Jamaica Kincaid, a novel
An Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, and gardener. Jamaica Kincaid’s writing often asks questions about identity, home, colonialism, racism, class, and coming-of-age. In See Now and Then Kincaid write about a mixed-race couple in New England, and all the many layers of memory, musings, and knowings that happen between people. The writing itself takes a lyrical, stream-of-consciousness approach that weaves disparate ideas together.
…and across the way was the house in which old Mrs. McGovern had died and she had lived in it for many years before she became old, she had lived in her house, built in a neoclassical-something style that harkened back from another era, long ago, long before Mrs. McGovern had been born and then became a grown-up woman who married and lived with her husband in the Yellow House and made a garden of only peonies, big white ones that were streaked with a wine-dark red on the petals nearest the stamens, like an imagined night crossing an imagined day, so had been those peonies in Mrs. McGovern’s garden and she had grown other things but no one could remember what they were, only her peonies were committed to memory and when Mrs. McGovern had died and so therefore vanished from the face of the earth, Mrs. Sweet had dug up those peonies from that garden, “Festiva Maxima” was their name, and planted them in her own garden, a place Mr. Sweet and the beautiful Persephone and even the young Heracles hated.
By Jamaica Kincaid
- Look at the stream-of-consciousness approach that Kincaid takes. What effect does it have on the writing? When might you use a similar tool in your own work?
- What dose the garden reveal about Mrs.McGovern, the community as a whole, Mrs.Sweet and her family?
- Look at the descriptions of the flowers themselves… what do you notice? What is their tone?
- What other noticings and questions do you have?
GREEN & GROW 