voice right off the bat, the way Jamaica Kincaid did. It was 1974 when Jamaica first began writing for this magazine, reporting about life in New York, very often for the talk of the town section. She was a young immigrant from the Caribbean island of Antigua. Kincaid started writing with a wit and a particular bite about the world she had entered.

2:21She went on to write about her family, about Antigua, about how people from the Caribbean see Americans next door. She wrote about the dissolution of a marriage, about gardening, which she took up with extraordinary passion. She once said, everything I write is autobiographical, but none of it is true in the sense of a court of law. You know, a lie is just a lie. The truth, on the other hand, is complicated. it. Jamaica Kincaid's new book is a collection of pieces that spans almost half a century in print. It's a total delight. It's called Putting Myself Together.

3:00Jamaica, I've been reading you for half my life, but I have to say there are so many pieces here that I knew very little about, And in a way, they form a rough autobiography of your writing life, at least. And your first words printed in The New Yorker, it turns out, were a dispatch from the West Indian American Day Parade. And this is for our listeners who haven't attended a huge event that marches through Brooklyn on Labor Day. Could you read an excerpt from that very first Talk of the Town piece that you wrote for The New Yorker in 1974? Yes. Yes. I got to watch the parade from the second best platform of dignitaries.

3:46The first best platform of dignitaries was reserved for politicians. West Indians are the only group of people I know who still have a great deal of respect for politicians, men of the cloth and school teachers, and anyone who makes a career in any of the above fields automatically becomes dignified. I saw Shirley Chisholm. She sat with her legs crossed at the ankles. Howard Samuels was there. No one seemed to recognize him, and he looked like a man who had got himself invited to the wrong party. Soon after, the first float appeared. It carried the carnival queen and her lady in waiting. The queen looked regal enough in her long white gown and silver crown, but instead of waving to the crowd and smiling like a dummy, the way queens usually behave, she was snapping her fingers, wiggling her hips, and shuffling her feet all at the same time.

4:48I liked her very much and personally think she's going to start a new vogue in royal public behaviour. Jamaica, this is you right off the bat? You're 70, how old now? Now I'm 76. And you were 25, and it sounds like you, don't you think? When you read this, you hear yourself? Yes, I'm surprised. It sounds like me. Tell me how you came to write that piece. You came as an immigrant from Antigua, then still a British colony, and at age 25, you're writing a Talk of the Town piece. In short order, how did that happen? My mother took me out of school. I was very smart. And the idea was to send me to work to help support the family.

5:43I was very resentful and even bitter, though I didn't have words for these feelings. Anyway, they sent me off to America with a family, and I then proceeded to get a GED, go to school at night. By the way, that would have made me, in those days, an illegal alien, though now I think an undocumented person. You're saying ICE would have been hunting you down if it had been today. Absolutely. And for all I know, they might find something wrong with my records. Maybe I don't know. I wait for them to turn up, and I'm not afraid of them. You were working, as I remember, as what we now call an au pair, a nanny.

6:29Yes, though I called myself a servant because au pairs were usually young white women from Europe taking a break or something. But the family I lived with did not think of me as a servant. They had people who cleaned their homes and so on. I mainly looked after their children. But I always had in mind that I would do something on my own. I didn't know what it was. I'd always liked writing and reading, though I never really wrote anything. I would pretend I had written the book I was reading. You're one of the few writers that I've ever heard of who's, you say that the first book you read was the dictionary.

7:10Yes. And then you say something that I think most writers wouldn't be able to say, that you read the Bible whole. Yes. I believe both of those things when I read you. Yes, yes. That repetition of words comes from the dictionary and giving the same word a different meaning. The way of telling a story, again, repetition, you know how the Bible will begin a story and then tell it again, but the way it will tell it is to begin with a conjunction, which you're not supposed to do. And I think not enough is written about or thought about the profound philosophical implications of the word and. How do you mean?

8:01If you begin a sentence with and, there's a whole world that is not described and it's joined to what you're writing, but you don't see it. It's somewhere off the page. How did you come to write at age 25 for The New Yorker? How did that happen? Well, George Trow used to write about me in Talk of the Town. He would refer to me as our sassy black friend, Jamaica Kincaid. One day, I remember saying something to him. He'd taken me to dinner at a Lebanese restaurant, and I said something to him, and he laughed so hard, And he said, would you like to meet Mr. Sean? And I had no idea who Mr. Sean was.

8:45The editor of the magazine at the time. And I said, oh, sure, yes. So he took me to meet Mr. Sean at the Algonquin for lunch. I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu because I was always hungry. And Mr. Sean ordered cornflakes, I think. And I was horrified because I thought I had used up the lunch budget.

9:10And we talked for a while. And then afterwards, that was the spring of 1974. Later, he said to George, well, she should give it a try. And I did. So that must have been April or May, because I still have the dress I wore. I didn't really have anything to write, but the West Indian Day Parade was coming up. What I just read to you was supposed to be a summary. And I thought Mr. Sean would rewrite them or have George rewrite them. And he published it just the way I wrote it. And that's when I knew that I was writing. Somewhere in the book, you say that you didn't think of yourself as Black or African American, that you grew up where everybody was Black.

10:00I did. And how did that shape your arrival, your identity in those terms? People were racist, as you can imagine, all the time. But I never understood it. I thought they were just badly brought up. They were so rude. So I never had the feeling that if I was in a place and I was the only African-American black person, whatever John McWhorter wants to call me now. But it didn't seem to affect my inner self, that self of who I think I am. When you came here, Jamaica, you had a different name. was that part of a reinvention of yourself? Was it part of a creative exploration, an idea of yourself as a writer?

10:52Why did you do it? When I was sent away by my mother and I was so bitter about it and all I could think about was my mother, what my mother had done, how she had brought me up and so I immediately started to write but I didn't want her to know that I was doing this thing that I was sure I would fail at. I was sure I would fail at it, but that wouldn't have stopped me. My mother was so full of pride, she didn't want people to know that I understood the darkness that she had cast me into by sending me away and interrupting my education. So she would pretend she never read it, which was very good for me because then I could just write because she's never going to read it.

11:43That was another reason to later I could understand why I had to change my name because Elaine Potter Richardson could not write about Elaine Potter Richardson, but Jamaica Kincaid could write about Elaine Potter Richardson. Well, you write a lot about your childhood and your family. There's another piece that appeared in 1992 in the journal Grand Street. Quite a wonderful journal, one that changed a lot over time. And it's a piece called Biography of a Dress. Would you read that passage for us, Jamaica? My second birthday was not a major event in anyone's life, certainly not my own. It was not my first and it was not my last.

12:28I am now 43 years old. But my mother, perhaps because of circumstances I would not have known then, and to know now is not a help, perhaps only because of an established custom, but only in her family other people didn't do this, to mark the occasion of turning two years old had my ears pierced. One day at dusk, I would not have called it that then, I was taken to someone's house, a woman from Dominica, a woman who was as dark as my mother was fair, and yet they were so similar that I am sure now, as I was then, that they shared the same tongue. And two thorns that had been heated in a fire were pierced through my earlobes.

13:23I do not know, and could not have known then, if the pain I experienced resembled in any way the pain my mother experienced while giving birth to me, or even if my mother, in having my ears bored in that way at that time, meant to express hostility or aggression towards me, but without meaning to and without knowing that it was possible to mean to. There are many things fascinating about this piece of writing, and one of them is a technical thing that you're able to indicate with your voice, but the reader on the page would see more vividly, is your use of parenthesis constantly. Through one paragraph, there are probably, I don't know, a half a dozen at least sets of parenthesis.

14:14Tell me about that. you're telling a story and you're recollecting something, but you're also moving in and out of time. And the use of parentheses is just kind of masterful. It turns out that I have been obsessed with the notion of time from before I even knew there was such a thing. You know, I grew up in a place where you told time by the way the church bell rang. One o 'clock, one. Two o 'clock, two. Three o 'clock, three. And so I would sit there listening for the time in between one and two. And sometimes it would seem forever before two came along. Something happens between then and now.

15:06I've written a book called See Now Then to put time in a domesticated way because it's one of the things we humans do with time is we domesticate it. Lunch at noon, dinner, and so on. Just yesterday, I read that this very day we're in is the shortest day of the year because the Earth will only go around the sun not quite 24 hours. and scientists don't know whether it's the moon moving away. There are all sorts of explanations. But now I'm the sort of person who, when I see that and read that, I just am, my day's completely undone because I think, what? I'm speaking with the writer Jamaica Kincaid.

15:53More in a moment.

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20:51Time is your obsession. Yes. And somewhere in the book, there's a reference to reading Proust, who is the great poet of time. Yeah, but I read Proust, and then I couldn't read it anymore. Why is that? Too much chocolate cake. By chocolate cake, I mean the real—it's very rich in the way I can— Rich, yes. Yes. Well, I began to think of it as this sort of indulgence Europeans have, diverting themselves from the terrible things they've done. So, yes, the chocolate. But I want to say to Mr. Proust, well, do you know how this chocolate gets made, or these madeleines, and all these little fine things you're interested in.

21:37Do you know what happened? Now, people hear me say that. They say, oh, but the aesthetics, the this, the that. And I cannot, for some reason, get away from the fact that— Because you know where the sugar was made. I know where the sugar was made. I know where these things come from. And yet, I would say, Jamaica, in your own fiction, The politics of things, the history of things, is not, I mean, it's not like Dickens. It's not like that kind of political realism. It's well submerged in a sense, no? Yes, I would say that because it's not that I'm opposed to the chocolate being made. I would like it recognized.

22:27And there is a way, life is complicated, and we human beings are always in violation, and we seem unable to help it. But I wish it would be more recognized that the chocolate didn't just come out of the clouds. Or a box, yeah. Or a box. Well, the box had to be made too. That it has a reality to it that is even magical, you know. I don't mind Columbus Day at all. I have a bust of Thomas Jefferson in my garden. I don't mind things, but I like them to be at least admitted. Jamaica, I know you fault me for this, and you're 100 % right to do so, but I'm not an outdoorsman. I'm what's called an indoorsman, and you are a passionate, passionate gardener.

23:25I'd like you to read a bit from The Kind of Gardener, I Am Not. That essay opens with a passage about you and another writer, Ian Frazier, an old buddy of yours. Oh, gosh. And you're on a road trip together. You've stopped at a small town in Montana.

23:42Yes, let me see. It goes like this. There was still quite a bit of daylight, so Sandy, Ian Frazier, who had been to Cutbank before, drove us around the small town, and then we got out and walked a bit. It was in Cutbank that I saw the garden and the kind of gardener that I am not. In the front yard of each little house, the houses were small, bungalow-like, a style of architecture very much suited to vast expanses of landscape, were little gardens blooming with flowers. The flowers, almost without exception, were petunias, red, purple, white, impatiens, portulaca, and short, red salvia. There was one garden that seemed more cared for than the others, and that had a plaque placed prominently in a garden bed that read, Garden of the Week.

24:43And that is exactly the kind of gardener I am not, and exactly the kind of garden I will never have. A garden made for a week is unknown to me. For years I have been making a garden and on making it too. It isn't out of dissatisfaction that I do and don't do. It is out of curiosity. That curiosity has not led to stasis. It has led to a conversation. And so it is. I have been having a conversation in the garden, and so it will be until I die. You will forgive me, Jamaica. What does it mean to have a conversation in the garden? Ah, well, people, when they're in the garden, they say it's relaxing and it's all sorts of things that I do not find the garden to be.

25:32When I'm in the garden, I'm thinking. I'll have a conversation with a plant I was putting in the ground, and it turned out to be named after Thomas Jefferson, but its common name is twin leaf. and it has one leaf, but the leaf is divided in two and the two halves are not identical. And that seemed to me to reflect his personality as I know it from breeding him. So the other way around, which I know is going to sound awfully hooey, but it happens to be true, plants in my garden tend to be taller than the literature and they stoop over the way my back is stooped. The plants that you never really think of as self-sowing put themselves in places that I haven't put them.

26:25Of course, it's a bird or an ant or something that's moved the seed around. The garden itself is having a conversation with me and I with it. I really take it, I don't take it as a plant, as just something for my enjoyment or my enhancement. I really believe we are having a back and forth. I was trying to understand the various ways leaves arrange themselves on a stem. And as I was, well, I think you'd call it research, though I just call it reading, I came upon something called Fibonacci. I had never heard of Fibonacci, but there are some plants that arrange themselves in this way, which is, you know the Fibonacci.