As an English teacher, I often have to remind my students that you don’t have to like a book for its message to be important. March’s book had me listening to my own advice. I really struggled writing this review. Yet, I think the tension that I felt while writing this blog is the entire point of reading this book.
Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy was my beach read for spring break, and I couldn’t help but struggle with her disgust toward the idols of American culture just as I was trying to enjoy one. After all, the beach is meant to be a place of relaxation, not intellectual challenge. However, I was struck with Kincaid’s insistence that America’s protection of its sacred experiences is a reaction to our ultimate destruction of them. Conveniently, the beach provided a set of perfect illustrations of this very concept:
A young woman screams at a jellyfish after running into its tentacles, complaining that the beach would be such a nice place without them.
A family simultaneously films and chases away a blue heron that was exploring too closely to their camp.
I look up boat tours to “view dolphins in the wild!” on a boat that is “completely air-conditioned and heated with a fully stocked bar.”
As someone who is practically allergic to the beach (read: Irish complexion), I understand the importance of human innovation and comfort. Sunscreen and those cheap plastic umbrellas are the only way that I can survive the beach. Yet, I think Kincaid’s criticisms hold within them a difficult truth. By wanting to improve upon an experience (i.e. no ouchy jellyfish stings), we risk destroying the very experience itself (i.e. eliminating sea life). Civilized, carefully planned, and picture perfect, our experiences exist to be preserved, not lived.
Lucy is a book that thrives on calling out this constant tension. Just as Kinkaid settles into beautiful prose, so she also forces her character into an abrupt shift in tone, destroying the thing she had just described as beautiful. Often, the things that Lucy destroys are things that I happen to hold very dear: fresh fallen snow, the first bloom of flowers in spring, and even falling in love. Yet, it is Lucy’s constant questioning of these things that revealed my own feelings of ownership over them. Things that didn’t actually belong to me, I felt like should. Eventually, I realized that much of what I didn’t like about the book was that it challenged me to have an experience that I had not sanitized in order to make it my own.
Lucy
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American writer who first arrived in the U.S. after being sent to New York by her mother to be an au pair in order to help provide for her family. Having established herself as an intelligent girl in her hometown, Kincaid had performed at the top of her class before being withdrawn and forced to move to New York. Kincaid saw her mother’s choice as one which placed higher value on the lives of her three younger brothers (all of whom would be expected to finish school and pursue higher education). Kincaid reacted by cutting off ties completely with her family after arriving in New York. Eventually, Kincaid would not only become a successful writer, but also a professor of African American Studies at Harvard, a position she still holds today.
In many ways, Lucy is an autobiographical novel about Kincaid’s transition to life in America. Just like Kincaid, Lucy leaves the West Indies to take up a position as an au pair, leaving behind her mother, step-father, and three younger brothers. Lucy’s relationship with her family also mirrors Kincaid’s, particularly her disdain toward her mother. Written in the first person, we vividly see everything through Lucy’s straightforward point of view. Yet, this perspective also means that we see her struggle to process the conflict between her homesickness and contempt toward her family in a very human, and thus disorganized, way. Often, Lucy is unwilling to acknowledge her feelings and almost never connects her actions to her emotions. This conflict makes it difficult for us, as the reader, to decide whether Lucy is acting on her own or in reaction to some unprocessed emotion. Her frequent moments of biting anger paired with an almost otherwise complete passivity, make her an incredibly realistic figure, but also a difficult one to define.
Inside the complexity of Lucy’s character, Kincaid constructs a critique of our post-colonial world. Lucy’s struggle to form meaningful relationships throughout the book made me think about the tension we create when we try to interact with people who are different than us while also expecting them to conform to our own cultural narrative. Our desire to understand the nice things about a place or a culture or an experience is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. For example, traveling to new places and wanting to “live like the locals,” shows a very positive human desire to learn about others and expand our own perspective. Yet, upon arrival, our obsession with filling our Instagram feeds full of pictures that signal authenticity (wearing cultural clothing, posing with local children, etc.) is exactly the damaging colonial mindset that Kincaid critiques.
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