Incendiary Mother

Abstract

The immolation of Vivian Tindall by her mother on the island of Antigua in June 2012 occasions a return to the problems of Antillean postcoloniality, forgiveness, and the work of Antigua's most influential child, Jamaica Kincaid. We find the prospects of Antiguan postcoloniality arrested in Kincaid's tropes of ‘small’ and ‘event’ and in a forestalled notion of ‘in the place of forgiveness’ in the Antiguan archive. Kincaid's generalized contempt for the Antiguan maternal enjoins the most limiting of the contested meanings of postcolonial forgiveness. We find in the palaver regarding Vivian's burning a reckoning with the problem of event and an archiving that is grounded not in the ‘love’ against which the genius of Kincaid's work dashes itself, but in a forgiveness: not the colonially self-serving psychogenic forgiveness of Arendt, Kristeva and Derrida, but a forgiveness that takes its meaning and possibilities from the reimagining of Antiguan space and event. Only this forgiveness, which is an indigenous temporal intervention, inserts an immunological ‘fever’ into the archive, permits rematriation, and renews our capacity to resist the unended return of colonialism.