My brother

⊳ My brother
⊳ Jamaica Kincaid
⊳ 1997

It all begins with the birth. The narrator leaves her home at the age of 13 when her brother, Devon, is born. 33 years later she’s forced to return to her birth home at Antigua. Her brother is dying. And when you’re dying of AIDS at Antigua there’s no hope of survival. The narrator tries to reconnect with her roots, but it doesn’t resonate. She doesn’t feel anything, except hate. The narrator hates her mother, and the feeling is mutual. It is a kind of silent, suffocating, slowly consuming hate. And that’s about what we get from “My brother”. Hate, bitterness, disdain.

I don’t mean that Kincaid is obliged to celebrate her heritage or home country just because she’s born there or that she has a responsibility to represent her first country in a positive way. But I would lie if I didn’t say these parts of the story is quite inaccessible to me. The fully negative portrayal of Antigua is hard for me to relate to. Maybe I didn’t read the novel from the right perspective. Maybe it is something I will never be able to understand with my experiences and from my point of view.

What I do find interesting is when Kincaid touches on how her brother may have been affected by keeping an important part of himself secret. I would’ve loved to hear more about her thoughts on how someone is affected by their secret in such a highly toxic masculine environment, especially someone who’s hiding their deviant sexuality in a quite aggressive masculine way.

Even though I had a hard time finding the keys to understand this novel I want to share a thought regarding the narrator’s relationship to her home and family. Being forced to leave her home and losing touch with her family as well as leaving her heritage and country behind her to create a new life with a chosen family is a theme quite common in lgtqi+ literature. This theme can – and has to – be covered from many angles, as loss, longing and sorrow are universal emotions intersecting many aspects of human life in a post-industrial, globalized world. Maybe that is the key to Kincaid’s novel? Maybe that is how I should have read this novel to appreciate it more?

Makz Bjuggfält