PUTTING MYSELF TOGETHER

A writer’s sharp opinions.

Kincaid gathers more than 50 pieces of nonfiction—essays, introductions, memoir, and an interview with Athol Fugard—from 1973 to 2020, that reveal recurring themes: writing and gardening, friendship and family, and, most prominently, racism and colonialism. In her native Antigua, Kincaid grew up in a “colonial situation” that incited her ongoing “state of rage, rage, and more rage.” In school, she was shown a map of England, laid out “gently, beautifully, delicately, a very special jewel” situated “on a bed of sky blue”; the nation, she was made to believe, represented the pinnacle of culture. She read 19th-century English authors who depicted a society nothing like her own: “We understood then—we were meant to understand then—that England was to be our source of myth and the source from which we got our sense of reality, our sense of what was meaningful, our sense of what was meaningless—and much about our own lives and much about the very idea of us headed that last list.” It’s no wonder that when Kincaid first went to England, she hated it and everything about it. “The reality of my life was conquests, subjugation, humiliation, enforced amnesia,” she writes. Many essays reflect on colonial oppression. She can neither forgive nor forget those who treated humans like commodities and drained the wealth of the countries they dominated. “Have you ever wondered,” she asks, “why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants?” In a different mood entirely are Kincaid’s essays on her friendship with Ian Frazier, her writing for the New Yorker, her love for her children, and, always, gardening, a source of unequaled joy. Henry Louis Gates Jr. provides an appreciative introduction.

A spirited miscellany.