Volume 49, Number 13 · August 15, 2002
Having the Last Laugh
By Darryl Pinckney
Mr. Potter
by Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 195 pp., $20.00
In A Small Place (1988), her memoir of the island of Antigua where she was born in 1949, Jamaica Kincaid gives a tour of the targets of her cultural bitterness and colonial resentments. In so doing, she may be telling us where the high, aggressive finish of her prose style stems from. She grew up among the powerless and was determined not to see herself that way. The sugar plantations were long gone and history was looking the other way by the time she came along. Yet her tone suggests that she works under the suspicion that her unyielding voice could be extinguished at any time, simply because, according to the history of where she grew up, she was never meant to have this, a survivor's voice.
Review, 4106 words
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