Jamaica Kincaid’s “Putting Myself Together”

Spanning nearly fifty years of writing, Jamaica Kincaid’s latest book, “Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974—,” is a fascinating read, offering a blend of criticism, epistolary and hybrid forms. Its themes include history, family and American culture, but categorizing it in such neat terms is a disservice. What’s special about this collection is just how pleasantly it resists categorization, how deftly it razes rigidity and order. Much like flowers in a field, Kincaid’s nonfiction is so striking because of its wild harmonies. Each essay becomes more lovely when viewing one with the whole.

Perhaps the only structure to this book is that it’s arranged in chronological order, and so the collection starts with her essays from the 1970s. Barely four pages long, these essays are quick and energetic, with a razor-sharp focus on subjects ranging from Diana Ross to “Gone with the Wind.” In them, I recognized what all twenty-five-year-olds sound like when they first begin to write in a public-facing way.

Yet within that same decade, Kincaid’s distinct literary voice takes root. “Antigua Crossing: A Deep and Blue Passage on the Caribbean Sea” (1978), published in Rolling Stone, is a beautiful meditation on her grandmother, colonialism and the Caribbean Sea. Melding together history and lyricism, fiction and not-quite-fiction, Kincaid announces her style and an essential theme of her work: How colonial legacies continually wrap themselves around family, language and notions of femininity.

Jamaica Kincaid/Photo: Rob Woolmington

While other writers might not have strayed from the personal essay form, Kincaid pushes beyond it as she explores these major themes throughout her career. “Ovando” (1989) is a humorous modern-day apostrophe to the Spanish soldier who conquered and governed the West Indies. “Jamaica Kincaid’s New York” (1977) juxtaposes letters she’d written to her mother with how she really felt and thought when she first left home. A longer essay adopts the form of an election journal.

Notably, this collection also includes various forewords and introductions that Kincaid had written for other publications. Her introduction to the 1995 edition of “The Best American Essays” is rich in writerly insights and her foreword to the 2007 edition of Alexander Dumas’ “Georges” made me place a hold for it at the library.

Her most recent work centers on her gardening practice at her home in Vermont, continuing to lean on her vivid imagery and philosophical contemplation. Taken together, the essays in “Putting Myself Together” comprise a dazzling collection on the evolution of a writer’s voice, showing what can happen when you give your work the freedom to grow.

“Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974—”
By Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages