My Brother
Page 13
When my brother was dying
these people were kind to him:
Dr. Nancy Scattergood, Dr. Eric Pillemer,
Dr. Catherine Hart, Edward Molloy of The Pharmacy
in Bennington, Vermont.
They did not know him.
Again, when my brother was dying
these people were kind to him:
Dr. Prince Harold Ramsey, Bud and Connie Rabinowitz,
his mother’s friend Sister Lee.
These people did know him.
He died. On his behalf I would like to express gratitude
to all of them. To all of them I would like to say,
Thank you.
Also by Jamaica Kincaid
At the Bottom of the River
Annie John
A Small Place
Lucy
The Autobiography of My Mother
Praise for MY BROTHER
“Kincaid’s haunting memoir of her brother’s death from AIDS recounts his troubled life as a Rastafarian involved in the drug culture. Through the larger story of her family’s life on Antigua, with emphasis on her mother’s powerful personality, Kincaid again illuminates the complex nature of family and intimacy.”
—San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year
“My Brother approaches perfection in its controlled prose and detached elegance, with new layers of detail revealed with each recounting of a memory.”
—GISELLE ANATOL, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Kincaid blends the medical with the magical in this riveting memoir of her younger brother Devon, who died of AIDS at age 33. Kincaid’s own, accented narration palpably evokes the atmosphere of the island of Antigua, which was her birthplace and the scene of her brother’s grueling and strangely instructive death.”
—CAROLYN ALESSIO, Chicago Tribune
“Sober and direct, Ms. Kincaid is unsparing whether looking at others or herself … Her unflinching account is all the more poignant for its utter lack of false emotion.”
—MERLE RUBIN, The Wall Street Journal
“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. It’s about the sticky tentacles that tie brothers to sisters, mothers to daughters, adults to their childhoods, people to where they come from—no matter how far they stray, no matter how desperately they try to escape.”
—MEREDITH MARAN, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“To read Jamaica Kincaid’s memoir, My Brother, is to re-experience her unforgettable narrative voice, revisiting Antigua over the three years that Devon is dying of AIDS, and re-characterizing the island, her mother and the child/adolescent self chronicled in her earlier books … My Brother is a memoir of a voice.”
—GAY WACHMAN, The Nation
“Kincaid’s prose is, as always, meticulous—the emotions scalding, the declarations harsh. But she triumphs here by transforming tortured memory into emancipating elegy.”
—NICK CHARLES, People
“A poetic, unapologetic chronicle.”
—Marie Claire
“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
“A narrative of raw, unmediated emotion, this story settles over the reader like a storm. After My Brother, everything looks different.”
—JULIE HALE, The Virginian-Pilot
“Kincaid’s prose is so direct, so honest, so searing, so searching that these concise 198 pages demand to be read in one breathtaking sitting.”
—JOCELYN MCCLURG, The Burlington Free Press
“More than a memoir, My Brother is the story of a journey … 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
“Kincaid has pulled out all the stops … A book whose painful memories meander, then jar the senses like a rattlesnake’s tail.”
—PAULA L. WOODS, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A study in detachment, in bitterness, in survival … The memoir criscrosses time and space from Kincaid’s childhood on Antigua to her present-day life in Vermont—as mother, wife, writer—and back again to the hospital ward where her brother lies awaiting a lonely death.”
—ELIZABETH MANUS, The Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1997 by Jamaica Kincaid
All rights reserved
Published in 1997 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First paperback edition, 1998
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Kincaid, Jamaica.
My brother / Jamaica Kincaid.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-21681-8
ISBN-10: 0-374-21681-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Kincaid, Jamaica—Family. 2. Novelists, Antiguan—Family relationships. 3. Women—Antigua—Family relationships. 4. Brothers and sisters—Antigua. 5. Rastafari movement—Antigua. 6. Family—Antigua. I. Title.
PR9275.A583 K5639 1997
813—dc21
[B]
97-16190
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52562-0
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-52562-5
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 9781466828865
First eBook edition: September 2012