Just look at that post-colonial shuffle!(West Indian novels in English)(Critical essay)

 
  My material-my past, separated from me by place as well-was fixed and, 
  like childhood itself, complete; it couldn't be added to. The way of 
  writing consumed it. (VS. Naipaul, Reading and Writing, 28) 

The West Indian novel in English goes back a long way, at least to C.L.R. James, who flourished from the 1930s to the 1980s of the last century (Selvon 1989, ch. 1; sandhu 2004). The achievements of Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, and David Dabydeen, not to mention Sam Selvon, George Lamming, and V.S. Naipaul before them, now at work suggest that it still thrives despite the opposition view that modern West Indian writers should not write in English. The Caribbean Islands have a great many languages and English could be thought of as just one more of them, but that argument will not wholly suffice, for the loyalty of these writers is not merely linguistic. Their allegiance is to the English novel of the 19th-century tradition, and their work has little in common with deviant strains, whether of Modernism or Postmodern Magic Realism, or of such mid-20th-century experimental styles as the nouveau roman. Indeed they testify to the power, or if you prefer, the inertia, of that great central tradition (Stephens 2005, 45-46). The majority of them, rather like the great immigre artists whom early 20th-century England attracted, were cosmopolitan enough to cast a quizzical eye on Western assumptions. They, like their predecessors, are to be admired for their normativity, not their eccentricity. Even so, the doctrine of art as a disinterested equilibrium of the soul, tempering disruptively partisan interests by balancing them with their opposites, runs back through Joyce to James. But it must now be put on a new scientific basis, given the way that modern life, with its brittleness of response, noisy disruptions, and impoverishment of experience, has thrown us out of kilter. Culture, however, is not at all as serenely disinterested as it appears. For Kincaid and the rest of the Caribou tribe a contemplative aesthetic wholeness has had to translate itself urgently into social action, not least if it is itself to survive; yet the inevitable partisanship of social action would seem to betray the harmony of being which it was meant to realize. On this view, the beauty of their case is that the local color is part and parcel of the disinterestedness, so that they can avoid aestheticism and instrumentalism at the same time. For Kincaid in particular, by being, like the ideal poem, ends in ourselves, we will be all the more instrumental in serving the cause of freedom, equality, and social justice. (1)

It once mattered that there was to be a major technological revolution in the art of the novel, but it did not happen; even James Joyce did not cause one. Prejudice against extreme forms of doing has persisted, and these seductive and subversive West Indian writers have acceded to it. This may be why, with the help of certain post-Imperial nostalgia (Naipaul) or anger (Kincaid), they are so much admired in Britain and the rest of the world. One of the first Booker prize winners included a novel by a West Indian writer, or, failing the Caribbean, other parts of the old Empire. (2) Of the thirty four or so winners of the prize to date, fewer than half are native--the rest are either Indian or West Indians, with a few African, Canadian, and Australian laureates (English 2005, 323-34). And even they tend to prefer solidity to fireworks. It is in this sense that "solid" is a description that comes to mind (but it turns out to need qualification) when one is reading Jamaica Kincaid. The half-dozen novels she has so far written are all crisp, unhurried, and atopos in the Barthesian sense of the word (Barthes 2005, 78). They contain a good number of characters, all kited out with characteristics, attitudes, foibles, and broken families to quarrel with or leave behind in their quest for freedom and a better life. They are domestic persons with private causes for pain or anxiety or displacement but they are also subjected to the savage wear and tear of life under duress, dispossession, and the violence of fate. The novels contain many accidents--the action of The Autobiography of My Mother, for example, has its origin in one. (3) The other novels contain unfortunates who, mostly as a result of fateful accidents, are, as Kincaid put it, "in pitiful pursuit of ambulation"; or who stumble, fall off, and are crushed by the collapse of their own destiny, beaten up by slavery or, when unwillingly undergoing some sort of transformation as required by their predicament, carelessly or viciously castrated. (4) Considering their ill luck their calm is remarkable.

If writing is important, it is because it represents the subtlest, most economical organization of human impulses there is. Kincaid can thus practice her value of organization and state of mind in shaping what she calls "demigoddesses in search of a fine balance" (Bonetti 1992, 12). Such an exercise is healthy in that it tends to reduce waste and frustration. After all, this is a narrative where the family unit remains firmly at the center of the action. To understand how despair functions is not, she insists, the same as understanding how life works. Ambiguity is among other things a coded sort of anti-chauvinism. To be hospitable to different meanings is to be open to a diversity of cultures. Such an attitude toward life and writing is manifested in her concentration on the scale of unresolved perplexities, still lodged at the center of her project. This technique (if one calls it that) induces the reader to take stock of the deterioration of everybody under the threat of poverty, including the children and the steady draining of the modest happiness the "good people" around her main protagonist, Xuela, in The Autobiography of My Mother, had enjoyed back home in Antigua when she was a child growing up there. Such atrophy is matched by the increasing impossibility of finding any space in a grossly overcrowded locale. All around are noise and poverty. Men scratch a living from such trades as letter-writing, bone-setting, hair-collecting, and earwax-removing, all chronicled quite in the spirit of Mayhew. "Let's all have some piss and quiet," says a minor character who is conscientiously identified by his inability to sort out English vowels (Kincaid 1997, 23). In the place where Xuela was born and went to school you have too much of the first and none of the second. The management of the story, the pressures of the place, of illness, and bad luck on these "decent people," is admirable. Kincaid describes what is pitiable without too much display of pity, and that prevents her reader from seeing the Caribbean households as versions of pastoral. Mr. Potter may be thought to lack the power and scope of The Autobiography of My Mother, a really drenching and therefore sustaining novel, which charts the downfall of one generation only to see the next one rise, has panoramic scope and variety. Kincaid is extremely good at the politics of the family but does not neglect major issues such as poverty, unhappiness, hunger, or slavery that have plagued her community for generations. She is also perceptive on corruption, brutality, and selfishness that are in the atmosphere, and are able to invade quiet homes. This may sound unduly dark, and it is high time to recall that Kincaid is a writer of great skill and resource--it shows in all the characterization, plot, and sub-plot in the carefully idiomatic dialogue. She can be extravagantly private as in the following instance where she recounts an intimate moment in which Xuela exhausts all her sexual energy in fucking Monsieur LaBatte, who may be advanced in years and "unbeautiful," but is crafty enough to leave an imprint. This is how she describes the encounter after he makes love to her for the first time:

 
  I wanted to see what I looked like, but I could not. I felt myself; my 
  skin felt smooth, as if it has just been oiled and freshly polished. 
  The place between my legs ached, my lips ached, my wrists ached; when 
  he had not wanted me to touch him, he had placed his own large hands 
  over my wrists and kept them pinned to the floor; when my cries had 
  distracted him, he had clamped my lips shut with his mouth. It was 
  through all the parts of my body that ached that I relived the deep 
  pleasure I had just experienced. When I woke the next morning I did 
  not feel I had slept at all; I felt as if I had only lost 
  consciousness and I picked up where I had left off in my ache of 
  pleasure. (Kincaid 1997, 72) 

One of the virtues of this kind of writing, which Roland Barthes aptly called the "dedication," by which he meant the episode of language which accompanies any amorous gift, whether real or projected; and, more generally, every gesture, whether actual or interior, by which the subject dedicates something to the loved being, in this case Xuela to her self, happens to be her Self, is the sheer exuberance by which the writer seeks to place love in an economy of pure expenditure (2005, 34). Kincaid is fully aware of the transgression, which is possessed by a demon of language that impels her protagonist to feel or even injure herself. Such technique allows her to get so much into the narrative without its lapsing into the condition of the loose and baggy monster.

Henry James, commenting on Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns, allowed that the author has put down "in dense unconfused array, every fact required, to make the life of the Five Towns press upon us"; but that, he argues, is not enough, for soon we are saying: "Yes, yes, but is this all? These are the circumstances of interest ... but where is the interest itself, where and what is the center?" (Lodge 2004, 56). A devout Jamesian might say the same of Kincaid's novels. The criticism would be unjust. Her narrative does have an interest beyond its "unconfused array" of fact and character. She can write of a wall made dangerous and disgusting by men using it as a urinal, and provoking a plague of mosquitoes. The wall is cleaned up, and a pavement artist hired to paint on it the gods of all relevant religions. Since men are no longer willing to take the risk of pissing on it, this solves the problem and also advances the professional skills of the artist. A doll won in a raffle is raped by a half-wit; a quilt, long in the making, always has a piece missing (Garis 1990, 3). There is imagination at work here, and there is interest. One might say that the interest begins on the first page of Lucy when Lucy leaves the home that never was. The world of which she is momentarily the center is full of hard facts that must be dealt with. Her combined force to "Ever try. Ever fail. Never mind. Try again. Fail better" is stronger than the defenses of the fine unforced civility the people around her normally enjoy. (5) The variety, virtue, and humor of lives led in defiance of these facts constitute the interest itself, and to represent them so fully is, like the work of the pavement artist, a work of art born out of a labor of love.

Kincaid, who has lived in the US since 1967, has chosen to plunge her reader into the maelstrom of the Caribbean mess she left behind. This is a world refracted through the distorting lenses of distance and time, where realism, blended with a cold eye, and surrealism, mixed with sangfroid, collide, often to disconcerting effect. Her thematic point of departure is simple: while her stories unfold against the wide screen of social change in the Caribbean, her characters seem to be against most things that are good, yet they have no reason to act the way they do-they express a kind of negative freedom. It is in the interstices of a multi-layered narrative that Kincaid reveals a genuine and considerable talent for answering back while at the same time forcing the reader to confront the simple question: is negative freedom the only freedom available to her protagonists and why do they suffer from the void inside them, even though they still recognize the importance of telling their own stories? Since there is no consensus about what constitutes the hallmark of the orders of Empire, everyone is entitled to support or refute it while choosing his or her own ground. Her own position on this matter is clear: "History is full of great events," she informs us; "when the great events are said and done, there will always be someone, a little person, unhappy, dissatisfied, discontented, not at home in her own skin, ready to stir up a whole new set of great events again" (1990, 23). She, rather conservatively, locates herself about four or five feet from her characters and landscapes-near enough to tell us what we need to know about Lucy or Annie or Mr. Potter or Jack LaBatte or Antigua, but not so near as to infringe on their privacy or essential dignity. This is how Xuela reveals herself to the reader and the world:

 
  I came to feel that for my whole life I had been standing on a 
  precipice, that my loss had made me vulnerable, hard, and helpless; on 
  knowing this I became overwhelmed with sadness and shame and pity for 
  myself.... I loved the smell of the thin dirt behind my ears, the 
  smell of my unwashed mouth, the smell that came between my legs, the 
  smell in the pits of my arms, the smell of my unwashed feet. Whatever 
  about me caused offense, whatever was native to me, whatever I could 
  not help and was not a moral failing--those things about me I loved 
  with the fervor of the devoted. (Kincaid 1997, 32-33) 

With a grim smile and a daunting accuracy, Kincaid shines her flashlight down into those unlit places of the Self where we rearm for our intimate wars with ourselves. In doing so, she chose to occupy once and for all the territory most favorable to her ambitions both as a storyteller and as a novelist. In the process, she unveils not only Xuela but also her other characters, as if across the width of a farmhouse supper table, or from a distance equivalent to that between one furrow and the next in a neatly ploughed field. A case in point is the portrait she draws of Mr. Potter: harsh, pitiless, even cruel but true and sincere (2002, 78). In this sense, Kincaid seems bent on forcing us to share the plight of the subject with a broken heart, the broken lineage, even though there is nothing broken or "barbaric" about her enonce (utterance). All this has a very complicated effect on the reading consciousness. The narrative offers surprise, delight, amusement, and fascination: it is spellbinding and sometimes extraordinarily insistent on provocation and unpleasantries. On saying that a daffodil is not just a daffodil because of the way it was cultivated, who cultivated it and, who sweated over it? Why, then, does Kincaid, who writes as she speaks with an accent both lilting and melodic, feel it is her "duty to make everyone a little less happy?" (1990, 24) In fine, why this insistence on truth? Can we at all assume that the process of interpretation is fulfilled, or will it continue as new material comes to light? Is it a golden rule of fiction that a writer like her cannot create a character whose way of noticing is significantly and emphatically less rich than her own? The problem always is: what colors and nuances to leave out, what tricks and twists of voice or consciousness to throw aside? These questions arise when reading Kincaid, who is increasingly fascinated by defeat, by the idea of the painful, by the incapacity to break down the boundary, the more successful she is.

I

The various interventions (whether speaking, writing, or teaching) by Jamaica Kincaid have the same theoretical underpinning: a modest extension of the argument made long ago by C.L.R. James in The Black…