Nine: Postcolonial Hauntings: Ghostly Presence in Jamaica Kincaid's the Autobiography of My Mother (original) (raw)

2018, Wagadu: a Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies

The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. This chapter explores the haunting or ghostly presence of both the living and the dead. The ghosts of slavery and colonialism haunt the character/s and the text; in retaliation, Xuela/Kincaid performs a “ghosting” by defying narrative conventions, by blurring the line between fiction, myth, biography, and autobiography. Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. A creolized subject (daughter of a Carib mother and a half Scot, half-African father), the novel’s protagonist, Xuela Claudette Richardson, embodies resistance, for she not only survives her mother’s death, but she also survives her father’s subsequent abandonment and several foster homes. Xuela’s mother dies shortly after giving birth 108 Wagadu Volume 19, Summer 2018 © Wagadu (2018) ISSN : 1545-6196 to her, leaving her in the care of her father who, in es...