Jamaica Kincaid

ON WRITING, DAFFODILS, AND CHILDREN

By Laura Mars

From the pages of our May/June 2024 Issue.

MIRANDA R. BARNES

Jamaica Kincaid is a Jewish Afro-Carribean author, born in Antigua. The novelist, essayist, and gardener writes about colonialism, migration, mother-daughter relationships, loss, and, yes, gardening. She has published over a dozen books, notably At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, A Small Place, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. Kincaid is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University and the recipient of numerous national and international awards, most recently The Paris Review Hadada in 2022, their annual lifetime achievement award. Her life in America began when she was sent to New York at age 17 to work as an au pair to help support her family. Heartbroken and angry not to be attending a university, she stopped sending money home, and “became the best-dressed servant you ever saw.” In her early 20s, she started writing for The Village Voice, Ingenue, and The New Yorker. From her home in North Bennington, Vermont, Kincaid offers a glimpse of what we can expect when she speaks at the Authors Guild Foundation’s WIT Festival in Lenox, September 27–29.

You wrote for The New Yorker for 20 years. How has your writing changed? I've become more revealing about my real feelings, and the language has become, in some ways, more rough. I am not as kind to myself as a writer. I used to, perhaps, protect myself from my own violent thoughts, frank thoughts. I'm less likely to do that now.

Do you have a favorite literary genre? Oh, no, no. People writing the Bible, what genre were they writing? Or The Iliad? Shakespeare was a playwright, but was he a playwright when he was writing? Or was he a writer? Issues of genre are convenient for people who have to sell them. “These are not beans. They are canola beans. They are red beans. They are beans from Italy.” It is true that when I'm writing certain things, I adhere to a different morality. When I was writing a book about my brother dying of AIDS, I made sure that everything in it was factually true, because I had an obligation to him. But when I'm writing something in which I'm only obligated to my own sense of morality, my own understanding of certain things, then I approach the writing in a different way. I didn't always understand this, but I've come to see that the notion of genre has been ruinous to a writer, or to literature.

You are an avid gardener, and gardening is the subject of several of your books. What does your garden look like today? Last week, it looked like Greenland, just this sheet of white. Then it melted and the daffodils, Rijnveld’s Early Sensation, came up, a little shyly. I used to hate daffodils because we had to memorize this poem by Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” that was all about daffodils. When it occurred to me that it was not the daffodils’ fault that I was forced to memorize a poem about them, I decided to plant the whole yard with daffodils. I started with 1,000, and last year the total was over 22,000. It’s just a sea of daffodils. I call it “Redeeming Wordsworth.” The garden is a form of writing for me, always telling me about itself. The Twin Leaf, for example, whose proper name is Jeffersonia diphylla, was named after Thomas Jefferson by his friend who just thought it was a beautiful plant—one leaf that is separated into two, and the two halves are not identical. But it absolutely describes Jefferson and his nature. He's one thing, and he's the opposite of that, but he's the same person. I also grow lots of things that I would grow in the Caribbean, like cotton. I never get cotton, but it has a beautiful flower, different colors, pink and yellow. It's a very beautiful plant that was put to a very vicious use, and I grow it for that reason—to redeem it. So many things in the garden are innocent of how we use them.

Your latest book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, illustrated by Kara Walker, will be released May 7. It is full of provocative illustrations and language that describes not only plants and flowers, but events in history. What is the message? I didn't think of it so much as a message but as the joy of knowing something. If you're a child from the West Indies and your parents give you breadfruit, it'd be wonderful to know how it got there. Native to the Pacific Islands, to Tahiti, it was brought to the West Indies to feed slaves. I've never met a child who liked breadfruit, as if we instinctively know its origins. If you enjoy an orange or a rose, wouldn’t you want to know where it came from? Once you start talking about cotton, sugarcane, nutmeg, about the vegetable kingdom, you are talking about history. Rubber is native to Brazil, but the Dutch took it. Tea belongs in China, but it became a commodity and changed the culture. Dahlias, whose 2327 hollow stems were used to treat urinary tract infections, are native to Mexico, and Europeans took it to Europe. Am I writing about plants, am I writing about history, or am I writing about evil?

Do you have a favorite letter in your new book? My favorite illustration is Nicotiana, a person lying clearly dead, with a beautiful nicotine plant coming out of her, blooming. It's so poignant. Nicotiana is named after a Frenchman, Jean Nicot.

What age child do you see reading An Encyclopedia? This is just the book I would have wanted as a child. My childhood was complicated, but among the joys was being taught to read at a very early age. I would read anything in front of me. While people were playing, I would read and steal books. For my seventh birthday, my mother gave me the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. An Encyclopedia would have been heaven, a book that told you things and showed you things. So, it’s really written for the seven-year-old child I was. Children are incredibly curious, and it just drives me crazy how we infantilize children's literature. I was reading to my granddaughter, who is only three years old, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, about the friendship between a First Lady and former slave. She just loved Mrs. Keckly.