杰梅卡·金凯德

杰梅卡·金凯德（英语：Jamaica Kincaid，/kɪnˈkeɪd/；1949年5月25日—），原名伊莱恩·辛西娅·波特·理查森（Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson），安提瓜和巴布达作家，哈佛大学英文系常驻非洲和非裔美国人研究教授，被誉为当代西印度群岛最重要的作家，有着“来自加勒比海带刺的黑玫瑰”之称，乃至其作品被美国新锐批评家布鲁斯·罗宾斯（Bruce Robbins）称之“具有世界主义意义上重划文化资本疆界之重大意义”

她于1993年皈依犹太教。

生平

杰梅卡·金凯德的本名是爱琳娜·波特·里查德森，1949年出生在加勒比海英属殖民地安蒂瓜。9岁以前非常喜爱自己的母亲，因为三个弟弟陆续出生，她变得很偏心。牙买加曾经是一位非常聪明而且有天赋的孩子，可是她的母亲还是让她提前休了学，只因为她的家庭还有弟弟们需要大量开支。她开始懂得反抗母亲，与此同时她的继父也得了重病。她的母亲就把幼小的她送到了纽约去打临时工，要她帮助家里的日常开销和昂贵的药费。牙买加到了纽约后，非常努力的工作，不过她不要汇钱回家。

作品

《河底》（At the Bottom of the River）

《安妮·强的烈焰青春》（Annie John :A Novel）

《一处小地方》（A Small Place）

《我的母亲的自传》（The Autobiography of My Mother）

《露西》（Lucy: A Novel）

《我的兄弟》（My Brother）

《我的花园》（My Garden）

《说故事》（Talk Stories）

《波特先生》（Mr.Potter: A Novel）

Jamaica Kincaid (born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan–American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. Born in St. John's, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda, she lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence Emerita at Harvard University.

Biography

Kincaid was born on 25 May 1949 in St. John's, on Antigua. She grew up in relative poverty with her mother, Annie Richardson Drew, a literate, cultured woman and homemaker who also worked as an assistant to a local physician, and her stepfather, David Drew, a carpenter. She was very close to her mother until her three brothers were born in quick succession, starting when Kincaid was nine years old. After her brothers' births, she resented her mother, who thereafter focused primarily on the brothers' needs. Kincaid later recalled:

Our family money remained the same, but there were more people to feed and to clothe, and so everything got sort of shortened, not only material things but emotional things. The good emotional things, I got a short end of that. But then I got more of things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect.

In an interview for The New York Times, Kincaid said, "The way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me."

Kincaid received a British education, as Antigua did not gain independence from the United Kingdom until 1981. Kincaid attended the Princess Margaret School and the Antigua Girls' High School, and apprenticed as a seamstress. Although Kincaid was intelligent and frequently tested at the top of her class, her mother removed her from school at 16 to help support the family when her third brother was born, because her stepfather was ill and could no longer provide for the family. In 1966, when Kincaid was 16, her mother sent her to Scarsdale, an affluent suburb of New York City, to work as an au pair. After that, Kincaid refused to send money home; "she left no forwarding address and was cut off from her family until her return to Antigua 20 years later".

Family

In 1979, Kincaid married the composer and Bennington College professor Allen Shawn, son of longtime The New Yorker editor William Shawn and brother of playwright Wallace Shawn. They have two children: a son, Harold, a music producer and songwriter; and a daughter, Annie, who works in marketing. Kincaid and Shawn divorced in 2002.

Kincaid is a keen gardener who has written extensively on the subject.

She converted to Judaism in 1993 for family reasons, and was president of Congregation Beth El, Bennington's synagogue, in the 1990s.

Career overview

While working as an au pair, Kincaid enrolled in evening classes at a community college. After three years, she resigned from her job to attend Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship. She also attended the New School for Social Research, studying photography. She dropped out after a year and returned to New York, where she started writing for the teenage girls' magazine Ingénue, The Village Voice, and Ms. magazine. She got her first assignment at Ingenue by walking in off the street and proposing an interview with Gloria Steinem, which became "When I was Seventeen", her first published article. She changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973, when her writing was first published. Her friend and author Guy Trebay suggested the name from his "little satirical playlet". She first dismissed it as "too stupid", but adopted it a week later. She called the name change "a way for me to do things without being the same person who couldn't do them—the same person who had all these weights". She said that "Jamaica" is an English corruption of what Christopher Columbus called Xaymaca, the part of the world she comes from, and that "Kincaid" seemed to go well with "Jamaica". Her short fiction appeared in The Paris Review and in The New Yorker, where her 1990 novel Lucy was serialized.