“Poor Visitor”: Mobility as/of Voice in Jamaica Kincaid’s <i>Lucy</i>

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid crosses disciplinary borders by writing fiction that is simultaneously diasporic and national, but only half of this equation has received serious inquiry. Since its publication, myriad critical essays have appeared about Kincaid's Lucy: A Novel (1990), a fictionalized autobiographical account of Antiguan author's migration to New York in late 1960s to work as an au pair for a wealthy white family; most essays focus on character interactions in novel that metaphorically explore relationship of Antigua to its British colonial past and to contemporary imperialism and forced diaspora of global capital. For example, Jana Evans Braziel explores Kincaid's use of daffodils in Lucy as a metaphor for diaspora and a way to reverse colonial 'order' and denaturalize 'natural' (113-14). Gary E. Holcomb reads novel through lens of black transnationalism, characterizing Lucy as a migrant whose travel and sexual liberation work together to resist dominant notions of national identity [that] endeavor to enforce homogeneity through colonial, racist, and nationalist values (296). Rosanne Kanhai stresses important role novels such as Lucy can play in undergraduate classroom as global feminist interrogations of (white) US feminism's limited focus on race-class-gender trifecta of identity categories, and Kristen Mahlis analyzes Lucy as a model of paradoxical space of female exile (182) through an analysis of body in exile, drawing particularly on Kincaid's metaphorical use of the tongue. While these articles contain excellent scholarship, they represent tendency to overlook Lucy as a work of American feminist fiction, one that resounds with commentary on US domestic politics and culture, even, or perhaps especially, as it considers these phenomena in a transnational context. Braziel, for instance, notes femininity implicit in Kincaid's description of daffodils and Lucy's scornful rejection of it, but focuses her analysis on issues of colonial displacement instead of on feminist politics that pervade text. Similarly, Kanhai's essay generalizes its critique of US feminism without a close analysis of Kincaid's writing. contend that Lucy's position outside of US literary canon is a notable oversight in American letters, both because Kincaid is a US immigrant and because story line openly critiques cosmopolitan American Left of 1960s, setting for book. One exception to this oversight is David Cowart's chapter on Lucy in Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America (2006), but even this analysis, which emphasizes questions of assimilation in US immigrant narratives, overlooks novel's strident commentary on particularly American political movements. Lucy's general critical placement outside purview of American literary studies upholds novel's own argument about limited potential for radical change in US culture. In Lucy, Kincaid uses mobility as a literary trope to examine assimilative impulses that pervade US feminist agendas; by dismantling mythologies that surround concepts such as family, sisterhood, conservation, and avant-gardism, she argues that such terms metaphorically imply always contains vestiges of imperialism and racism. In Modest_Witness (1997), Donna J. Haraway argues that American Left's opposition to genetic modification and other forms of biotechnology needs to be considered in context of Western theme of purity of type, in which can be heard the unintended tones of fear of alien and suspicion of mixed (61). Like it or not, Haraway writes, I was born kin to ... transgenic, transspecific, and transported creatures of all kinds; that is family ... to whom [we] are accountable. It will not help ... to to natural and pure (62). Haraway's critique of leftist politics in realm of biotechnology aids my reading of Lucy as a systematic deconstruction of appeal to natural and pure with which other leftist platforms--feminism, environmentalism, and bohemian counterculture--are infused. …