The autobiography of my mother

By jamaica kincaid , dominique peters , and carme geronès.

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The autobiography of my mother by Jamaica Kincaid

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The West Indian narrator vents her bitterness at the unhappy life fate dealt her--mother died in childbirth, father ignored her, stepmother tried to kill her, at school she had an abortion. Finally, she married a white doctor, but it was impossible for her to love him because he was a colonialist. She draws parallels with the despair of her country--Dominica--attributing it to the legacy of slavery. By the author of Lucy.

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The Autobiography of My Mother

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From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry. Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she could hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack Labatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness.

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  • Release date: January 15, 1996

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Lexile® Measure: 1160 Text Difficulty: 8-9

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Kindle Book Release date: January 15, 1996

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  • Jamaica Kincaid - Author
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  • Languages English
  • Levels Lexile® Measure: 1160 Text Difficulty: 8-9

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Women’s Lives into Print pp 123–136 Cite as

When Writing the Other is Being True to the Self: Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

  • Alison Donnell  

165 Accesses

2 Citations

When asked how much of her work is autobiographical, Jamaica Kincaid’s stock response is ‘All of it, even the punctuation’. However, readers of her work would be well-accustomed to such statements of devious simplicity and complex clarity They would likewise recognise in the title of her latest work, The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), a playful but incisive disturbance in the accustomed use of language. Like the title of this work, two comments which Kincaid has made in interview imply that, for her, the figure of the mother is implicated in the central relationship between writing and the self around which autobiographical works are structured.

My mother used to tell me a lot of things about herself. It’s perhaps one of the ways in which I became a writer. (Kincaid in Bonetti 1992: 127) Clearly the way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me. I can’t help but think that it made me interested in the idea of myself as an object. (Kincaid in O’Connor 1985: 6)

All of Kincaid’s major fictions, to date, have focused on the mother-daughter relationship; a fact which is perhaps more surprising given that she has written in a variety of genres, periods, voices and cultural locations, in order to unravel the politics of colonialism, neo-colonialism and post-colonialism.

  • Hegemonic Discourse
  • Voice Pattern
  • Oppressive Conse

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

I write about myself for the most part, and about things that have happened to me. Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. (Kincaid in Bonetti, 1992: 125)
He was so sure inside himself that all the things he knew were correct, not that they were true, but that they were correct. Truth would have undone him, the truth is always so full of uncertainty (Kincaid, 1996: 222)

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Bensteck, ed. (1988) The Private Self Theory and Practice of Women’s Aatobiographical Writings , London: Routledge

Google Scholar  

Birbalsingh, Frank (1996) Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English , London: Macmillan

Bonetti, Kay (1992) ‘An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid’, Missouri Review 15:2, pp. 124–42

Donnell, Alison (1992) ‘Dreaming of Daffodils: cultural resistance to the narratives of Eurocentric theory in Kincaid’s Lucy’, Kunapipi XIV, pp. 45–52

Donnell, Alison (1993) ‘When Daughters Defy: Jamaica Kincaid’s Fiction’, Women: A Cultural Review 4:1, pp. 18–26

Harasym, Sarah, ed. (1990) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies and Dialogues , London: Routledge

Hong Kingston, Maxine (1977) The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girhwod among Ghosts , New York: Random House

Hooks, bell (1990) Yeanuug: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics , Boston: South End Press

Hurston, Zora Neale (1947, 1986) Dust Tracks on a Road , London: Virago

Kincaid, Jamaica (1984) At the Bottom of the River , London: Pan Books

Kincaid, Jamaica (1985) Annie John , London: Pan Books

Kincaid, Jamaica (1991) Lucy , London: Jonathan Cape

Kincaid, Jamaica (1996) The Autobiography of My Mother , London: Vintage

Marcus, Laura (1994) Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism Practice , Manchester: University of Manchester Press

Marcus, Laura (1995) ‘The face of autobiography’, in Swindells, Julia, ed. (1995) The Uses of Autobiography , London: Taylor & Francis

Murdoch, H A (1990) ‘Severing The (M)other Connection: The Representation of Cultural Identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John’, Callaloo 13.2, pp. 325–40

Article   Google Scholar  

Natov, Roni (1990) ‘Mothers and Daughters: Jamaica Kincaid’s Pre-Oedipal Narrative’, Children’s Literature 18, pp. 1–16

O’Connor, Patricia (1985) ‘My Mother Wrote My Life’, New York Times Book Review , 7, p. 6

Sidonie Smith (1987) A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Margiuality and the Fictions of Self-Representation , Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Sidonie Smith (1993) Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century , Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Sinister Wisdom Collective (1990), Sinister Wisdom , 42:4, pp. 1–6

Smith, Sidonie (1987) A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography , Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Stanley, Liz (1992) The Auto/biographical I , Manchester: University of Manchester Press

Stanley, Liz ed. (1994) Lives & Works: Auto/biographical Oeeaskvis (double issues) 3:1 and 3:2, i-ii

Steedman, Carolyn (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman , London: Virago

Swindells, Julia, ed. (1995) The Uses of Autobiography , London: Taylor & Francis

Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1989) Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feiuiuism , Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1991) When The Moon Waves Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics , London: Routledge

Wilkinson, Sue and Kitzinger, Celia, eds (1996) Representing the Other: a Femiiusm and Psychology Reader , London: Sage

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Nottingham Trent University, UK

Pauline Polkey ( Lecturer in women’s writing and feminist theory ) ( Lecturer in women’s writing and feminist theory )

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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Donnell, A. (1999). When Writing the Other is Being True to the Self: Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother . In: Polkey, P. (eds) Women’s Lives into Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374577_9

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The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel (FSG Classics)

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the autobiography of my mother pdf

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Jamaica Kincaid

The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel (FSG Classics) Paperback – May 7, 2013

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From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry. Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness.

  • Print length 240 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publication date May 7, 2013
  • Dimensions 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.2 inches
  • ISBN-10 0374531870
  • ISBN-13 978-0374531874
  • Lexile measure 1160L
  • See all details

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“Fierce, incantory . . . lyrical . . . powerful and disturbing.” ―Michiko Kakutani, New York Times “Kincaid, always an elegant stylist, makes this story of a simple woman extraordinary . . . filling her prose with rich, poetic detail . . . An unforgettable account of singular survival.” ― San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “A book that comes both to haunt and to dazzle us . . . [Kincaid] writes like an angel: with enviable lucidity and precision and a lyric touch that frequently aspires to the condition of poetry.” ― Boston Sunday Globe

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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (May 7, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374531870
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374531874
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1160L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.2 inches
  • #2,498 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
  • #6,731 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
  • #32,777 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Jamaica kincaid.

Jamaica Kincaid's works include, Mr Potter, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother, a memoir. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

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A Postcolonial Reading of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography Of My Mother

Profile image of International Journal of English Language  and Translation Studies

Caribbean literature exposes a history of dispossession, exploitation and oppression which has been neglected and often deliberately misinterpreted. In this article the destructive effects of colonization and slavery in Jamaica Kincaid's 1996 novel The Autobiography of My Mother are scrutinized thoroughly. The main objective of this research is to examine Kincaid's novel within the framework of postcolonial studies, in the light of Albert Memmi (2013) and Frantz Fanon's (2008) theories on the psychology of colonialism. Frantz Fanon argues that colonialism had brought together two opposing social orders doomed to coexist in everlasting tension; the colonizer's and the colonized's; these tensions cause the moral and spiritual deformity of an ideological system based on racism, oppression, and exploitation. In contrast to Fanon, Kincaid regards resistance and liberation in a quite different perspective. Instead of attempting to build a "new woman", Xuela refuses to accept the colonizer's views of those like her that lead to self-destruction and self-hatred. Instead, in order to survive, she confidently chooses self-love, albeit an almost grotesque and obsessive one. Kincaid uses Xuela's relationships with various characters to categorize the social types that Fanon describes in his writings—from Philip and his wife Moira as examples of the deformation of behavior caused by colonial social hierarchies to using mask as a metaphor for her manipulative father's mimicry of the oppressors. This research finds out that colonization and slavery have negative impact on both the colonizer and the colonized.

Related Papers

razan abulibdeh

Jamaica Kincaid, arguably the most popular Caribbean woman writer living in the USA, has produced many o f her bestsellers by dissecting her personal and familial history. Yet in spite of her inclination to anchor the life o f her creative inventions in her personal and intimate experience, Kincaid, known for her radicalism and militancy, can be a fiercely polit­ ical writer. The aim o f this essay is to explore how Kincaid handles the trope o f race in her novel The Autobiography o f My Mother, how she uses racial imagery to unearth the covert mechanisms that account for the intricacies of identity formation and how she dismantles ide­ ological foundations that paved the way for racial exploitation. 1 will in particular focus on how Kincaid challenges, undermines and recasts the (post)colonial concept o f race by show­ ing that racial identity is a shifting category conceived through interaction with other cate­ gories o f identification such as class and gender.

the autobiography of my mother pdf

Mytam Mayo-smith

Academic Journal of History and Idea

Kanan Aghasiyev

This article's focus is Antiguan American writer Jamaica Kincaid's short story Girl. The story is also known as a poem since it is written in a poetic shape. The story was published by The New York Times for the first time in 1978, and then later it was published in a book named At the Bottom of the River in 1983, alongside many other stories by Kincaid. Girl talks about a relationship between a mother and a daughter in a colonial society. In Girl, readers can see how a mother teaches her daughter about her duties as a woman and a future wife. The piece has always been seen as either a postcolonial or feminist literary piece, rather than being a postcolonial feminist work. However, in this article, I claim that Kincaid's prose poem is a postcolonial feminist literary work that depicts the struggle of women in the colonized Antiguan society. I focus on postcolonial feminist concepts such as subalterns' voices and the concept of women's double colonization by giving related examples from Kincaid's Girl.

In Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge. Eds. B Ledent, Evelyn O'Callaghan, and D. Tunca. Palgrave

Rebecca Romdhani

Through locating the instances of unreliable narration and scrutinizing the mode and performative nature of the narrator’s account in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), this chapter argues that the novel exposes the pathology of colonialism. More precisely, by reading the novel alongside David Scott’s description of what would constitute a moral and reparative history, and Kehinde Andrews’s work on the psychosis of whiteness, the essay suggests that Kincaid’s text constructs the history that Scott advocates and reveals the psychology that allows the legacy of slavery and colonialism to continue.

Izabella Penier

Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal

Dr. Terri Smith Ruckel

Edwin C. Onwuka

This paper probes the symbolic in Jamaica Kincaid's short stories, My Mother and Girl. Its premise is that writers of Caribbean extract often deploy elements of symbolism to portray the peculiarities of their postcolonial experience and to express socio-cultural realities that may not be adequately explored by other means. This feature, therefore, necessitates a close and rigorous study of Caribbean writings to discover meanings communicated through symbolic characters, settings, atmospheric conditions and narrative undertones among others. This study, therefore, explores the historical and cultural experiences in the stories to highlight the socio-cultural dilemma and other historical complexities that shape the character of the Caribbean society. Using postcolonial theory as a critical compass, this paper is a library study through textual analysis and consultation of secondary sources to explore the content of the stories. The study concludes, therefore, that the use of symbolism in Caribbean literature, especially the short stories, is fitting and expedient to facilitate the depiction of the atypical range of experiences that shape Caribbean characters and which distinguishes them from other postcolonial societies. Further, the study shows that the writer succeeds, through the postcolonial experiences she explores, in communication her artistic vision to draw attention to the cultural limbo that is the lot of Caribbean characters.

Wagadu: a Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies

Simone A James Alexander

The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. This chapter explores the haunting or ghostly presence of both the living and the dead. The ghosts of slavery and colonialism haunt the character/s and the text; in retaliation, Xuela/Kincaid performs a “ghosting” by defying narrative conventions, by blurring the line between fiction, myth, biography, and autobiography. Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. A creolized subject (daughter of a Carib mother and a half Scot, half-African father), the novel’s protagonist, Xuela Claudette Richardson, embodies resistance, for she not only survives her mother’s death, but she also survives her father’s subsequent abandonment and several foster homes. Xuela’s mother dies shortly after giving birth 108 Wagadu Volume 19, Summer 2018 © Wagadu (2018) ISSN : 1545-6196 to her, leaving her in the care of her father who, in es...

Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature

Barbara Arizti

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    The West Indian narrator vents her bitterness at the unhappy life fate dealt her--mother died in childbirth, father ignored her, stepmother tried to kill her, at school she had an abortion. Finally, she married a white doctor, but it was impossible for her to love him because he was a colonialist.

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    Odisea, nº 19, ISSN 1578-3820, 2018. 25-34 28 Esther Muñoz-González The Autobiography of My Mother:... In The Autobiography it is the old Xuela who remembers her past and relates it mainly in chronological order -only interrupted by some prolepses- from the moment of the death of her mother to her old age, the present in the narration.

  4. The autobiography of my mother by Jamaica Kincaid

    by Jamaica Kincaid, Dominique Peters, and Carme Geronès. The West Indian narrator vents her bitterness at the unhappy life fate dealt her--mother died in childbirth, father ignored her, stepmother tried to kill her, at school she had an abortion. Finally, she married a white doctor, but it was impossible for her to love him because he was a ...

  5. The Autobiography of My Mother

    The Autobiography of My Mother. Kincaid's new and long-awaited novel is a powerful and unforgettable story of loss, longing, loving, and survival that resonants with the proud insurgence of the human will. The story of Xuela, whose mother dies at the moment she is born, presents "an indeliable portrait of an angry woman" (New York Times) "most ...

  6. The Autobiography of My Mother

    Book Details. Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry. Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica.

  7. The Autobiography of My Mother

    Jamaica Kincaid's new novel is the haunting, deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, was delivered to his laundress as an infant, bundled up like his clothes. The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one ...

  8. The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid (ebook)

    Jamaica Kincaid. Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry. Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica.

  9. The Autobiography of My Mother

    ebook. Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry. Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica.

  10. [PDF] The Autobiography of My Mother: Looking at the Past with Old Eyes

    The Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid 1996) is Xuela's story. Xuela as the narrator and protagonist of the novel 'moves between the imaginary world of the text and the real world of Kincaid's life' (Edwards 116-17). The Palimpsest metaphor shows to be useful to represent the 'palimpsesting of her identity' that Xuela does in her autobiography because the final perception of Xuela ...

  11. PDF The The Autobiography Autobiography of of My My Mother Mother

    biography, Oust Tracks 011 a Road ( 1942), can also be read as staging questions around the ownership of life stories and the responsibility to tell which arc so crucial to Tl1c Autobiography of My Mother. The most arresting scene of Hurston's <lutobiography b th<1t of her mother's death and her intuitive interpretation of this event: 'But she

  12. [PDF] Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother: Allegory and

    DOI: 10.33596/ANTH.60 Corpus ID: 55914434; Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother: Allegory and Self-Writing as Counter Discourse @article{Adams2006JamaicaKT, title={Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother: Allegory and Self-Writing as Counter Discourse}, author={Michele A. Adams}, journal={Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal}, year={2006}, volume={4}, pages={1}, url ...

  13. The autobiography of my mother : Kincaid, Jamaica : Free Download

    The autobiography of my mother by Kincaid, Jamaica. Publication date 1997 Topics Women Publisher New York : Plume Collection printdisabled; internetarchivebooks Contributor Internet Archive Language English. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2011-09-27 15:46:39 Boxid IA152701 Boxid_2 CH123001 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II

  14. (PDF) The Autobiography of My Mother: Looking at the ...

    The Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid 1996) es la historia de Xuela. Xuela, como narradora y protagonista de la novela, "se mueve entre el mundo imaginario del texto y el mundo real de la vida ...

  15. PDF Mother and Daughter in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother

    Jamaica Kincaid's novel The Autobiography of My Mother is about a woman named Xuela. Claudette Richardson. She is the narrator of the novel and is 70 years old when she starts. telling the story of her life. However, the title indicates that the novel is an autobiography of. Xuela's mother; the mother who died giving birth to Xuela.

  16. PDF Jamaica Kincaidâ•Žs The Autobiography of My Mother: Allegory and Self

    The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), her fourth lengthy work of fiction, is set in Dominica in the early 20th century and purports to be the life story of the writer's mother told from her own perspective. The basic premise of the novel presents two opportunities for further interrogating colonial and patriarchal power. Since the

  17. The Autobiography of My Mother Summary

    Summary. The Autobiography of My Mother offers a first-person, retrospective account of Xuela Richardson's struggle, over the course of her life, to reconcile with the early loss of her mother ...

  18. (PDF) A Feminist Narratological Study of Jamaica Kincaid's The

    Autobiography of My Mother, the focalization is internal b ecause the focalizer is a character who participates as an acto r in the narrative. Xuela claims the validity of her ri ght to interp ret ...

  19. [PDF] The Autobiography of My Mother: Narrative as an access to post

    This study discusses the Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid's novel The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) from the perspective of trauma theory. The study explores how Kincaid is using the loss of the mother as a mode of access into colonial history and how her ctional methodology re ects the methods of trauma studies. By insisting on claiming her body and bodily pleasures, Xuela, the ...

  20. The autobiography of my mother : Brown, Rosellen : Free Download

    The autobiography of my mother by Brown, Rosellen. Publication date 1976 Topics Mothers and daughters -- Fiction, Mothers and daughters Publisher Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday Collection printdisabled; internetarchivebooks; inlibrary ... EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

  21. The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel (FSG Classics)

    From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry. Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged ...

  22. A Postcolonial Reading of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother

    The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. This chapter explores the haunting or ghostly presence of both the living and the dead. The ghosts of slavery and colonialism haunt the character/s and the text; in retaliation, Xuela/Kincaid performs a "ghosting" by defying narrative conventions ...

  23. A Postcolonial Reading of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography Of My Mother

    The Autobiography of my Mother is narrated by the 70-year-old protagonist, Xuela Claudette Richardson who narrates her life story from the beginning; a vulnerable motherless child, abandoned by her father in her early childhood and left in the hands of first, an insensitive laundress Ma Eunice Paul, and then a cruel stepmother who even tries to ...

  24. Why some Christians are angry about Trump's 'God Bless the USA' Bible

    Former President Donald Trump's endorsement of a patriotic Bible during Holy Week has been challenged by some Christians who say it preys on people's faith for profit.