Laura Nguyen
Final Paper
December 14th, 2018
Survey of Caribbean Literature
Resisting Self-hate and Colonization in Jamaica Kincaid’s
The Autobiography of My Mother
In the novel, The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid brilliantly paints a portrait of how impactful colonialism has been on the characters and how it has dramatically damaged them psychologically. The story follows the protagonist, Xuela, an unloved woman who does her best to survive the cruel world of the island of Dominica. Independence is exactly what Xuela strives for, but her journey is long, packed with several obstacles along the way. These obstacles take the shape of oppressive nationalistic tools. Seodial Deena, in his critical essay that focuses on oppressive colonial institutions, explains,
The institutions responsible for these forms of oppression and exploitation are what I call colonial apparatuses, which undermine the colony and colonized to a status of disorder and mimicry. These apparatuses become agents of power and subjectification reducing the colonized to the powerless objects whose futile acts result in betrayal, playacting, corruption, and failure.
The structures found on Dominica further validate the internal oppression created within the characters. The characters around Xuela fall into the trap of nationalism and colonialism, but Xuela in extricable fight these oppressions. Xuela is bombarded with these repressive tools not only from her father, but her education, step-mother, sexual partners, siblings, peers, and society.
The Autobiography of My Mother opens with Xuela’s straightforward assertion:
My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind … at my beginning was this woman whose face I never seen, but at my end was bothing, no one between me and the black room of the world. (Kincaid, 3)
These opening lines, and the undertones of vulnerability embedded in them, immediately establish a deep sense of loneliness and self-hate, which characterizes Xuela’s childhood, and extends into her adulthood. Xuela’s experiences with mother loss are not unique. Kincaid forces the reader to note that many daughters who lost their mothers believe that their development as women were damaged or hindered. In this way Xuela’s lack of mother play a critical role in helping their her navigate feminine behavior. The only genuine Carib person in the novel, Xuela’s mother is killed off, representing the absence of Xuela’s truest self. Xuela feels equally disconnected from the Carib people because she was raised in a society that believed that the “Carib people had been defeated and then exterminated,” which made it difficult for Xuela to claim roots in a nation or people that dominant society regarded as non-existent (Kincaid ,16). In other words, she lacks both mother and motherland. Xuela explains, “I refused to belong to a race, I refused to accept a nation… Am I nothing then? I do not believe so” (226). For Xuela, accepting a race or nation means accepting the crimes that go along with them and colonization. However, she does not understand her identity as being intrinsically attached to her heritage, or to the nation or race that she belongs to. Instead, her identity is bound up in maternal loss: “Who was I? My mother died at the moment I was born…I cannot remember when I did not know this fact of my life” (225). This direct link between identity—“Who was I”—and motherhood suggests that maternal bonds transcend racial or national ones.
Throughout the novel Xuela displays feelings of rejection, “When we were alone we spoke to each other in French patrois, the language of the captive, the illegitimate” (Kincaid 74). We understand how deeply Xuela believes in her own oppression, referring to her native tongue as the language of the “captive” and the “illegitimate.” Writer Veronica Marie Gregg explains in her article “How Jamaica Kincaid Writes the Autobiography of her Mother” that, “Produced by the destructive history of the West Indies, Xuela rages within and against the language that contains this history” (Gregg 15). For Xuela, language of colonialism and nationalism is just another form of oppression. These notions are a learned behavior, and from an early age Xuela is taught to recognize her position as other. In school she is condemned by her teacher and her peers for looking less African and more Caribbean. But Xuela recognizes their own self-hatred for their African descent. She describes her teacher as,
…..of the African people that I could see, and she found in this a source of humiliation and self-loathing, and she wore despair like an article of clothing, like a mantle, or a staff on which she leaned constantly, a birthright which she would pass on to us. (Kincaid ,15)
Members of the Dominica have been consistently presented with these structural tools of nationalism such as language as a direct result of colonialism. This nationalistic symbol is the colonizer’s way of keeping the native inferior. The continuous images are passed on and are intergenerational. But Xuela fights back against this nationalism, and although she may be a member of a “captive” community, she refuses to let that deter her own sense of self.
Xuela’s inherent oppression is rooted at the loss of her mother. She never forgets the loss of her mother and is constantly reminded of her loneliness in the lack of her mother's presence. This oppression is so ingrained in her it is what eventually leads her to doubt her worthiness of love. Her mother’s death and lack of presence suggests to us that without motherly guidance the effort to resist oppression is even more difficult. She makes the conscious choice to love herself in spite of the several believed reasons why she should not. “I came to love myself in defiance, out of despair because there was nothing else. Such a love will do, but it will only do, it is not the best kind it has the taste of something left out on the shelf too long that has turned rancid, and when eaten makes the stomach turn” (57). She does not “recommend” this love because she perceives it as a love for the undeserving. Xuela goes to great lengths to love herself even though her oppressors tell her not to, in this way Xuela is naturally resilient.
Xuela’s father is her first encounter with repression; early on he emotionally abandons her, teaching her to “mistrust’ her peers. She explains, “….that this insistence on mistrust of others- that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children is no longer a mystery to me” (48). Xuela understands that “mistrust” is a tool that has been ingrained in her society, to keep the colonials inferior. Xuela is able to impressively acknowledge that those who should be mistrusted were “beyond our influence” (48). In this instance she is referring to the imperial power of the colonizers. Xuela understands that to impact them was outside her community’s control. So instead they are trained to turn on each other and create their own sense of imagined community.
Xuela’s stepmother is a prime example of this type of disloyalty. She saw Xuela as a threat and feared that her husband may love his daughter more than herself. So she treats her step-daughter with disdain, claiming that she could not be her father’s daughter because she does not resemble him physically. After her children are born, she even attempts to kill her, giving her a poisonous necklace. Xuela’s stepmother serves as a nationalistic tool of oppression. Yet Xuela is observant enough to realize that her stepmother is also a victim of internal hatred. The woman’s own self- hatred is vividly characterized by Xuela when she describes the relationship between her stepmother and her children.
She bore a boy first, than she had a girl. This had two predictable outcomes: she left me alone and she valued her son more than her daughter. That she did not think very much of the person who was most like her, a daughter, a female, was so normal that it would have been noticed only if it had been otherwise: to people like us, despising anything that was most like ourselves was almost a law of nature. (Kincaid 52)
The stepmother’s favoring the son over her daughter, strikes to the very heart of self-hate. She “despised” her daughter because she “despised” herself. She is in a prison of her own self-hate, internalizing the prejudicial ideals of colonizers. The real tragedy is that her pessimistic mindset is inevitably passed down to her children. Her daughter, Elizabeth, grows up to be literally and figuratively beaten by her own inherent hatred. Lacking any respect for herself, she allows a man to use her like a dirty rag until she is physically and psychologically broken.
Xuela’s step-brother, the pride and joy of his parent’s eye, dies suddenly of a strange illness. Xuela describes that, “Before he died his body became a river of pus. Just as he died, a large brown worm crawled out of his left leg; it lay there, above the ankle as if waiting to be found by a wanderer one morning.” (111). The son embodies the hope and ideals of his corrupt parents. His mother favors him, and his father sees him as his legacy. His death puts an end to their fleeting happiness. The way in which he dies is interesting as well. The pus that seems to overtake his body, becomes a metaphor for the colonization distortion that has crept up inside the natives of the Dominica. Kincaid’s message is that this internal oppression will be the natives’ ruin. The worm invades the boy, and this worm is a representation of colonialism.
Xuela’s father is yet another significant character in the novel who displays self-hate behaviors through intergenerational. By all accounts, he is perceived as successful, but he definitely makes his fortune on the exploitation of others. He validates his actions with religion, and the idea that members of his community deserved it.
My father had become a Methodist, he attended Church every Sunday; he taught Sunday school. The more he robbed, the more money he had, the more he went to church; it is not an unheard-of-linking. And the richer he became, the more fixed the mask of his face grew, so that now I no longer remember what he really looked like. (Kincaid, 41)
Xuela’s father mimicked the actions of his oppressors; not only does he exploit the villagers he also takes on the colonial religion. She questions how one could attend church and teach Sunday school, and still rationalize actions of exploitation. The European Christian religion becomes yet another institution that builds the structures of nationalism. Her father’s mimicry of the colonizers allows him to rationalize his neglect and mistreatment of others.
As Xuela grows into a woman, she is still confronted with obstacles of oppression everywhere she turns. At age 14 she is sent to live with the LaBattes, a married couple. In this house she is sexually exploited by the husband, guided by the encouragement of Mrs. LaBatte, who is no longer desirable to her spouse. Such abuse would be enough to break most young girls, but not Xuela. Xuela takes control of her sexuality refusing to let the intended exploitation defeat her. When she becomes pregnant she precedes with an abortion; seeing motherhood, and all that it entails, as another way for someone to rule her. The abortion as a life changing incident. After this pivotal and physically torturous event, Xuela feels permanently altered-she learns that she is capable of carrying her life in her own hands. Here Xuela is making a conscious decision to take charge of her life. Xuela’s refusal to biologically reproduce allows her to circumvent passing on the legacy of violence, domination, and extinction, or as she puts it, “The crime of these identities, which I know now more than ever, I do not have the courage to bear” (226). The double meaning of the phrase, “bear,” as both to invoke and to biologically reproduce, sheds light on the complicated, and oftentimes, burdensome effect that a history of domination has on both individual and maternal identities. Kincaid is clearly developing a character that is the antithesis of colonization. In a world where so many are controlled by the imperial rule of the British, Xuela decides to try and take back the power. She refuses, and literally kills the only colonial element about her.
Kincaid accomplishes this recreation to historical colonization with her protagonist, Xuela. She is an iconic hero of the “anti-colonial” story. Unfortunately this triumph of independence and resistance come with stark consequences. Xuela encounters love for the first time with a man named Roland. She falls deeply for him, but only succumbs to him physically. Ultimately she lets him go because Xuela perceives love as a weakness, another way to be controlled. She explains, “Romance is the refuge of the defeated; the defeated need songs to soothe themselves, they need a sweet tune to soothe themselves, for their whole being is a wound; they need a soft bed to sleep on, for when they are awake it is a nightmare, the dream of sleep is their reality” (216). The “nightmare” Xuela is referring to is the powerlessness of love. It is incomprehensible for Xuela to surrender to love because she would be unable to maintain control. Instead Xuela makes the mindful decision to advance her social and financial status by marrying an English doctor. She sees this action as a progressive step in the defeat of nationalism. “And this man I married was of the victors, and so much a part of him was this situation, the situation of the conqueror, that only through a book of history could he be reminded of a time when he might have been something other….” (Kincaid 217). Xuela’s final step towards realizing her personal identity, her “great revenge” is to marry a man of high-class, and a subsequent colonizer (Kincaid 216). This marriage is the definitive act of resistance. Xuela’s internal oppression runs so deep that it pushes her to sacrifice a life filled with love for a life of security.
The Autobiography of My Mother is an examples of how West Indie literature can deconstruct stereotypes, preconceived notions, and allows the reader to either relate or have a compassionate understanding of the extreme damages left behind by colonialism. This novels bring the uncomfortable issues of internal oppression and its effects, to the forefront of the reader's mind. Each part of Xuela’s life not only guides, but forces the reader to face the destruction created by colonial rule. Xuela is a very complex character, but when one observes closely the tragedy in her triumph is easily seen. Xuela’s resistance can be directly linked to the victimization of colonialism. Kincaid constructs a narrative that vividly illustrates this link, giving a voice to the oppressed. The Autobiography of My Mother does just that; it opposes and breaks down stereotypes; it turns the major ideals on its heel, and shines a light on the struggle of a marginalized society that is slowly recovering from generations of oppression. Xuela’s independence does create a rebellion against Colonial power. Her will to control her life, instead of allowing it to be controlled, is an attempt to free herself from oppression. She remains psychologically “captive” (Kincaid 74). Xuela’s choices and behaviors indicate the deep repressive corruption that lies within. Her inherent pessimism with regard to her language, culture, race, and heritage is the result of generations of oppression that has been passed down to her. Such a complex character can only lead the reader to feel a deep sense of compassion. Her resistance guides the audience in understanding the psychological upheaval these communities live in. Kincaid’s novel understand the narrative of the West Indies and inherently resists colonization through the character of Xuela. Kincaid analyze this problem of internal oppression, and bring to light the horror created during this decolonization period. Such literature helps to free those who are afflicted with this self-hate.