Jamaica Kincaid is said to have described At the Bottom of the River (her first collection of stories) as a very “unangry, decent, civilized book . . . sort of this successful attempt by English people to make their version of a human being or their version of a person out of me,” and that she would “never write like that again." It would be interesting to know if she felt that way as each was being published individually, or if that suddenly dawned on her when she looked at the collection of them in Bottom of the River. I do believe a collection gives meaning to a writer’s work that may not be there when you look at each individual separate piece.
Unlike her, Kincaid’s critics have found much evidence of anger and rebellion against British colonialism in the collection, which some say is dramatized (played out by way of metaphor) in the mother-daughter relationships in the stories. Well, so much for the writer’s own view of his or her work, right?
If woman-centered is rebellion, then there is rebellion in the collection. The images and relationships of and between women dominate the stories. But arguably, the images are speculative, not conclusive about much. Individually, they are thought-provoking, gender-assertive at best. And while I certainly see that it’s possible to extract conclusions from the collective images, I find much of it elusive and ambiguous. The collection’s true beauty is (for me) not necessarily in its images of women / womanhood, but in the lyrical language and in the broader philosophical wisdom it presents.
Dominant images of women
From “Girl”:
A pointed interruption…
The piece is a series of warnings and advice for a girl on how to live and behave, particularly in the presence of men. It is written in one long punctuated sentence, which gives forceful, kind of breathless monotony to the warnings: “always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming…” For most of the piece, the tone is abusive and threatening. But then there is one moment, which arguably changes the tone and allows another level of interpretation. That moment is when the girl being addressed interrupts the speaker with this question: “but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?” Her question causes the speaker to remind her of the reason for the warning—"you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?"—and her reminder is laced with ridicule for the question the girl asks, but the interruption gives the reader pause to place this new logic alongside the one being presented by the admonisher, and the ridicule in her tone loses effect. Some may say it is undermined by it. And that moment of interruption is the lasting effect of the piece.
From “In the Night”:
Is this one pure folklore?
The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn’t a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on the way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin in a corner of a house made out of wood. It is a woman who is reasonable and admires honeybees in the hibiscus. It is a woman who, as a joke, brays like a donkey when he is thirsty.
And regardless of how you feel about same-sex marriages, I’m sure you can enjoy the magical realism and the humor in this:
Now I am a girl, but one day I will marry a woman—a red-skin woman with black bramblebush hair and brown eyes, who wears skirts that so big I can easily bury my head in them . . . Every day red-skin woman and I will eat bread and milk for breakfast, hide in bushes and throw hardened cow dung at people we don’t like . . . put on John Bull masks and frighten defenseless little children on their way home from school . . . This woman I would like to marry knows many things, but to me she will only tell about things that would never dream of making me cry; and every night, over and over, she will tell me something that begins, “Before you were born.” I will marry a woman like this, and every night, every night, I will be completely happy. From “Wingless”: Every girl’s dream? I shall grow up to be a tall, graceful, and altogether beautiful woman, and I shall impose on large numbers of people my will and also, for my own amusement, great pain. But now, I shall try to see clearly, I shall try to tell differences. I shall try to distinguish the subtle gradations of color in fine cloth, of fingernail length, of manners . . . I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle . . . I am not yet a woman with a terrible and unwanted burden. I am not yet a dog with a cruel and unloving master. I am not yet a tree growing on barren and bitter land. I am not yet the shape of darkness in a dungeon . . . I am primitive and wingless. From “Blackness”: A mother’s view of the perfect daughter? My child haunts the dwelling places of the useless-winged cormorants, so enamored is she of great beauty and ancestral history. She traces each thing from its meager happenstance beginnings in cool and slimy marsh, to its great glory and dominance of air or land or sea, to its odd remains entombed in mysterious alluviums. She loves the thing untouched by lore, she loves the thing that is not cultivated, and yet she loves the thing built up, bit carefully placed upon bit, its very beauty eclipsing the deed it is meant to commemorate. View from the bottom of the river The title story of the collection is the longest piece, and like the others, it raises questions about interpretation and meaning, and possibly about who (man, woman, young, old) can best interpret or find or give the true meaning of a given terrain--geographical or otherwise. At the beginning of the piece is the description of a mountainous, dangerous terrain, where only the bravest, surest, most deeply arched of human feet will venture. It is a terrain that awaits the eye, the hand, the foot that will give it meaning. Two questions arise: who will give it meaning, and what will that meaning be. The piece first presents a man who lies in his bed (as if) isolated in a small room, waiting. He is deemed unfit to interpret and give meaning to the terrain because he has no depth of insight—"he cannot conceive of the union of opposites, or, for that matter, their very existence, he cannot conceive of varying emotions, he cannot conceive of the chance invention that changes again and again and forever the great turbulence that is human history." This line underscores his impotence: “He sits in nothing, in nothing, in nothing.” Next up is another man who has a wife and child, and who seems to be gainfully occupied with his hands: “He sees before him himself, standing in sawdust, measuring a hole, just dug, in the ground, putting decorative grooves in a banister, erecting columns, carving the head of a cherub over a door…” But despite his ability to create and love, and participate (as opposed to the previous man who does not), he too is deemed incapable of giving meaning and interpretation to the landscape because he is uncertain, vain, and weighed down: “…he stands, forever, crossing and recrossing the threshold, his head lifted up, held aloft and stiff with vanity; then his eyes shift and he sees and he sees, and he is weighed down. First lifted up, then weighed down—always he is so.” Further along in the piece comes revelation—revelation about the terrain and the person who will give it meaning or interpretation. Guided by a woman--described as "naked with long black hair that stood out in a straight line away from her head, and her insteps were high as if she had been used to climbing high mountains. Her skin was the color of brown clay, and she looked like a statue, liquid and gleaming, just before it is to be put in a kiln"--the narrator makes a life changing discovery at the bottom of a river (The allegorical cave? The genesis? Ground zero?). That discovery is of a place or condition, where unquestionable truth, beauty, and purpose exist. It is a place where the sun and moon shine together uniformly on everything, a place where there are no divisions, and nothing in nature has been examined or numbered, and nothing has died. Upon seeing this place, the narrator declares, “I felt . . . I was not made up of flesh and blood and muscles and bone and tissue and cells and vital organs but was made up of my will, and over my will I had complete dominion . . . how bound up I know I am to all that is human endeavor, to all that is past and to all that shall be, to all that shall be lost and leave no trace. I claim these things then—mine—and now feel myself grow solid and complete, my name filling up my mouth.” Now it’s possible to determine that the person (the narrator) who discovers this indisputable truth about the terrain is female. The use of “I” which gives it an autobiographical feel certainly lends to that interpretation. And that would give the collection an overall complete feminist feel. To have one woman be the guide and another make the discovery of the answer to life's biggest riddles would serve to tie up some of the loose ends left by questioning, paired females in some of the other pieces. But I don’t necessarily see the use of “I” as conclusive in that sense. I feel the narrator is stronger when you look at the character. The narrator is someone who is willing to be open–minded, willing to follow a woman's lead, and someone who is unfettered by belief systems… That person could be male or female, in my view. Meaning and interpretation is ultimately up to the individual eye, isn’t it? Nevertheless, I liked the overall conclusion that there is an absolute truth to be found somewhere—an unquestionable truth. Whether that is the state of death, or the state of the devout, or some new to be imagined state, I won’t venture to speculate. But I did feel comforted by it. A Caribbean conclusion Some have pinpointed Antigua as the setting for the stories—not too hard to figure out why. Jamaica Kincaid was born there. But the setting could just as well be wherever in the Caribbean you’ll find or imagine women giving young girls advice on how to behave in front of men, wherever night-soil men come and go, walking on the damp ground in straw shoes, wherever you’ll find jablesse and people who walk through a door backward when they see a dead man standing under a tree, wherever women wet-dream about babies being born, wherever people fill houses with dreams and skeletons, and beautiful things. They can easily be seen as Caribbean stories about conquering evils or adversities—winglessness, oppressive voices—and about finding alternative ways to make sense of one’s dreams and aspirations. They present a certain reality that maintains the element of surrealism that Caribbean people are familiar with. The stories speak of the alternative worlds many Caribbean people create for survival. Those qualities, as well as the strong presence of women in the stories, make the collection an evergreen Caribbean gem. You can see and interpret for yourself. Be the first to comment, and I’ll send you a copy of the book. _________________ At the Bottom of the River, by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1983, 82 pp). _________________ Other posts on Jamaica Kincaid:
