Jamaica Kincaid's regressive writing

Abstract

This article deals with Jamaica Kincaid’s “regressive style” in her novel The Autobiography of My Mother. Critics generally present this book as a quest for origins : the narrator’s desire to recapture the image of her dead mother, a Carib Indian whose community has largely disappeared, is equated to her yearning for the recovery of her lost original island. In search of a “vanishing race”, the heroine dreams of recreating an “imagined community”. However the novel documents the impossibility of reversing the course of History, of returning to the idealized pre-colonial/prelapsarian past that the protagonist fantasizes. The painful realization of this impossibility has a paralyzing effect on the girl who is left alone in an imaginary world, an “I-land” of solitude and doubt. Her feeling of stagnation and self-centeredness is conveyed through a particularly haunting prose that this article means to analyze. It explores the various narrative strategies that produce an original style wavering between the discursive regression of a text constantly returning to its starting point and thus creating its own stasis and the movement of expansion of the heroine’s inner life who, through a sensual approach to body and language, manages to counteract the effect of this stasis.