"I would never become a mother, but that would not be the same as never bearing children. I would bear children, but I would never be a mother to them. I would bear them in abundance; they would emerge from my head, my armpits, from between my legs...they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god...I would bathe them at noon in a water that came from myself, and I would eat them at night, swallowing them whole, all at once." States our narrator; Xuela courageously raises herself - growing up on the island of Dominica and living under colonial rule. We follow her closely as she moves from one traumatic job, and complex love affair, to the next.
It is Xuela's realization of certain power shifts and social paradigms which creates an increasingly dark, winding prose that propels off each and every page, invading the reader's own psyche. Kincaid is one of our most subversive writers, and The Autobiography of My Mother gets under your skin as it explores the unspeakable traumas in the black community which are still to this day globally ignored.
Cruel, poetic, and revealing —a deeply candid coming of age tale which reveals the profound, yet equally chilling, life of Xuela Claudette Richardson; who never had the chance to come to know her own mother —as she had died upon giving birth.
Our anti-hero’s entire life philosophy is shaped by the indifference she suffers from this incalculable loss. Xuela not only learns all of the skills she needs to survive on her own, at one point in time she organizes her own abortion. But the question comes to fester inside of us as well -how essential is the family dynamic, and how can a woman find herself outside of these traumas?