The Autobiography of My Mother
What I kept thinking about while reading The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid was Sinéad O’Connor’s blockbuster album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. It’s a long and convoluted album name — I once had a dubbed tape of the album and I wish I remembered if the friend who gave it to me was even able to fit the whole title on the cassette cover’s spine. But I feel like it sums up this novel.
Protagonist Xuela is motherless in Dominica; the book opens like this: “My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my while life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind.” There are numerous references to things from a colonizer’s world (a plate depicting the English countryside and viewed as “heaven,” Irish linen, the English language...). In fact, one could argue that the novel is about Xuela’s discovery of how the white world “works” via conquering and then a subsequent and perhaps subtle rejection of it and all its imports, including her father.
Or maybe not. Mostly, I found it a weighty reflection on how one might grapple with figuring out what they want (physically, emotionally) — and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not they can get it:
“To want what you will never have and to know too late that you will never have it is a life overwhelmed with sadness.”
“I believed that I would die, and perhaps because I no longer had a future I began to want one very much.”
“The present is always perfect. No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I live. The future I never long for, it will come or it will not; one day it will not.”
It’s more complex than that other musical adage: You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Xuela — who closes out the novel at age 70 — is acutely aware of that. No, it’s something more. By recognizing *why* we want something, are we better equipped for acceptance of what we’ve been given?
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