My Brother

by Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.



My Brother is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Biography Memoir, LGBT, Read For School, School

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua (part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda). She lives in North Bennington, Vermont (in the United States), during the summers, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.

Reviews

[Raul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking back at my reading these past few months, a lot of the books I've read have dealt with death, illness, or grief, or all three, in some way. Upon reflection, the simple reason for this, even though a few books probably didn't get much thought when selected, is that I'm growing older and these realities are becoming more certain and there's some fear that I need to make sense of, and books have been known to help with that.

So to this book which is my sixth by Kincaid, and it has everything I love about her: pure honesty, the beauty of prose, a cadence accomplished by repetition, and a level of awareness of both self and that around self. It's still a tough read. Jamaica Kincaid's younger brother, Devon, died of AIDS and this book is a result of contemplating the grief and pain that loss brought.

Kincaid was already established and acclaimed when she had published this and before her brother died. As a child she had been a brilliant student but had been forced to abandon her studies and immigrate to the U.S.A. and work as an au-pair to help earn money for her family back in Antigua. Her ascension to the echelons of contemporary literature, where she's rightfully placed, resembles the fantastical and miraculous, and given the circumstances she must have endured, it is. So when she has to return home because of her brother's illness the gulf in their situations (Kincaid middle-class, American, accomplished, comfortable with a nice family of her own; Devon poor, fatally ill, suffering and dying, unaccomplished and unknown, without a family of his own and much to show for himself) confronts the circumstances she might have faced had she remained home and all the complicated emotions it brings, as well as the reality of her dying brother.

The complexity of human relationships, of situation, of life in general. Nothing is ever simple and Kincaid herself, nor her dead brother, nor her family, nor anyone for that matter, is simple. To turn all that grief and difficulty into something this beautiful is testament to her gift.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really struggled between 3 and 4 stars for this one! The first half was enjoyable and engaging, but the second half was so long, plodding and redundant that I ended up marking it down. Overall I’m happy I read it, but I don’t think Kincaid’s style is quite my cup of tea!

[Gretchen Rubin]

I sense a Jamaica Kincaid kick coming on. A short, compelling memoir of her brother and her family, and a meditation on how and why their lives turned out so differently.

[Marc Manley · Rating 1 out of 5]

To me, Jamaica Kincaid is a contrived. Her whole identity is duplicious and incoherent. I also find her to be a cultural elitist that attempts to pass herself off as the victim of Antigua in general, and her mother in specific. In the end, her brother's death is not about him, but is about her. In fact, the entire book is one long prattle about herself mumbling, "me, me, me". I fail to see her attraction, at least in this volume, as her writing style is far from engaging; more akin to nails on a chalk board. The sadest part, is I am left feeling little for her, at the death of her brother, or even for her mother, who has just lost her youngest child. I would certainly remove this from a "must read" list.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

after my third kincaid, i’m starting to wonder where her nobel prize is

[Johanna Lundin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boken handlar om Kincaids bror, hur han är döende och sedan dör. Men det är också en skildring av en familj, en dysfunktionell relation till det som är din grund och samtidigt det som drar dig ner i avgrunden. Stundvis repetitiv i sitt språk/beskrivning vilket gjorde att jag fick kämpa med läsningen sista tredjedelen.

[Andrew H · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memorable memoir -- honest and touching.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

(Sigh), compared to the fiction I've read by her, I think this book got a lot of praise because she was established already with two good books, and maybe, because its something readers could feel sympathetic towards. For me, I was into it at first, and then thought that even its 198 pages in big type dragged on too long. I still don't know her brother because she doesn't, she doesn't care--me neither, and I don't know the mother because she only chooses to speak about her when she pleases. I feel like this book was an issue that interested her and so she wrote about it because this type of non-fiction sells. For me, I would of liked her to focus on some of the thoughts she places at the very beginning and end of the piece which tend to be rich and not so journalese; the "this is only something a mind like mine would think about" part of it, for those who read it. And I'm not knocking clean prose, I like that this book wasn't jazzed or glittered up, but it lacked substance at certain areas too. She was just stating the facts at times, I wanted more, but maybe there wasn't much to give to begin with.

[Tricia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t believe that this is her best work. Kincaid writes about the life and death of her brother who was diagnosed with AIDS at a time when medication for this disease on an island with scarce resources, is non-existent. However, this book delves more into the complex relationships Kincaid has with her dying brother, her mother, and even with herself. But unfortunately it’s written like a slow-rolling boulder. Picking up stray particles along the way. There is also a great tug-of-war happening within herself on her feelings for her brother: she states more than once that she doesn’t love him, but puts herself into debt buying and shipping him medicine to keep him alive. Sadly, I feel this was a lost opportunity to write about her brother’s life (however seemingly wasted) and the cultural disadvantages that led to his contracting AIDS and the people who were willing to help him live as long as possible.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really honest memoir about her family and specifically her brother (closeted) dying of AIDS in the mid-'90s. It's rare to read about someone saying, repeatedly, that they hate their mother and don't really love their brother who is dying, but she makes it work. Not everyone has to be lovable to have a memoir written about them.

[Sarah (sarahanneisreading) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Adrienne Gilliam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could give this 6 stars I genuinely couldn't put it down. The rhythm of the book feels like you're walking a spiral path, it moves forwards and at the same time backwards all the while and it resonates with a very intense loneliness and almost survivor's guilt. There's a part where she talks about how when she remembers her brother has died it's like hearing it for the first time all over again and that's kind of what it's like to read this book because his death repeats as everything does in her memoir as it exists in both the past and in her present. This is definitely a book I will revisit many times in the future.

[Valentina Salvatierra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brutally sad, unflinching look at having someone close to you die from AIDS. Also very personal: Kincaid's brother, although close in terms of blood relation, wasn't especially close to her as an individual, because of their differing adult life trajectories. Kincaid uses this contrast very effectively, this gap between her brother's materially impoverished existence in Antigua and her own privileged first-world life in Vancouver. She uses it to question the nature of family, what makes you "love" your family members simply because they happen to share DNA and ancestry, and what that "love" can mean in the trying times of imminent death. She also uses her brother's illness to portray her relationship to his and her mother, her shortcomings and strengths. Although so personal, Kincaid's account also grasps for something universal, insofar as death is one of the few truly universal human experiences and here she is coming to grips with this particular instance of it.

[alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kincaid's memoire 'My Brother' recounts the death of her brother from AIDS with so many complex layers and a rather phenomenal detachment that is easier to understand when you read it. Reading this journey of her memories was painful in an unapologetic way that can only leave one speechless.

[Ceallaigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What I am writing now is not a journal; a journal is a daily account, an immediate account of what occurs during a certain time. For a long time after my brother died I could not write about him, I could not think about him in a purposeful way. It was really a short time between the time that he became sick and the time he died, but that time became a world. To make a world takes an eternity, and eternity is the refuge of the lost, the refuge for all things that will never be or things that have been but have lost their course and hope to recede with some grace, and even I believe this to be true, though I also know that I have no real way of measuring it. His death was imminent and we were all anticipating it, including him, but we never gave any thought to the fact that this was true for all of us, too: our death was imminent, only we were not anticipating it . . . yet.”

TITLE—My Brother
AUTHOR—Jamaica Kincaid
PUBLISHED—1997
PUBLISHER—Farrar, Straus and Giroux

GENRE—literary nonfiction memoirish
SETTING—Antigua & Vermont
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—an elegy for a life lost to more than just death, motherhood, family relationships—esp birth family vs chosen family, the nature of familial love, AIDS, Antigua, the legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean, survivor’s guilt, secrets, identity & purpose, the choices available to us & the choices we make, queerness, grief, funerals & cemeteries, how we honor ourselves by honoring our dead, the color blue, a survivor’s homage—a sibling’s homage, one of the best books about death I’ve ever read

“His face was sharp like a carving, like an image embossed on an emblem, a face full of deep suffering, beyond regrets or pleadings for a second chance. It was the face of someone who had lived in extremes, sometimes a saint, sometimes a sinner.”

Summary:
"Brilliant writing and thinking… My Brother... is about life and death. It's about how economic and emotional poverty corrode the body and the soul." — MEREDITH MARAN, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“This is another chapter in Kincaid's quest to come to terms with the way politics and history, those two generalities, shape human assumptions in the most specific and idiosyncratic manner." — BETSY WILLEFORD, The Kansas City Star

“…transforming tortured memory into emancipating elegy." — NICK CHARLES, People

"If it is impossible to go home again, it is equally impossible for most of us to stay away… Kincaid renders that ambivalence (the tension between revulsion and attachment) so precisely, she makes it seem almost bearable.” — JOAN SMITH, San Francisco Examiner

My thoughts:
Reading a Jamaica Kincaid book is like watching someone do an autopsy on your soul, exposing your deepest secrets and the root of your most visceral emotions, and this book has exemplified that experience for me the most of any of her books so far.

I was *stunned* by this book. I had trouble putting it down. In fact, I only managed to put it down twice and each time unintentionally right before the two biggest bombshells of the book. I couldn’t believe the degree to which I related to Kincaid’s experience of her relationships to her family members (both birth and chosen), her coping with contradictory feelings of compassion & anger, love & hatred, understanding & resentment, and even her relationship to her own sexuality.

Uncensored, unfiltered, brutally honest and transparent, this book excelled in emphasizing the contradictions between the things Kincaid was doing to help her brother, her choosing to help, to be there with him and their mother, while they all went through her brother’s decline together, and the terrible thoughts and feelings she was having in spite of her decisions. She was so far from being a hero, probably further even in her own mind than in the eyes of her family, and yet there she was—back home among a family that in many ways wasn’t a family to her.

Is it possible to turn your back while still facing forward? Humans are complicated. Life is complicated. Family is complicated. Love is complicated. And this book more than any other I’ve read to date has managed to translate the complexity of all of those contradictions into an artform that reminds us why art is so essential to appreciating our existence as humans in a world we only pretend to understand.

Not to mention the writing style! The syntax! The tone and cadence—the organic, emotional flow of her reflections. The vivid use of color, the parenthetical clarifications, the repetition of “I don’t know. I don’t know.” all conveying such a desperate desire to be as clear and honest as possible in a passionate attempt at excavating not just her feelings but the way such a world could cause such a complex hurricane of mercilessly contradictory emotions and reactions. And the ending! Whew. I already want to reread it.

I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in taking a deep dive into exploring the themes of death, family relationships, and grief. This book is best read after reading her other books in order of publication leading up to this one. It deeply enhances the whole experience.

Final note: It’s still wild to me that the book I thought I was going to struggle with the most of hers ended up being my favorite and the most resonant of all of Kincaid’s books that I’ve read so far. This readalong of all of her works is turning out to be one of the best and most important reading experiences of my life. 🫶🏻

“I became a writer out of desperation, so when I first heard my brother was dying I was familiar with the act of saving myself: I would write about him. I would write about his dying. When I was young, younger than I am now, I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life. When I heard about my brother's illness and his dying, I knew, instinctively, that to understand it, or to make an attempt at understanding his dying, and not to die with him, I would write about it… And so I wrote about the dead for the dead…”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Season: November—Samhain & All Souls’ Day

CW // *graphic*: AIDS, terminal disease, grief (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
- everything else by Jamaica Kincaid—best read in order of publication
- WHEN WE WERE BIRDS by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
- THE STAR SIDE OF BIRD HILL by Naomi Jackson
- KRIK? KRAK! by Edwidge Danticat
- HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK by Zora Neale Hurston

Favorite Quotes—
“And when I picked up that book again, The Education of a Gardener, I looked at my brother, for he was a gardener also, and I wondered, if his life had taken a certain turn, if he had caused his life to take a different turn, might he have written a book with such a title?”

“I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are, why they invent a self that bears no resemblance to who they really are, why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.”

“The plantsman in my brother will never be, and all the other things that he might have been in his life have died; but inside his body a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems able to satisfy and stop.”

“I am so vulnerable to my family's needs and infuence that from time to time I remove myself from them. I do not write to them. I do not pay visits to them. I do not lie, I do not deny, I only remove myself. When I heard that my brother was sick and dying, the usual deliberation I allow myself whenever my family's needs come up—should I let this affect me or not?—vanished. I felt I was falling into a deep hole, but I did not try to stop myself from falling. I felt myself being swallowed up in a large vapor of sadness, but I did not try to escape it.”

“If I should bring it up, she says it is an old story ("e' a' ole time 'tory; you lub ole-time 'tory, me a warn you"), and for my mother an old story is a bad story, a story with an ending she does not like.”

“This part of Antigua was considered the country then, and I was terrified of the darkness, it was so unrelieved by light even from other houses; also from the house where I lived I could see the St. John's city graveyard, and it seemed to me that almost every day I could see people attending a funeral. It was then I decided that only people in Antigua died, that people living in other places did not die and as soon as I could, I would move somewhere else, to those places where the people living there did not die.”

“It was for my own peace of mind that I said it; I wanted it to be real to me, that my brother was suffering and dying from AIDS; hearing that he was sick and dying was new to me and so every opportunity I got I would say it out loud: "My brother is sick from and dying of AIDS."”

“[Dr. Ramsey] said that people who are not HIV-positive give up too soon on the people who are, but that he tries to keep everybody alive, because you never know when a cure might come along. He said that—you never knew when a cure might come along—and I could not tell if, in that, he was asserting native Antiguan foolishness or faith in science. Antigua is a place in which faith undermines the concrete.”

“In a place like Antigua, I suspect, the use of drugs is not about the dulling of pain in a useless life but about providing and extending pleasure.”

“Antiguans are not particularly homophobic so much as they are quick to disparage anyone or anything that is different from whom or what they think of as normal.”

“My own life, from a sexual standpoint, can be described as a monument to boring conventionality. And so perhaps because of this I have a great interest in other people's personal lives.”

“We are not an instinctively empathetic people; a circle of friends who love and support each other is not something I can recall from my childhood.”

“I used to do exactly this when I was a child: lie in bed with my feet resting on the windowsill and in the sun, because my feet then were always cold. I would read books then, and this whole scene of me lying in bed and reading books would drive my mother to fits of anger, for she was sure it meant I was doomed to a life of slothfulness, but as it turned out, I was only doomed to write books other people might read.”

“…but what I really meant was, no, I can't do what you are suggesting - take this strange, careless person into the hard-earned order of my life: my life of children and husband, and they love me and love me again, and I love them.”

“Whatever made me talk about him, whatever made me think of him, was not love, just something else, but not love; love being the thing I felt for my family, the one I have now, but not for him, or the people I am from, not love, but a powerful feeling all the same, only not love. My talk was full of pain, it was full of misery, it was full of anger, there was no peace to it, there was much sorrow, but there was no peace to it. How did I feel? I did not know how I felt. I was a combustion of feelings.”

“He was not meant to be silent. He was a brilliant boy, he was a brilliant man. Locked up inside him was someone who would have spoken to the world in an important way.”

“And I began again to wonder what his life must be like for him, and to wonder what my own life would have been like if I had not been so cold and ruthless in regard to my own family, acting only in favor of myself when I was a young woman.”

“When I was a child, I would hear her recount events that we both had witnessed and she would leave out small details; when I filled them in, she would look at me with wonder and pleasure and praise me for my extraordinary memory. This praise made an everlasting mark and nothing anyone could do made me lose this ability to remember, however selectively I remember. As I grew up, my mother came to hate this about me, because I would remember things that she wanted everybody to forget.”

“He lived in death. Perhaps everyone is living in death, I actually do believe that, but usually it can't be seen; in his case it was a death I could see.”

“I was thinking of my past and how it frightened me to think that I might have continued to live in a certain way, though, I am convinced, not for very long. I would have died at about his age, thirty-three years, or I would have gone insane.”

“We are all acquainted with death; each moment, each gesture, holds in it a set of events that can easily slide into realities that are unknown, unexpected, to the point of shock; we do not really expect these moments; they arrive and are resisted, denied, and then finally, inexorably, accepted…”

“For the magazine I wrote for all of my writing life so far was like the place in which I had grown up; it was beautiful, an ideal of some kind, but it had been made vulgar and ugly by the incredibly stupid people who had become attracted to it.”

“…I only wanted to be happy and happy and happy again, with all the emptiness and meaninglessness that such a state would entail.”

“But these words, "I'm sorry," which sometimes are said with a real depth of feeling, with true sincerity, sometimes just out of politeness, are such a good thing to hear if you are in need of hearing them, and just then I was in need of hearing those words, "I'm sorry," "I am so sorry.” I did not love my brother, I did not like my brother, I was only so sorry that he had died…”

“…the future never being now; only it actually comes, the future, later.”

“I was so tired of him being in this state, not alive, not dead, but constantly with his demands, in want, constantly with his necessities, weighing on my sympathy, at times preying on my sympathy, whichever way it fell, I was sick of him and wanted him to go away, and I didn't care if he got better and I didn't care if he died. That was just the way I felt, that was the only thing I felt just at that moment when he would not die and when he would not live; I only wanted him to do one or the other and then leave me alone.”

“I felt anger, my anger was everything to me, and in my anger lay many things, mostly made up of feelings I could not understand, feelings I might not ever understand, feelings that everyone who knows me understands with an understanding that I will never know, or that someone who has never met me at all would understand as if they had made up my feelings themselves.”

“…and that is one of the reasons to outlive all the people who can have anything to say about you, not letting them have the last word…”

“I did not get in her way, I was inside on the bed lying down, but in any case, I no longer got in her way, I had removed myself from getting in her way, I was in a position in my own life that did not allow for getting in my mother's way, she could not curse me, I no longer needed her.”

“I liked books, I liked reading books, I did not like anything else as much as I liked reading a book, a book of any kind.”

“I joined a group of people sitting in chairs waiting and waiting for the doctor, and we waited not in joy, not in anger, but more as if we were in a state of contemplation, as if we were seeing the whole panorama of life, from its ancient beginnings in the past to its inevitable end in some future, and we accepted it with indifference, for what else could we do? And this is the way people wait, people all over the world wait in this way, when they are powerless or poor, or both at the same time.”

“…in spite of all the people I had been close to who had died, I never believed in it, the very fact that they had died; I now know that I thought of them as being somewhere else, someplace that I now no longer visited, or had never visited and would never visit, for they were there and I was here and had chosen to be here and not to join them at all; they had not died, they were only someplace else.”

“I could not have become a writer while living among the people I knew best, I could not have become myself while living among the people I knew best—and I only knew them best because I was from them, of them, and so often felt I was them—and they were—are—the people who ought to have loved me best in the whole world, the people who should have made me feel that the love of people other than them was suspect.”

“And his life unfolded before me not like a map just found, or a piece of old paper just found, his life unfolded and there was everything to see and there was nothing to see; in his life there had been no flowering, his life was the opposite of that, a flowering, his life was like the bud that sets but, instead of opening into a flower, turns brown and falls off at your feet.”

“I shall never forget him because his life is the one I did not have, the life that, for reasons I hope shall never be too clear to me, I avoided or escaped.”

“Which Devon was he? All of them, I suppose; and which did he like best, and which one of his selves made him happiest? I cannot tell this, and perhaps neither could he.”

“It was because I had neglected my brother when he was two years old and instead read a book that my mother gathered up all the books I owned and put them on a pile on her stone heap, sprinkling them with kerosene and then setting them alight; I cannot remember the titles of these books, I cannot remember what they were about (they would have been novels, at fifteen I read only novels), but it would not be so strange if I spent the rest of my life trying to bring those books back to my life by writing them again and again until they were perfect, unscathed by fire of any kind.”

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first foray into Kincaid's wide body of work, and I certainly wasn't disappointed. Basically analyzes her, let's say, "complicated" relation with her family - her cruel mother, her feuding brothers, and in particular, her wild and horn-dog-y brother who, during the span covered by the memoir, is diagnosed with AIDS, undergoes a respite from death's door with the help of anti-retrovirals, and then dies from the disease's complications.

A number of cultural factors lend the book some greater weight than I think Kincaid wants to fully interrogate - her family is in Antigua, where, at the time of the memoir's "narrative," HIV and AIDS are little understood illnesses, and much maligned because of their association with MSM populations. This likewise becomes a conflict for Kincaid's brother, who wishes to disavow both the homophobic stigma attached to the disease and to avoid acknowledging his diagnosis in any regard. At the end of the memoir, after her brother's death, Kincaid discovers that, in fact, her brother did have sex with men and had kept this closeted from basically everyone who knew him in his life. Kincaid doesn't necessarily consider this secrecy or this identity deeply, and I think does her memoir a disservice by treating the revelation almost as a kind of "whodunnit" moment of disclosure. Her privileged position of knowing is underscored, though quietly, from the very beginning -- and of course, is unavoidable in the life writing genre, I suppose.

At other times, Kincaid is beautifully humane in considering her brother's suffering, and in recognizing the disease, despite her obvious distaste for her Antiguan family. Particularly wonderful was her attention to the permeability of the body, her distinction between the precarious but confident lives most people lead and the kind of living death that certain populations outside of the cultural or political center must reside in, emblematized here by the corporeal limbo of the patient with AIDS. I'd like to say things are different contemporarily, and certainly there have been leaps and bounds in the fight against the virus, but is there any other illness so misunderstood and so stigmatized even in supposedly "liberal" countries like the U.S.? I think a lot of people get off on believing that we've developed a kind of sophistication in relation to AIDS that "those people" in the Caribbean or in Africa can hardly fathom, but perhaps one thing this memoir serves to remind us of is that even in privileged positions or "educated" communities, there's a great deal of blindness, hypocrisy, and terror regarding the epidemic.

Oh me oh my! That was a depressing end to the review. Sorry, I've been reading a ton of books with HIV at their center this summer, and as a gay man born after the rise of the epidemic, this is a terror that has never not been peripheral in my life. So, yeah, pour a drink and cheer up, y'all?

[Sara Solomando · Rating 4 out of 5]

Se ha puesto de moda eso de “la familia elegida” y no es para menos cuando se conoce a algunos progenitores. Nuestras madres y nuestros padres (algunos, muchos, ausentes) están haciendo de oro a varias promociones de psicólogos.
No podemos elegir a nuestros padres y hermanos, pero podemos resistirnos a su influjo. Huir de él incluso. De esa fuga va, un poquito, “Mi hermano”. Un pequeño gran relato donde Jamaica Kincaid cuenta cómo fueron los últimos años de vida del más pequeño de sus hermanos, enfermo de VIH. Pero esa es solamente la excusa para hablar de las profundas huellas que deja el des-amor materno: “¡A su manera mi madre quiere a sus hijos, tengo que decirlo! Y eso es absolutamente cierto, nos quiere a su manera. Es su manera. Nunca se le ha ocurrido pensar que quizá su forma de querernos no sea lo mejor para nosotros. Nunca se le ha ocurrido pensar que quizá su forma de querernos la haya beneficiado más a ella que a nosotros. Quizá toda forma de amor es egoísta”.
“Mi hermano” es también un viaje por la pobreza, un recordatorio de cómo repercute en la vida de la gente y por qué no hay que romantizarla. Habla de sexualidad y homofobia (“Había muerto sin llegar a comprender o saber o permitir que el mundo en el que vivía supiera quién era; quién era él en realidad -no una seña elemental de identidad, sino toda la complejidad que abarcaba su ser-, era algo que no había sido capaz de expresar plenamente; su temor ante la posibilidad de que se rieran de él, su miedo enfrentarse con el desprecio de la gente a la que mejor conocía lo abrumaban y no era capaz de vivir exponiendo abiertamente todo aquello que conformaba su ser”) , pero sobre todo habla de esas distancias que se van, nos vamos, imponiendo con los nuestros, para que dejen de dolernos, para que no nos hieran. Y de cómo a veces quienes deberían conocernos mejor, son aquellos que menos nos intuyen.
Y por supuesto es una reflexión profunda sobre la muerte, cómo vivimos mientras llega (La muerte nunca muere (…) sucede todos los días, aunque siempre que uno ve personas de duelo se comportan como si fuera una novedad, como si ese acontecimiento, morir, -que un ser amado muera-, no hubiera sucedido nunca antes; resulta algo tan inesperado, tan injusto, que es algo único para cada cual.”) y el poder curativo de la palabra: “cuando yo era joven, más joven de lo que soy ahora, empecé a escribir acerca de mi propia vida y me di cuenta de que ese acto me salvaba

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was kind of a weird introduction to Jamaica Kincaid. She was on my mental list of authors to try, so when I saw this book at a church book sale, I picked it up. It's very rambly; by the end of a sentence you often have no idea what or whom Kincaid was talking about at the beginning and have to backtrack. She also has no issue speaking ill of the dead, and of the living. It's a bitterly frank memoir about her brother who was dying (and eventually died) of AIDS, but mostly the book is about Kincaid's feelings toward her mother. I'd estimate the book is about 75% invective. I was expecting the book to be a little more about her brother (inferring from the title), but, as I suppose a grief memoir should be, it was primarily about the author herself and her anger at her family (or as she puts it, "the people I am from," as she reserves the word "family" for her then husband and her children).

The two moments that moved me the most were these: 1) when Kincaid meets a woman from home (Antigua) at a book signing and, for the first time, feels able to talk about her brother's death; and 2) her description of her brother's dead body.

I found it interesting that she rarely referred to other people by their names, instead referring to them by their relationship to her. She has three brothers, and goes to lengths not to refer to them by name. She is not hiding their names from us, as she does name them each at least once in the book, but she does prefer to call them "my brother who ___" most of the time. Kincaid often passes possession of her mother to her brothers, referring to her mother as "his mother," explaining that she was not on speaking terms with her mother at the time. She also has complex workarounds for referring to her birth father and her step-father.

At the time she wrote this book, she was married to Allen Shawn, son of Kincaid's mentor William Shawn (and, more interestingly to me, brother of Wallace Shawn who played Vizzini in The Princess Bride and Grand Nagus Zek on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). She refers, at separate times, to her husband's father and to the man who reads what she writes. She names the latter "William Shawn," but does not reveal that the former and the latter are the same person.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Related interview with the always interesting Kincaid https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bo...

*

[Nikhil · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5/5.

Nigh unreadable. The text is a stream-of-consciousness rambling of Jamaica Kincaid trying to understand her relationships with her mother and half-siblings and trying to address her failings (is it grief? love? who knows, she certainly doesn't) surrounding the death of her youngest brother. The text is narrated in a circular style, and the author writes almost in free association. While this could work in a text, here, it doesn't.

The rambling, disassociated nature of the text eliminates any plot and makes it difficult to understand the basic timeline of events in the author's life. The text also sits at an awkward halfway point between personal memoir, discussion of AIDS symptoms, and assessment of her brother's life; it needed to do more in at least one of these directions. For example, the text is replete with Kincaid calling her mother cruel, hateful, spiteful, etc., yet she provides few if any examples of her mother's cruelty and spends little time on her memories of her mother and how that changed after her brother's birth. The reader is only provided snippets of half-memories, snippets that, frankly, seem insufficient to justify the degree of animosity she and all her half-siblings feel towards their mother (i mean, seriously, what did this woman do?). It would not have been difficult for Kincaid, had she so wished, to flesh out more of her relationship as an adolescent with her mother (which is what engendered so many of these negative feelings) rather than just telling the reader repeatedly how awful her mother is.

I will likely try some of Kincaid's novels, given how much I enjoyed her essay A Small Place. Perhaps I will find them more to my liking.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Jamaica Kincaid’s writing and the exploration of her feelings about her brother - current and past - as he is now dying of AIDS. The book is almost a book of two halves and I enjoyed the first half immensely. The second half resonates with grief and the complex mix of feelings which go with losing someone who is a blood connection but with whom you have nothing in common. It is very evocative of the feelings of grief but I did find it repetitive and it dragged compared with the first half.

[Filipa Calado · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devastating... written in a breathless style that makes you think Kincaid stayed up all night then submitted the first draft that came out. The prose comes across as raw, unedited, yet masterfully arranged.

A memoir that recounts the writer grappling with her brother's death, touching on the AIDS crisis, family, and gay themes.

[k · Rating 5 out of 5]

memorable and very honest!!

“I noticed that the lemon tree my sick brother had planted was no longer there and I asked about it, and she said quite casually, Oh, we cut it down to make room for the addition. And this made me look at my feet immediately, involuntarily; it pained me to hear her say this, it pained me the way she said it, I felt ashamed. That lemon tree would have been one of the things left of his life. Nothing came from him; not work, not children, not love for someone else.”

[Navya]

hard to rate personal writing in terms of "stars." Read b/c of book club i may/may not attend
What I liked:
- interesting setting for a disease that I personally researched and learning about the social factors/attitudes associated with HIV/AIDS in a different time/place than the setting I worked in
- certain meditations on family/writing/society/death

What I didn't like:
- a lot of the prose, style wise
- length of the book (could have been 30-35% shorter)
- a lot of the subject matter (felt like tangents that didn't do much to increase my appreciation of the book)

[jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don't know if this book would've hit so hard if i wasn't already having lots of thoughts about the nature of death and dying, but goddamn did it hit. it's vivid, poignant, and so breathtakingly honest. an uncomfortable read, but i think it's going to stay with me for a long time.

[Ann-Cathrine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um die Autorin zu zitieren: "What to do?" aber eher "what to say", endlich fertig mit dem Ding. Ja liet sich relativ schnell ne, aber gottseidank weil girl ich hätte das nicht länger ausgehalten

+ wir haben beide mommy issues und es ist teilweise echt heftiger als die Beschreibung der Krankheit des Bruders
+ illness as metaphor, ne?
+ ihr Schreibstil ist echt fließend und liest sich gut

- Sätze, die über Seiten gehen
- nach der Hälfte wirds sau zäh und langweilig
- weil sie sich aus was für immer auch einen Grund ständig wiederholt, könnte man teilweise SEITEN überspringen aber whatever es ist ne Metapher ne

[gyanve · Rating 3 out of 5]

undeniably meaningful
but the repetition throughout somehow managed to throw me off
i can understand it was for a purpose, but the second half of the book just felt a little over the place and once again repetitive
however, the style of writing is beautiful

[Kimberlee Howley · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful book. I felt trapped inside a grieving mind, trying to weave my way out with the writer. Every so often Kincaid drops a blunt, unforgettable detail about her family (her mother). Those facts stand out against haunting repeated visual details. Read this if you know or are interested in complicated family dynamics and grief.

[Marieinsweden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Min första Kincaid. Självbiografisk.

[Carina]

bawled