Unspeakable Mother: The Politics of Reclaiming the Maternal Pre-Text and Origin in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother

Abstract

This paper considers the representation of identity-formation and mother-daughter relationship in the feminist black American Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother (1997). Attention is given to study how My Mother's Autobiography and much feminist psychoanalytic criticism confront the coincidence between the engendering of daughters and mother-daughter affiliation within racial African context. It also looks at some extremely telling parallels between revisionary feminist psychoanalytic paradigms and narrative techniques used in Kincaid’s work. First, this paper traces the conversions within psychoanalytic theories, and feminist thinking which modified classical oedipal frameworks, thus the narratives of mothers and daughters do not remain unspeakable. Several elements of these representations emerge with particular force: the impulse to return to a pre-oedipal, pre-verbal moment of origin which, though essentially inaccessible to language and memory, nevertheless is meant to be crucial for merging the fragments of the self; the ideological implications of the mother-daughter bonding as basis for gender difference; and the instability of identity and subjectivity-formation. This paper explores the way in which Kincaid’s novel represents the mother-daughter relationship, proceeding from the statement that the mother is often the pre-text for the daughter's fictional project and that the daughter's text seeks to reject, reconstruct and reclaim the mother's message. The paper also addresses one of the central questions that Black feminist criticism seeks to answer: What is the connection between women as material objects of their own histories and the representation of women in narrative?