Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body.

Moira Ferguson. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994. 206 pp. $16.95.

Moira Ferguson's book Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body offers an energized exploration of the concept of British colonialism in Antigua in the works of Jamaica Kincaid. It does so through the assumption that this theme works in part through deflection and indirection, finding its most dramatic manifestation in the mother-daughter relationship: "Kincaid's female protagonists and their biological mother are crucially formative yet always mediated by intimations of life as colonized subjects." Implicit in this formulation is the notion that in Annie John, for example, the maternal role is a disguised transmutation of a dominating imperialistic power, which explains why Annie's need for personal independence is so accentuated. Ferguson thinks about literature, and writes about it, in emphatically post-structural terms: "Kincaid's colonial and postcolonial texts, then, are indelibly marked by opposition to the hegemonic project. In that sense, Kincaid is a voice-giver, inviting us to read against the grain, exposing the suppression of heterogeneous utterances." By way of explanation, Ferguson goes on to specify that "Kincaid's resistance to illicit or corrupt authority is a form of nonviolent decolonization that complements a post-colonial agency."

Ferguson's focus and methodology are decidedly political, not literary, and they have their most efficacious application in non-fiction works that lend themselves to social disputation, especially "Ovando" and A Small Place. The chapter on "Ovando," an experimental story originally published in Conjunctions, offers an extremely valuable historical overview of the career of Fray Nicolas de Ovando, who ruled Hispaniola from 1502 to 1508 with extraordinary barbarity. Ferguson is convincing in arguing that, as "a subaltern text, 'Ovando' is a combination of hardcore political history, a polemic against colonialism and the displacement of Amerindian people, a supernatural tale, and an oblique commentary on mother-daughter bonding." She is similarly insightful and informative about A Small Place, Kincaid's jeremiad against the abuses of vestigial colonialism in the form of white tourism in the independent nation of Antigua. Ferguson again provides a valuable historical context from which to view the era of British domination of Antiguan culture and the corruption and incompetence of the government since independence in 1967. Her formulation of the central thrust of Kincaid's essay is that "tourism is a modern version of colonialism; it is domination's new, lucrative face." From this perspective, virtualiy every aspect of residual British influence is pronounced corrupt, even the schools and libraries and hospitals that were left behind, all of which are in some dimension malevolent institutions, intent on subjugating and diminishing the indigenous people of color. By the end of the chapter, Ferguson points out that the inescapable implication of this argument is that Native Antiguans, freed from colonial oppression, are now unshackled and empowered to exercise human rights and political dominion, creating a nation for their own benefit and fulfillment.

If Ferguson's political verve and historical knowledge serve her well in these two chapters, it leaves her vulnerable and almost embarrassingly inept in the chapters on works of fiction, where there are problems ranging from simple errors of fact to gross distortions of emphasis, making Annie John, for example, into a philippic on colonial power rather than a series of stories on the growth and incipient independence of a young girl. Ferguson insists on reading Annie's mother as an "imperial presence," an external force that "protects and indoctrinates" and inspires the girl's rejection of what Ferguson regards as "colonial domination." She refers to the book as a "novel," ignoring the fact that all eight of the episodes in it appeared in The New Yorker as formal "stories" and that they were altered to create what is decidedly a short-story cycle. Nor does it occur to Ferguson to read the stories in both versions, even though there is much to be learned in the process about the very themes she is exploring. Ferguson is simply wrong, factually, in thinking that Annie has three brothers, that she resents the favoritism her parents show to her brothers (Annie is an only child), and that her father turns out to be a stepfather. Ferguson here is imposing biographical details onto a fictional text. On an interpretive level, her insistence that the people and artifacts within the stories are political "symbols" constituting a revolutionary allegory is simply unconvincing, a distortion born of her own thesis and not the data of the stories themselves. Obsessed with her thesis, Ferguson misses much about the book, including the implications of retrospective narration (Annie tells the stories from an anterior prespective, thus achieving fictive reconciliation with the mother she rejects through the portrayal of her as loving and generous) and the psychological stages of Annie's growth and painful separation from family and homeland. Ferguson is quite right to emphasize the scene in which Annie ponders the meaning of Colum bus for her people, and to rage at the legacy of slavery and domination that followed in the wake of European exploration, but it is reductive to see Annie's struggle exclusively in political terms. Kincaid has drawn a touching, if subtle, portrait of a child's yearning for independence from a dominating mother, but not everything that is revealed is to Annie's benefit. The mother is often portrayed as being warm and loving, generous to a fault, and wise enough to realize her daughter's need for an independent identity. Ferguson's insistence on casting the mother as a symbolic colonial England forces her to miss the most important implications of this crucial relationship.

Ferguson's thesis works even less well in assessing Lucy, which takes place in New York, as a parallel "novel" (all of these stories were also published in The New Yorker) about colonial aggression. Here, Ferguson reads "Kincaid as Lucy," a simplistic biographical fallacy, and persists in seeing the relationship between Lucy and her employer Mariah in terms of global politics: "The vision of plowed fields illumines another basic troping of colonialism. It represents Mariah's ignorance of Lucy's history and the power of Lucy's historical memory." Not even the most mundane detail is literal, human, or psychological in Ferguson's reading: "Mariah's preoccupation with marshlands, with mud and viscosity, underscores her distance from moral purity." Mariah has her limitations, and her own assumption of superiority, but her problems are not expressed in her interest in the marsh, nor is she the emblem of "cultural imperialism." Ferguson finally argues that Lucy is not a person at all but the embodiment of "Antigua of 1967, a territory freeing itself from the colonizer, already tentatively entering an early postcolonial phase." Seeing the book in these terms may stir political zeal in some quarters, but it is a belittling reading of a much more rich and complex body of fiction than this approach can appreciate.

It is not surprising that the conclusion to this study is unnaturally brief, since the books discussed within have been considered from a patently limiting perspective. To her credit, Ferguson does not attempt to hide this fact, stating in summation that "Jamaica Kincaid's texts constitute a continuous and evolving narrative [ldots] of a plural, multivocal, precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial female subjectivity by a postcolonial writer." In this dimension, Ferguson's book is a consummate success, driving home this thesis on every page, demanding that every character, every event, every situation in Kincaid's fiction in some way emphasize or buttress an anticolonial polemic. The tragedy is that a critic as sagacious as Ferguson should limit the range of her insight to this confined scope, thus missing much of the humane and artistic richness of Jamaica Kincaid's marvelous fiction.