well, achieving the "mark" she desires in the process of development and self- invention, a mark signifying "the beginning of living, real living," on her own premises (25).
Neither Antigua nor New York City are named in the novel. Kincaid said in an inter- view: "It is New York, but it could be anywhere. I didn't want to specify because I didn't want any preconceptions about the place. She doesn't even name the island she comes from" ( Perry508). The locations are named here for ease of reference, and because they can be indirectly induced from the text.
See Helen Tiffin for a useful discussion of recitation, colonial repression, and the postcolonial "tongue." Tiffin points out that "the gap between the lived colonial or post- colonial experience and the imported/imposed world of the Anglo-written has often been referred to by Commonwealth post-colonial writers and critics as "the daffodil gap'" (920n7).
In interviews with Selwyn Cudjoe and others, Kincaid mentions that she herself studied photography at the New York School for Social Research (215). Her discussion with Cudjoe of light and truth might almost be a photographer's aesthetic. The blinding light of Antigua, illuminating but also "hellish," influenced her early "obsession" with the idea of one truth: "I think that at some point I became obsessed with things being not that unclear, that things could not just vanish, that there could be some light that would show the reality of a thing, that this was false and this was right" (231).
Susan Sontag suggests that the family photographs and tourist photographs both give people the illusion of possessing a "past that is unreal" (8). The family constructs "a portrait-chronicle of itself--a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connected- ness," and the tourist converts "experience into an image, a souvenir" (8).
Kincaid writes from somewhere between the "I" of Antigua and the "you" of North America. Although she explains that she is "incapable of the consciousness of the tourist," she also cannot "claim" to be in "the position of the natives." It is her very in-betweenness that releases her voice. "If I had stayed in Antigua," she explains, "if I had stayed the native, I believe I would not have been able to write" ( Muirhead40).
In an interview with Moira Ferguson, Kincaid described the intimate relation be- tween her photography and her first writing. At a time when she thought she would become a photographer, she used to write down everything about a photograph before taking it, including what she wanted it to feel like. Then referring to these notes, she would snap the picture (163).
Kincaid has described her own reactions to Gaugin by saying that she doesn't find it easy to say that she identifies with him, but that when she read one of his journals The Intimate Journal of Paul Gaugin, she "found it a great comfort" because Gaugin was very selfish and very determined and he wasn't afraid to use "someone's negative view of his work. He wore it as a badge. I rather admire that" ( Vorda103). Elsewhere she calls Gaugin Journal "inspiring" and a "recent influence." "You know he's another dissenter rebel" ( Muirhead47).
Allan Vorda asked Kincaid whether she would "apply Lucifer's comment from Para- dise Lost that it's 'Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n' to Antigua's colonial situa- tion." She answered, "Yes, . . . It's better to be dead than live like this. It's better to risk dying than to live as a slave" (94).
Ferguson points out that the red, white, and blue of the book, its pages, and ink
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Publication Information: Book Title: The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving out a Niche. Contributors: Katherine B. Payant - editor, Toby Rose - editor. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1999. Page Number: 69.
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