Jamaica Kincaid on “Putting Myself Together”

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Speaker 3 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Speaker 1 This 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.

Speaker 1 But it's very rare to find one who nailed their unique voice right off the bat the way Jamaica Kincaid did.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 She went on to write about her family, about Antigua, about how people from the Caribbean see Americans next door.

Speaker 1 She wrote about the dissolution of a marriage, about gardening, which she took up with extraordinary passion.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Jamaica, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And this is for our listeners who haven't attended a huge event that marches through Brooklyn on Labor Day.

Speaker 1 Could you read an excerpt from that very first Talk of the Town piece that you wrote for the New Yorker in 1974? Yes.

Speaker 4 I got to watch the parade from the second best platform of dignitaries. The first best platform of dignitaries was reserved for politicians.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I saw Shirley Chizone. 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.

Speaker 4 Soon after, the first float appeared. It carried the carnival queen and her lady in waiting.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I liked her very much and personally think she's going to start a new vogue in royal public behavior.

Speaker 1 Jamaica, this is you right off the bat. You're 70, how old now?

Speaker 4 Now I'm 76. And you were 25.

Speaker 1 And it sounds like you. Don't you think? When you read this, do you hear yourself?

Speaker 4 Yes,

Speaker 4 I'm surprised.

Speaker 4 It sounds like me.

Speaker 1 Tell me.

Speaker 1 How you came to write that piece.

Speaker 1 You came as an immigrant from Antigua,

Speaker 1 then still a British colony.

Speaker 1 Yes. And at age 25, you're writing a Talk of the Town piece.

Speaker 1 In short order, how did that happen?

Speaker 4 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. I was very resentful and even bitter,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 By the way, that would have made me, in those days, an illegal alien, though now I think an undocumented person.

Speaker 1 You're saying ICE would have been hunting you down if it had been to the city.

Speaker 4 Absolutely. And for all I know, they still might, they might find something wrong with my records.
Maybe I don't know. I still, I wait for them to turn up.

Speaker 4 And I'm not afraid of them.

Speaker 1 You were working, as I remember, as

Speaker 1 an au pair, an annie.

Speaker 4 Yes, though I called myself a servant because au pairs were usually young white women from Europe

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But I always had in mind that

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 1 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. Yes.

Speaker 1 And then you say something that I think most writers wouldn't be able to say, that you read the Bible whole.

Speaker 1 Yes. I believe both of those things when I read you.

Speaker 4 Yes, yes. That repetition of words comes from the dictionary

Speaker 4 and giving the same word a different meaning.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 4 way of telling a story,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I think not enough is written about or

Speaker 4 thought about

Speaker 4 the profound philosophical implications of the word and.

Speaker 1 How do you mean?

Speaker 4 If you begin a sentence with and,

Speaker 4 there's a whole world

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 1 How did you come to write at age 25 for The New Yorker? How did that happen?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 One day, I remember saying something to him. He had taken me to dinner at a Lebanese restaurant.
And I said something to him, and he laughed so hard. And he said,

Speaker 4 Would you like to meet Mr. Sean? And I had no idea who Mr.
Sean was.

Speaker 1 The editor of the magazine at the time.

Speaker 4 And I said, Oh, sure, yes. So he took me to meet Mr.
Sean

Speaker 4 at the Algonquin for lunch.

Speaker 4 I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu because I was always hungry. And Mr.
Sean ordered corn flakes, I think. And I was horrified because I thought I had used up the lunch budget.

Speaker 4 And we talked for a while and then afterwards, that was the spring of 1974.

Speaker 4 Later he said to George, well, she should give it a try.

Speaker 4 And I did. So that must have been April or May,

Speaker 4 because I still have the dress I wore. I didn't really have anything to write, but the West Indian

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And that's when I knew

Speaker 4 that I was writing.

Speaker 1 Somewhere in the book, you say that you didn't think of yourself as black or African African-American, that you grew up where everybody was black.

Speaker 4 I did.

Speaker 1 And how did that shape your arrival, your identity in those terms?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So I never had the feeling that if I was in a place and I was the only African-American black person, whatever John McWathur wants to call me now.

Speaker 4 But it didn't seem to affect my inner self,

Speaker 4 that self of who I think I am.

Speaker 1 When you came here, Jamaica, you had a different name. Was that part of a reinvention of yourself? Was it part of a creative

Speaker 1 exploration, an idea of yourself as a writer? Why did you do it?

Speaker 4 When I was sent away by my mother, and I was so bitter

Speaker 4 about it, and

Speaker 4 all I could think about was my mother, what my mother had done,

Speaker 4 how she had brought me up. And so I immediately

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I was sure I would fail at it, but that wouldn't have stopped me. My mother was so full of pride, she

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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. That was another reason to later I could understand

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it's a piece called Biography of a Dress. Would you read that passage for us, Jamaica?

Speaker 4 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.
I am now forty-three years old.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 One day, at dusk, I would not have called it that then,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And two thorns that had been heated in a fire were pierced through my earlobes.

Speaker 4 I do not know, and could not have known then,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 but without meaning to and without knowing that it was possible to mean to.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Through one paragraph, there are probably, I don't know, a half a dozen at least sets of parentheses.

Speaker 1 Tell me about that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 4 It turns out that I have been obsessed with the notion of time

Speaker 4 from before I even knew

Speaker 4 there was such a thing. You know, I grew up in a place where you told time by

Speaker 4 the way the church bell rang. One o'clock, one,

Speaker 4 two o'clock, two, three o'clock, three.

Speaker 4 And so I would sit there listening for the time between one and two. And sometimes it would seem forever before two came along.
Something happens between then and now.

Speaker 4 I'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, you know, lunch at noon, dinner and so on.

Speaker 4 And just yesterday I read that this very day we are in is the shortest day of the year

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But now, I'm the sort of person who, when I see that and

Speaker 1 read that, I just am my day is completely undone because I think what

Speaker 1 I'm speaking with the writer Jamaica Kincaid. More in a moment.

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Speaker 1 Time is your obsession. Yes.
And somewhere in the book, there's a reference to reading Proust, who is the great poet of time.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but I read Proust and then I couldn't read it anymore.

Speaker 1 Why is that

Speaker 1 too much chocolate cake?

Speaker 1 By chocolate cake, I mean the real,

Speaker 1 it's very rich in a way I can't.

Speaker 4 Yes, yes. Well, I began to think of it as

Speaker 4 this sort of indulgence Europeans have, diverting themselves from the terrible things they've done. So, yes, the chocolate, but

Speaker 4 I want to say to Mr. Proust, well, do you know how this chocolate gets made, or these madlins, and all these little fine things you're interested in? Do you know what happened?

Speaker 4 How it now people hear me say that, they say, oh, but the aesthetics, the this, the that.

Speaker 4 And I cannot, for some reason, get away from the fact that because you know where the sugar was made.

Speaker 4 I know where the sugar was made. I know where these things come from.
Yes. So

Speaker 1 and yet I would say, Jamaica, in your own fiction, the politics of things, the history of things, is not,

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 it's not like Dickens, it's not like that kind of political realism.

Speaker 1 It's well submerged in a sense, no?

Speaker 4 Yes, I would say that because

Speaker 4 it's not that I'm

Speaker 4 opposed to the chocolate being made, I would like it recognized. And there is a way

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 1 or a box.

Speaker 4 Well, the box had to get be made to that it has a reality to it that is even magical.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 4 I don't mind Columbus Day at all. I don't mind.
I have a

Speaker 4 bust of Thomas Jefferson in my garden. I don't mind things,

Speaker 4 but I like them to be

Speaker 4 at least admitted, you know.

Speaker 1 Now, 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.

Speaker 1 I'd like you to read a bit from the kind of gardener I am not.

Speaker 1 That essay opens with a passage about you and another writer, Ian Frazier, an old buddy of yours. Oh.
And you're on a road trip together. You've stopped at a small town in Montana.

Speaker 4 Yes,

Speaker 4 let me see. It goes like this.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It was in Cutbank that I saw the garden and the kind of gardener that I am not.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 The flowers, almost without exception, were petunias, red, purple, white, impatience, portulaca, and short red salvia.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And 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.

Speaker 4 For years I have been making a garden and on making it too.

Speaker 4 It isn't out of dissatisfaction that I do and undo, it is out of curiosity. That curiosity has not led to stasis.
It has led to a conversation.

Speaker 4 And so it is. I have been having a conversation in the garden, and so it will be until I die.

Speaker 1 You will forgive me, Jamaica. What does it mean to have a conversation in the garden?

Speaker 1 Ah,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 When I'm in the garden, I'm thinking, I'll have a conversation with a plant

Speaker 4 I was putting in the ground and it turned out to be named after Thomas Jefferson, but its common name is twin leaf.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Plants that you never really think of as

Speaker 4 self-sowing put themselves in places that I haven't put them. Of course, it's a bird or an ant or something that's moved the seed around.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 enjoyment or my enhancement. I really

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 reading, well, I think you'd call it research, though, I just call it reading, I came upon something called Fibonacci.

Speaker 4 I had never heard of Fibonacci, but there are some plants that arrange themselves in this way, which is, you know, the Fibonacci. See, everybody knows but me.

Speaker 1 I don't know what's

Speaker 1 just for the record.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 4 But the mathematics of it is

Speaker 4 one and one make two, two and one make three, three and two make five. It's mathematical.

Speaker 4 But that is the conversation. There, here I am, 76 years of age, and I've just understood something that every schoolchild understands.

Speaker 1 How are the rabbits and the deer this summer? Are they eating you alive?

Speaker 4 No, because there's been a lot of rain. There are a lot of things to eat.
The rabbits, I think, have been more malicious.

Speaker 4 The deer look at it longingly from a distance, and I run outside with a shotgun that I shoot over their heads, and I think that will tell them that there's somebody who's not kind

Speaker 4 to them. But they

Speaker 4 really, and I do believe they can read, the deer can read. They always go into a place that says this place is protected from hunting.

Speaker 4 It's silly, well, not silly. It's arrogant, I think, to think that

Speaker 4 things don't know, the other existences don't know. We have something

Speaker 4 that's a back and forth. And I don't mean to be

Speaker 4 Buddhist or

Speaker 4 I'm not talking about something spiritual, though I suppose it is. I don't mean it to be.
But I can see with my own eyes that

Speaker 4 there are things in the garden that respond to me and me to them.

Speaker 1 What are you writing these days? And as your attitude toward writing, whether it's ambition.

Speaker 1 or passion or focus, is it any different than the piece that we began our conversation about?

Speaker 4 For me, you know, the world began

Speaker 4 in the year 1492. The world, which is different from the earth.

Speaker 4 And 1492 is the year of the

Speaker 4 expulsion of

Speaker 4 Jews from

Speaker 1 Europe.

Speaker 4 If you follow the way human beings have treated each other,

Speaker 4 1492,

Speaker 4 the vegetable kingdom was rearranged completely. Tea was sent somewhere, sugarcane was sent somewhere.
And not that things shouldn't change, but they can be changed without bloodshed.

Speaker 4 There can be an exchange between people without domination and evil, evil. So for me, as I reflect and look at this book of things,

Speaker 4 you know, I always tell my students, a writer should know everything and know nothing.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 there's that thin line you walk and the know-nothing is your unconscious. But I'm really

Speaker 4 amazed at how consistent certain things have been in my writing. And one of them is the world begins in 1492.

Speaker 1 Jamaica Kincaid, thank you so much.

Speaker 4 Thank you, David. It's wonderful talking to you at the same time.

Speaker 1 It's so much fun. It's a great guest to see you.

Speaker 1 Jamaica Kincaid's new collection gathers writings from 1974 on, and it's called Putting Myself Together. You can also find work by Jamaica at newyorker.com.

Speaker 1 And of course, you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well. Newyorker.com.

Speaker 1 A quick word of thanks to everyone who wrote in to us with legal questions for our correspondents, Jeannie Suk-Gerson and Ruth Marcus.

Speaker 1 You sent a boatload of good questions and we'll answer as many as we can get to on next week's episode. I'm David Remnick.
Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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Speaker 1 This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

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