The Struggle with Irreverent Time in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

Jamaica Kincaid’s lacunary pseudo-autobiography presents Lucy’s first year in exile and dissects its stages to such an extent that the story takes the form of a photographic slideshow. The unnamed city of exile (presumably New York) appears as a palimpsest locale, almost obliterated by Lucy’s invasive and strikingly detailed memories. This incursion of “space past” and “time past’” in the narrative present forecloses an accurate reading of the city. In the end, Lucy becomes well aware of this existential dilemma that suspends her between the past—an unhealed wound and the present—an unknown territory. Almost the entire book depicts the narrator’s efforts to reconcile two dichotomous places: the native island and the city, each with their corresponding temporal segment. The copresence of the “here’ and ‘there’ along with the tension between cyclical and linear time constitute the scope of the present paper.