At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid

First published: 1982 (collected in At the Bottom of the River, 1983)

The Work

Some critics call At the Bottom of the River a novel; others call it a collection of stories. Certainly the stories’ interconnections lend a sense of continuity to this thin volume. Much of At the Bottom of the River is a recollection of Jamaica Kincaid’s childhood on the Caribbean island of Antigua. The author captures the identity of this region and its people with remarkable accuracy in her sketches. By telling her stories largely from a child’s point of view, Kincaid gracefully intermixes the outside world with her protagonist’s mental world of dreams, images, fantasy, and mysticism.

The book’s ten stories dwell upon racial and mother-daughter relationships. The daughter is obsessed by her mother, an overpowering love object for her. Her attempts to break from her maternal dependence are central to many of the sketches. The sketch “My Mother” recounts with great poignancy a girl’s emotional odyssey from early childhood to the point of needing to loose herself from a reliance upon the mother she dearly loves. The narrative is disarmingly simple and direct. The child’s dreamworld intrudes constantly upon the outside world, with which she must necessarily merge. She cries a “pond of tears” at separating from her mother. The girl’s exile, expressed in the words “she [the mother] shook me out and stood me under a tree,” is connected to her memory of the childhood punishment of being banished, when she had misbehaved, from her house to take her dinner under the breadloaf trees. This story is about lost innocence and the attempt to recapture it.

The sketch “At Last” considers the essence of things. The child asks what becomes of the hen whose feathers are scattered, whose flesh is stripped away, whose bones disappear. Kincaid broaches similar universal questions in “Blackness,” in which she deals with the mystery of the generations, with the child who grows up to become a mother to the succeeding generation. The questions posed in this story are questions that puzzled the ancient Greek philosophers and that still puzzle thinking people everywhere.

Bibliography

Bouson, J. Brooks. Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Study of the representation of motherhood and maternal relationships in Kincaid’s writing. Includes a chapter on “Antigua Crossings” and At the Bottom of the River charting the emergence of Kincaid’s writerly identity.

Cudjoe, Selwyn R., ed. Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux, 1990. Includes an informative interview with Kincaid in which the writer discusses her name change, her mother, and Caribbean writing, among other things. An essay by Helen Pyne Timothy examines images of adolescent rebellion in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John (1985).

Dutton, Wendy. “Merge and Separate: Jamaica Kincaid’s Fiction.” World Literature Today 63, no. 3 (Summer, 1989): 406-410. Excellent article that depicts At the Bottom of the River and Annie John as complementary texts that explain and expand one another. Focuses largely on the presentation of mother/daughter separation.

Edwards, Justin D. Understanding Jamaica Kincaid. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Comprehensive study of Kincaid’s work, devoting a chapter to At the Bottom of the River.

Garis, Leslie. “Through West Indian Eyes.” The New York Times Magazine 140 (October 7, 1990): 42-44. A profile of Kincaid that appeared when Kincaid’s third novel, Lucy (1990), was published.

Ismond, Patricia. “Jamaica Kincaid: ’First They Must Be Children.’” World Literature Written in English 28, no. 2 (Autumn, 1988): 336-341. A consideration of Kincaid’s presentation of childhood in Annie John and At the Bottom of the River that focuses on Kincaid as a Caribbean writer.

Kincaid, Jamaica. “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” Interview by Kay Bonetti. The Missouri Review 15, no. 2 (1992): 125-142. Writing At the Bottom of the River helped free Kincaid from the language of Empire literature—John Milton, the Brontës, William Wordsworth—which she found beautiful but painful.

Mangum, Bryant. “Jamaica Kincaid.” In Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Biblio-graphical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Daryl Cumber Dance. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Mangum argues that the pieces in this collection are allegories of the mythic story of the Fall. The narrator longs for a return to a prelapsarian world of union.

Murdoch, H. Adlai. “Severing the (M)Other Connection: The Representation of Cultural Identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Callaloo 13, no. 2 (Spring, 1990): 325-340. A psychologically informed reading of the mother/daughter conflict in Kincaid’s writing. Focuses on Annie John, but because of the intimate relationship between Kincaid’s first two books, these comments illuminate At the Bottom of the River as well.

Natov, Roni. “Mother and Daughters: Jamaica Kincaid’s Pre-Oedipal Narrative.” In Children’s Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Seminar on Children’s Literature and the Children’s Literature Association. New York: Modern Language Association, 1990.

Perry, Donna. “Initiation in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux, 1990.

Timothy, Helen Pyne. “Adolescent Rebellion and Gender Relations in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John.” In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Wellesley: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Referring to Nancy Chodorow’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories of development, Timothy explores the emotional break between mothers and daughters in these two works. She focuses on the inner life and growth of the protagonists as they learn gender roles.

Wilentz, Gay. “Toward a Diaspora Literature: Black Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.” College English 54 (April, 1992): 385-405. Wilentz identifies features that link women’s Diaspora literature to African oral tradition. She notes the strong role of the mother in At the Bottom of the River.