See Now Then: Jamaica Kincaid delights Calabash audience

By Earl Moxam

Jamaica Kincaid, the Antigua-born writer, had the audience at the Calabash International Literary Festival enraptured by her wit on Sunday in Treasure Beach.

First, she read from her latest novel - See Now Then - followed by a rap session with moderator Kwame Dawes. It was the latter, perhaps, which engaged the attention and enthusiasm of the audience most, as it allowed her to share insights into her history, personality and character, which have helped to shape her career as a writer.

Here are some of the stand-out quotes from her exchanges with Dawes:

- On suicide: "I never do anything that I can't reverse."

- "There's that moment in one's life when, no matter how you love someone, you just want to kill them."

- "I never believe in writer's block; reading is part of writing."

- On why she doesn't often read her own books ("unless I'm paid to do it!"): "I've just written it, and there are many other things to read!"

She even had time to quote a friend, commenting on John Updike:

"John Updike is the kind of person who would hold your glasses for you while you get beat up."

Rustic setting

The literary festival, staged in a rustic fishing village on Jamaica's south coast, with wave after wave of the Caribbean Sea crashing against the rocks in the background, provided a story book setting for the novelist to thrill her Sunday afternoon audience.

Not all great writers are great readers of their own work. Jamaica Kincaid brought her written words to life with a fine example of brilliant reading, from See Now Then.

The New York Times, in a 2013 review, describes the novel as portraying a nuclear family "living in a charming New England village whose domestic idyll cracks apart when 'the dear Mr. Sweet' dumps 'the dear Mrs. Sweet' for a younger woman.”

“This subject,” the review continued... is as old as Euripides’ 'Medea,' but Kincaid has the gift of endowing common experience with a mythic ferocity."

Long sentences

At the start of her reading on Sunday, Kincaid put her listeners on notice that she, characteristically, writes in long sentences, but such was the ease with which she delivered those lines that they had no difficulty following the fortunes of the somewhat dysfunctional Sweet family in See Now Then. She did so with an easy familiarity, gained perhaps from the intimacy of the creative process during which the characters were born and shaped.

Some reviewers have suggested that the novel is substantially autobiographical, with the lives of the divorced Mr. and Mrs. Sweet seeming to resemble the real life fortunes of the author and her former husband. That resemblance has largely been explained away by Jamaica Kincaid as being a matter that should not be taken too literally.

She did reflect a bit on her early personal history in Antigua and the importance of her first exposure to reading, including her first Oxford Concise Dictionary at age seven!

While she still considers Antigua "home", in a sense, the novelist, born Elaine Potter Richardson, admitted frankly, during her exchanges with Kwame Dawes, that "I feel I have exhausted Antigua as a source of my imagination."

Nevertheless, she left her audience with this piece of advice: "Know the place you're from. Know the grass under your feet. Then you can write about it."