In the Beginning There Was Death: Spiritual Desolation and the Search for Self in Jamaica Kincaid's "Autobiography of My Mother"

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid's novels have invited considerable commentary on the mother-daughter relationships of her fictional heroines. While the undercurrent critique of white domination in Annie John (1978) and the inimical vision of British imperialism in Lucy (1990) have gone unacknowledged by many scholars, the unrelenting harshness of The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) does not allow for such critical neglect.' For Kincaid's fictional female trilogy-Annie, Lucy and Xuela-alienation from the mother becomes a metaphor for . .. alienation from an island culture that has been completely dominated by the imperialist power of England.2 With its focus on Christianity's place in the lives of those dispossessed by western exploitation, The Autobiography of My Mother is more explicit in its indictment of imperialism. Through the enigmatic existential protagonist, Xuela, Kincaid traces the resultant spiritual wasteland that is the legacy for this post-Colonial victim who rejects the master's God, but whose disconnectedness with her ancestral past