Jamaica Kincaid
Photo by Ann Lebowitz
“Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. In time, she put herself on another path.
She went from the New School in Manhattan to Franconia College in New Hampshire, and worked at Magnum Photos and at the teen magazine Ingenue. In the mid-’70s, she began to write for The Village Voice, but it was at The New Yorker, where she became a regular columnist for the Talk of the Town section, that everything changed for her”.
- Read more plus an interview with Jamaica Kincaid from the Spring 2022 edition of The Paris Review.
Writing by Jamaica Kincaid we loved in The New Yorker:
Homemaking, October 16 1995
“Early one morning in January four years ago, I was running with my friend Meg and we came to a point in our conversation where we had to stop running, because of the strong feelings brought to the surface by discussing our children in particular (she has three, I have two) and the world in general (between the two of us, there is only one of those). Suddenly, I saw the house I now live in looming out of the newborn day. I was standing perhaps a hundred yards from it, but it seemed far away, shrouded by a forest of those insignificant evergreens (it seemed a forest then, but in reality they are very few) and, of course, shrouded by unfamiliarity, because I had never been inside it; I had seen this house only from the road and longed to live in it.”
The Disturbances of the Garden, October 31 2020
“I am meaning to show how I came to seek the garden in corners of the world far away from where I make one, and I have got lost in thickets of words. It was after I started to put seeds in the ground and noticed that sometimes nothing happened that I reached for a book. The first ones I read were about how to make a perennial border or how to get the best out of annuals—the kind of books for people who want to increase the value of their home—but these books were so boring.”
Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, June 25 1978
“this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming”
