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T A B L E+T A L K

Blasphemy! Discuss Macmillan/Picador's "Readers Edition" of Ulysses, with its "corrected" spellings, punctuation and grammar in Table Talk.

F E A T U R E

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The Tetherballs of Bougainville
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Gorilla Suit
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Jesus Saves
By Darcy Steinke
Fiction
(10/02/97)

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my brother: a memoir

BY JAMAICA KINCAID

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

NONFICTION

176 PAGES

BY PETER KURTH | jamaica kincaid has some problems with her mother. This won't be a surprise to anyone who's read her books -- any of them, really, but most recently her 1996 bestseller, "The Autobiography of My Mother," in which she reflects, over and over, in an obsessive narrative made more powerful and dizzying by the bare hypnotic rhythms of her prose, on a mother/daughter relationship that sounds simply appalling, fraught with pain and misunderstanding and not resolvable to the daughter's satisfaction. This is the enormous fly in Kincaid's literary ointment -- the fact that her mother remains unmoved, dominant, implacable and right, no matter what Kincaid says or thinks about her. She's on a self-imposed merry-go-round, whirling endlessly over ancient griefs and unhealed wounds, sitting on a battered, paint-peeled pony while her mother rides, permanently ahead of her, on a stately gilded horse.

"My mother loves her children, I want to say, in her way!" Kincaid writes in "My Brother," a memoir about her youngest brother's death from AIDS in Antigua in 1996. "And that is very true, she loves us in her way. It is her way. It never has occurred to her that her way of loving us might have served her better than it served us." So bitter is Kincaid, and so sure that she's been wronged, that she only allots a certain amount of time and reflection in "My Brother" to the ostensible subject of her book. Her brother Devon was a Rastafarian ne'er-do-well whom she barely knew before he became ill with AIDS, a man who loved women, loved music and loved drugs, and who died without ever recognizing his own worth and potential.

"He was not meant to be silent," Kincaid protests. "He was a brilliant boy, a brilliant man. Locked up in him was someone who would have spoken to the world in an important way ... But he was not even remotely aware of such a person inside him." None of Kincaid's family is able to match her for perception, and she admits several times that what they find most irritating and unforgivable about her is that she never forgets a thing. She is a writer, after all. "The phantasm in my brother will never be, and all the other things that he might have been in his life have died; but inside his body a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems able to satisfy or stop."

This is not an "AIDS" book any more than it's a standard or straightforward attempt on Kincaid's part to render her brother's life and death. "Who is he?" I kept asking myself. "How does he feel about himself, and what has he ever wanted?" At his funeral, when the minister preaches to her about the afterlife, she remarks that "I did not like that at all ... I did not want to be with any of these people in another world. I had had enough of them in this one; they mean everything to me and they mean nothing, and even so, I do not really know what I mean when I say this." Which is why Kincaid keeps writing about them, undoubtedly -- to find out, or find out more. The only question that remains is how much longer she can mine this particular pit.
SALON | Oct. 9, 1997

Peter Kurth is a writer and biographer who lives in Burlington, Vt.