Jamaica Kincaid is one of the most significant Antiguan-American authors of the present day. Kincaid focuses heavily on the colonial project’s effect in all of her writings, a project from which her country has suffered much in the past (Samirah 124). This paper focuses on the evaluation of the significance of the ending section of Jamaica Kincaid’s work. The novel tells the story of a girl who left Antigua to work as an au pair for a white family in the United States (Samirah 124). It is about the titular heroine and how she results from double identities. Lucy is examined as a Caribbean foreigner/immigrant as well as a woman of color in the United States (Janelle and Raynor 35). Although both migrants and immigrants are people who move to another nation, immigrants differ from migrants in that they suffer more than simply physical displacement; their identities alter (Janelle and Raynor 35). They leave their home nation and attempt to blend into their new environment by trading one identity for another (Janelle and Raynor 35). Race, class, and gender are all factors that impact how people develop their identities.
Kincaid intertwines the immigrant experience and the Black experience of Lucy, forcing her into a realm of global Blackness in which she is identified by her Black racial identity rather than her ethnicity. According to Gary Holcomb, who explains the concept of sexual migration and other critics. As a result, Lucy is recognized not just as a Caribbean lady but also as a Black woman in America, forcing her to adopt two distinct identities (Janelle and Raynor 35). Hence, the name of the final segment might be seen as an author’s clue that the protagonist’s identity is split. Perhaps the novel parallels the author’s history and her second personality, which is the protagonist.
The author and the protagonist, Lucy, are enraged by everything that reminds them of the colonists, their birthplace, or their family. This rage is seen as a type of hatred in Lucy’s reactions to the colonists’ educational system, her nation, and any authority figure (Samirah 124). Lucy describes the few things she claims as her own in the face of her chosen exile are poverty and her history (Samirah 125). This statement occurs at a point in the novel when it is evident that Kincaid’s heroine has chosen a certain identity for herself: that of an artist living in the metropolis of New York City and a person who is unable to return home (Samirah 125). Although Lucy’s memories, rage, and despair tie her exile to colonial history and neocolonial alienation, I argue that the novel, like its protagonist, refuses to engage in now-familiar postcolonial storylines of cultural reconnection and homecoming.
Lucy, in fact, reads like a savage fight against the assumptions that underpin so many of the opposing tales of exile and displacement. The majority of such stories are well-known in their cultural nationalist guises (Samirah 127). They have been ingrained in both postcolonial and Caribbean literary canons, notably, that the alienating experience of exile inevitably leads to celebrations of return (Samirah 127). The significance of the ending section of Jamaica Kincaid’s work lies within this struggle for identity. It is aided by the writing technique of naming or renaming Lucy within the novel’s sections. The effectiveness stems from the symbolic division of the name as the whole novel, and its smaller portion shares the same title and points to the duality of shared identity. In addition, the name of the protagonist Lucy Josephine Potter and her birthday is drawn from the author’s given name (Elaine Potter Richardson), along with the autobiographical nature of the fiction. Consequently, it can be said that the idea of Lucy being a condensed version of the author’s personal identity struggle is elicited.
Works Cited
Almutairi, Samirah. “Postcolonial Reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy.” Arab World English Journal For Translation and Literary Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, 2018, pp. 124–129.
Martin, Janelle, and Sharon Raynor. “Double Identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy.” Explorations (2017): 35.