Self-Representation and the (Im)Possibility of Remembering in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Mr. Potter

Abstract

According to Anne Whitehead, “autobiography constitutes an important art of memory.” In fact, the contemporary interest in memory and Memory Studies coincides in time with a boom in life-writing genres to which the British ex-colonies have greatly contributed. Writing autobiography in a postcolonial context implies facing unwanted memories and coming to grips with a great measure of what Homi Bhabha has called “unhomeliness.” It also invites reading in allegorical terms since the personal and the domestic are imbued with the legacy of the Empire; and the autobiographical subject struggling to form an identity reverberates with echoes of the homeland. Extrapolating from Ian Hacking’s reflections on Holocaust memories, we can also establish that in the former colonies, what links group memory and personal memory is the experience of trauma. In order to accommodate the traumatic experience, contemporary autobiographies have often had to revise traditional genre codes. The work of Afro-Caribbean author Jamaica Kincaid constantly returns to her childhood in Antigua—then a colony of the British Empire—and to her problematic family relations. This article analyses two instances of Kincaid’s “ongoing self-representational project” (Gilmore 2001). Leigh Gilmore has approached Kincaid’s work as an example of limit-case autobiography, a kind of writing in which the interaction between self-representation and trauma questions the pillars of traditional life writing, bringing them closer to the preserves of fiction. This is particularly the case with The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), a fictional biography of a dead mother written by her daughter, and Mr. Potter (2002), a singular portrait of Kincaid’s biological father. The main interest in Kincaid’s 1996 novel lies not so much in spotting the connections with the life of its author as in exploring how it complicates the very concept of memory. Having no direct memories of her Caribe mother, who died in giving birth to her, the protagonist fills this absence with her own life story of neglect and abuse, which unfolds against the backdrop of colonialism. I here intend to approach Xuela’s particular act of remembrance as one in which the self, the mother, and the motherland—the staples of most (auto)biographical writing—merge in the context of a traumatic past. Mr. Potter follows in the footsteps of the earlier novel in predicating the story of Kincaid’s father upon personal and historical memories of trauma, a decision signalled not only at the level of content but also, conspicuously, in terms of form. My approach to Mr. Potter revolves mainly around Kincaid’s unconventional textual strategies and their repercussion on generic boundaries.