Kincaid's Lucy

_________________________________________________________________________________MELUS, Volume 34, Number 4 (Winter 2009)

“Poor Visitor”: Mobility as/of Voice in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

Jennifer J. NicholsAmerican Association of University Professors

Jamaica Kincaid crosses disciplinary borders by writing fi ction that is simultaneously diasporic and national, but only half of this equation has received serious inquiry. Since its publication, myriad critical essays have appeared about Kincaid’s Lucy: A Novel (1990), a fi ctionalized autobio-graphical account of the Antiguan author’s migration to New York in the late 1960s to work as an au pair for a wealthy white family; most essays focus on the character interactions in the novel that metaphorically explore the relationship of Antigua to its British colonial past and to the contempo-rary imperialism and forced diaspora of global capital. For example, Jana Evans Braziel explores Kincaid’s use of daffodils in Lucy as a metaphor for diaspora and a way to “reverse colonial ‘order’ and denaturalize the ‘natural’” (113-14). Gary E. Holcomb reads the novel through the lens of black transnationalism, characterizing Lucy as a “sexual migrant” whose travel and sexual liberation work together to resist the “dominant notions of national identity [that] endeavor to enforce homogeneity” through

“colonial, racist, and nationalist values” (296). Rosanne Kanhai stresses the important role novels such as Lucy can play in the undergraduate class-room as global feminist interrogations of (white) US feminism’s limited focus on the race-class-gender trifecta of identity categories, and Kristen Mahlis analyzes Lucy as a model of the “paradoxical space of female exile” (182) through an analysis of the body in exile, drawing particularly on Kincaid’s metaphorical use of “the tongue.”

While these articles contain excellent scholarship, they represent the tendency to overlook Lucy as a work of American feminist fi ction, one that resounds with commentary on US domestic politics and culture, even, or perhaps especially, as it considers these phenomena in a transnational context. Braziel, for instance, notes the femininity implicit in Kincaid’s description of daffodils and Lucy’s scornful rejection of it, but focuses her analysis on issues of colonial displacement instead of on the feminist poli-tics that pervade the text. Similarly, Kanhai’s essay generalizes its critique of US feminism without a close analysis of Kincaid’s writing. I contend that Lucy’s position outside of the US literary canon is a notable over-sight in American letters, both because Kincaid is a US immigrant and because the story line openly critiques the cosmopolitan American Left of the 1960s, the setting for the book. One exception to this oversight is David Cowart’s chapter on Lucy in Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in

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Contemporary America (2006), but even this analysis, which emphasizes questions of assimilation in US immigrant narratives, overlooks the novel’s strident commentary on particularly American political movements. Lucy’s general critical placement outside the purview of American literary studies upholds the novel’s own argument about the limited potential for radical change in US culture.

In Lucy, Kincaid uses mobility as a literary trope to examine the assimilative impulses that pervade US feminist agendas; by dismantling the mythologies that surround concepts such as family, sisterhood, con-servation, and avant-gardism, she argues that the “purity” such terms metaphorically imply always contains vestiges of imperialism and racism. In Modest_Witness (1997), Donna J. Haraway argues that the American Left’s opposition to genetic modifi cation and other forms of biotechnol-ogy needs to be considered in the context of the “Western theme of purity of type,” in which can be heard “the unintended tones of fear of the alien and suspicion of the mixed” (61). “Like it or not,” Haraway writes, “I was born kin to . . . transgenic, transspecifi c, and transported creatures of all kinds; that is the family . . . to whom [we] are accountable. It will not help . . . to appeal to the natural and the pure” (62). Haraway’s critique of leftist politics in the realm of biotechnology aids my reading of Lucy as a systematic deconstruction of the “appeal to the natural and the pure” with which other leftist platforms— feminism, environmentalism, and the bohemian counterculture—are infused. In both form and content, Lucy’s mobility embraces multiplicity and variegation, what Chela Sandoval calls “oppositional consciousness”; for Kincaid mobility becomes the conceptual antidote to the problem of purity (sameness, stagnation, and conservatism) that haunts American thought, an alternative represented by the transnational, laboring female subject.

Lucy chronicles its protagonist’s fi rst year in the US working as an au pair; as the story progresses, Lucy encounters representatives of three different American Left communities—the feminist, environmental, and countercultural art movements of the late 1960s. Lucy’s interactions with these groups illustrate how each employs a variation on the theme of purity to reproduce the nationalist, homogenizing current of the US’s hegemonic culture; one by one, they each attempt to forcibly assimilate, absorb, dominate, or delegitimate Lucy’s outsider position. Focusing specifi cally on Kincaid’s critique of second-wave western feminism,1 this essay demonstrates two related points: fi rst, how Lucy’s subject position as a transient, racialized, laboring woman intervenes in second-wave western feminism’s conservative reactions to racial difference; and second, how Kincaid’s use of language and form refl ects and complements that project. Lucy’s critique of western feminism is a metonymic challenge to the larger

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discourse of purity in which it participates. I offer an interpretation of Kincaid’s fi nal vision for her protagonist—the mobile subject as a viable agent of change.

Both literally and fi guratively, Lucy uses continual mobility to resist the circumscription of her identity. The novel can be read as a series of attempts to fi x Lucy’s identity countered by her own moves to under-mine such an agenda: literally, she leaves behind places and relationships that threaten her unlimited movement. Figuratively, the novel deploys a motional metaphor through its language and formal structure, playing across multiple meanings, disrupting the assumptions and unexamined claims of secondary characters, and interrupting the smooth functioning of the reader’s sense-making processes. Brooke Lenz argues that Lucy’s

“privileged standpoint as an outsider within . . . allows the reader to see particular truths or realities that are not apparent to someone more fully assimilated into dominant ideologies” (102). She analyzes the novel as a potent example of how standpoint theory can aid literary interpretation through its position that “no truth claims are devoid of political invest-ment” (101), since Lucy’s character engages in the exposition of the other characters’ otherwise unexamined assumptions while developing her own political consciousness.

The metaphor of the standpoint suggests a physical location in time and space, thus encouraging an interpretation of the text’s literal use of space to align the reader’s perspective with Lucy’s own burgeoning politi-cal understanding. In the physical organization of the text, Lucy controls the dissemination of knowledge to the reader so that her point of view is always visible fi rst and helps to shape the reader’s perspective; this device enables the critique of secondary characters’ assumptions about Lucy and about themselves even before those assumptions are named. This narrative privileging allows Lucy to sift through western binary power discourses and incorporate their most valuable knowledge into her emerging sense of identity. Her mobility makes this reworking of power positions possible.

The novel weaves parallel accounts of Lucy’s willful disengagement from her family back home and her developing relationships with her American employers Mariah and Lewis, her friend Peggy, and her lover Paul, a bohemian artist. As the story progresses, Lucy experiences sev-eral free-association moments in which a word or encounter recalls a brief vignette from her life in Antigua, and correlations begin to appear between the restrictions placed on her in Antigua and new limitations imposed on her in the US. Mariah tries to act as Lucy’s surrogate mother and men-tor, compelling Lucy to draw comparisons between her relationship with Mariah and that with her own domineering mother. When Lewis’s philan-dering causes his marriage to Mariah to disintegrate, Lucy decides to leave

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her au pair position for the relative freedom of a shared apartment with Peggy. Her newfound interest in photography lands her a job at a photog-rapher’s studio, and as confi dence in her ability to express herself grows, the novel ends just as Lucy begins the process of abandoning all of the relationships that have shaped—and restricted—her fi rst year in the US.

Christine Prentice asserts that Lucy’s “strategies include the interven-tion of disruptive questions, as well as of other knowledges, which despite offi cial suppression emerge in unauthorized forms. They enact less the production of an alternative authority than a questioning of the forms of authority itself when its monologic address is interrupted by other knowl-edges, other memories that enter on it” (204). Arguing against Fredric Jameson’s claim that third-world literature can be recognized by its use of the individual as an allegory for the collective, in which the collec-tive always takes the form of the national, Prentice offers an alternative proposal through her reading of Lucy; she argues that the novel represents both individual voice and collective voices “while critically interrogating both the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ as terms, ultimately dismantling the binary opposition, along with the contingent oppositions of private/public and personal/political” (211). I agree with Prentice’s claims, but her reading focuses on Lucy’s relationship to her biological mother in Antigua and her “surrogate” mother/employer Mariah as an allegorical “mutually overdetermining discursive relation between the colony and the imperial metropolis” (217). My analysis examines how Lucy metaphorically repre-sents a challenge to the authority of western feminism and how Lucy, the character, performs mobility as a source of resistance against authority—familial, patriarchal, racial, and national. My reading sees in Lucy not just potential but praxis, beginning with the fi rst page.

A brief example illustrates the novel’s mobile narrative. From its very fi rst words—Chapter One’s title, “Poor Visitor”—Lucy is fl uid, displacing the perspective of Lucy’s employers/hosts, Mariah and Lewis, who coin the term “poor visitor” to describe Lucy, by positioning other interpre-tations of the phrase ahead of their intended meaning. This reversal of order, foregrounding alternative meanings for the reader and pushing the

“real” meaning of the phrase to the margins, puts the US and its representa-tives, Lucy’s host family, under a microscope to privilege, even naturalize, Lucy’s outsider’s perspective; the text thereby decenters the (US) reader’s own position as a voyeur watching the immigrant bumble her way into a complacent American identity.

“Poor Visitor” begins with Lucy’s voice recounting her fi rst day in the US. She is indeed a poor visitor, from a world without western luxuries:

“Everything I was experiencing—the ride in the elevator, being in an apart-ment, eating day-old food that had been stored in a refrigerator—was such


a good idea that I could imagine I would grow used to it and like it very much” (4). Almost immediately, however, her tale gives a lie to the chap-ter’s title; instead of being overwhelmed by the greatness of the US, she notes that the famous buildings, parks, and bridges that her driver points out to her look “ordinary, dirty, worn down” and observes that she “could not be the only person in the world for whom they were a fi xture of fan-tasy” (4) but for whom their reality is a disappointment. It is the US that is poor, after all, disheveled and unattractive, a place where even the sun-shine is poorer, robbed of its warmth by the winter air. “Poor visitor” now refers not to Lucy’s economic status as an immigrant from an underdevel-oped colony, but instead to her status as one who has hoped for much and received little—the chapter title is a sympathetic tongue-clucking.

Refl ecting on her initial encounter with Manhattan, Lucy describes her pull toward constant motion: “In a day dream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my small drowning soul, for I would imagine myself entering and leaving them, and just that—entering and leaving over and over again—would see me through a bad feeling I did not have a name for” (3). Lucy’s desire to have unbarricaded entry and exit suggests something new in Kincaid’s immi-grant mythology. Lucy is a visitor from the start; her intention is always to depart, to keep moving. The suffocating fear of being trapped moti-vates Lucy’s mobility, and Kincaid sketches this fear through a sequence of images in which Lucy indirectly rewrites Antigua as a response to her disappointment in the US: instead of a “not very nice” (6) place, Antigua is reimagined as a lost paradise from which she has been exiled. Rather than escaping, she only succeeds in leaving behind the good parts, such as her grandmother’s cooking and the warm sun. The “poor visitor” is now the one who has traveled to a new place at the expense of all that she valued about the old. The journey leads her into a new family relationship with Mariah, whose own claims on Lucy are not less stifl ing than her real mother’s:

Mariah wanted all of us, the children and me, to see things the way she did. . . . But I already had a mother who loved me, and I . . . had come to feel that my mother’s love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn’t know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than just become an echo of someone. . . . Sometimes there is no escape, but often the effort of trying will do quite nicely for a while. (36-37)

The parallel relationships with her two mothers, the real and the surro-gate, echo Lucy’s relationships with two cultures, Antigua and the US, and remind her that some of the structures from which she seeks asylum have no national borders; American families are no less resistant to the

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individual than Antiguan families are, while national identity itself is pic-tured as prisonlike. The only reprieve comes from “the effort of trying” to escape—the pleasure of motion.

The chapter’s title, “Poor Visitor,” is codifi ed, fi nally, through the per-spective of Lewis and Mariah. Lucy records a family dinner conversa-tion:

They said I seemed not to be a part of things, as if I didn’t live in their house with them, as if they weren’t like a family to me, as if I were just passing through, just saying one long Hallo!, and soon would be saying a quick Goodbye! So long! It was very nice! For look at the way I stared at them as they ate, Lewis said. Had I never seen anyone put a forkful of French-cut green beans in his mouth before? . . Lewis looked at me, concern on his face. He said, “Poor Visitor, poor Visitor,” over and over, a sympathetic tone to his voice, and then he told me a story about an uncle he had who had gone to Canada and raised monkeys, and of how after a while the uncle loved monkeys so much and was so used to being around them that he found actual human beings hard to take. (14)

This scene can be understood as the culmination of a narrative power reversal that sets up the rest of the book as a string of related instances in which Lucy pulls the rug out from under the carefully balanced assump-tions holding together the secondary characters’ worldview. Mariah and Lewis misinterpret Lucy’s gaze as the curious stare of a naïve primitive who is fascinated by the banal everyday facts of the superior culture’s exis-tence: “Had I never seen anyone put a forkful of French-cut green beans in his mouth before?” The insult is heightened by the story of Lewis’s uncle, with its implicit racist suggestion that Lucy is unused to the company of civilized people and incognizant of her relation, however distant, to the niceties of culture. Ultimately, the distance she creates for herself through her anthropological stance leads to the intended meaning of “poor visitor”: her poverty, according to her employers, comes from her inability or lack of desire to assimilate.

The commentary from Mariah and Lewis becomes a focal point of Kincaid’s narrative; is it really a pity, as they say, that Lucy does not join in? Kincaid’s descriptions of the transnational laboring woman’s experi-ence through Lucy’s eyes offer a sound critique of this claim. Lucy disrupts the authority of Lewis and Mariah’s point of view by introducing her own knowledge, as Prentice suggests. For example, later in this scene, Lucy describes a dream that her employers interpret as Freudian, but Lucy, who does not know Freud, counters with a different interpretation; the domi-nant western discourse of psychoanalysis is interrupted when she suggests her dream signifi es emotional bonding rather than repression. She shares


this information with the reader, but not with Mariah and Lewis, an exam-ple both of their misjudgment of her—while they only pay lip service to making her part of the family, she feels a genuine desire to know them as people—and of how she invites the reader to see from a marginalized viewpoint that Mariah and Lewis cannot access. In addition to critiquing western authority, Lucy provides instructive methodology for reposition-ing the reader’s gaze—disrupting its authority—in order to challenge the cultural colonizing implicit in the US ideal of immigrant assimilation.

As Moira Ferguson points out, in Lucy “[g]ender issues are tied to the colonial imperative” (108). Kincaid employs domestic relationships to imagine the interlocking exploitations of gender, race, class, and nation, and uses her protagonist to articulate what Angela Davis calls “differ-ence . . . not as an objective in itself, but rather as a point of departure and a method for transforming repressive and antidemocratic social cir-cumstances” (xi), or what Lenz defi nes as “difference as . . . operational variable” (99). Lucy’s vantage point, as what feminist standpoint theorist Alison Bailey calls the “outsider within” allows her to see how Mariah’s place as a middle-class, white housewife who identifi es as a feminist both corresponds to and reveals a national politics of race and class ideolo-gy. Bailey posits, “Outsiders within are thought to have an advantageous epistemic viewpoint that offers a more complete account of the world than insider or outsider perspectives alone” (285). As a transnational domestic worker, Lucy is privy to the intimate workings of her employers’ home as it is constituted by the practices and ideologies of their class, race, citi-zenship status, and gender roles. As a “poor visitor,” however, her role is that of transient observer, not participant. Mariah’s attempts to liberate Lucy by inviting her into western feminism smack of a patronizing vision of Lucy’s “third world difference,” to use Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s phrase (53), in which only western liberalism can save the individual from the oppressions of a backward collective identity.

Feminist critics have long argued that women are mythologized as the keepers and producers of “the nation” (i.e., the homeland) through their literal and fi gurative roles as reproducers, nurturers, and keepers of culture and tradition.2 This mythology links gender, race, and national identity in complex ways, and feminisms that do not address how women are made to embody “the nation” necessarily open the door to short-sighted, exclu-sionary political practice. Or, to put it another way, if gender is one of the structural apparatuses upholding the nation, dismantling the politics of gender (including feminist political movement) can provide an access point to critiquing the nation.

Lucy takes place as the US second-wave feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s is underway. Writing in 1990, Kincaid is at the end

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of the major theoretical push in the 1980s by feminist scholars and artists of color and feminist scholars working on issues of class to rectify the exclusions of that movement. Among its familiarly rehearsed failures was the major tenet that all women are oppressed because they are “women”; the tie between this signifi er, “woman,” and the experience of oppression aided a universalist assumption that all women share the same experi-ences under a patriarchal system. As Judith Butler explains, “the feminist

‘we’ rightly came under attack by women of color who claimed that the ‘we’ was invariably white, and that that ‘we’ that was meant to solidify the movement was the very source of a painful factionalization” (15).3 Women of color resented the idea of a common oppression shared between themselves and white feminists.4 Maxine Williams explained the problem in 1970: “Women’s Liberation must not isolate itself from the masses of women or the Third World community. At the same time, white women cannot speak for Black women. Black women must speak for themselves” (“Black Women” n. pag.).

Williams calls not just for a more inclusive feminism but also for a drastic shift in the distribution of power, such that all women’s voices may be heard in the movement’s calls for change. Throughout Lucy, but espe-cially in the second chapter, “Mariah,” Kincaid uses the confl ict between white and black feminist agendas to explore the assimilationist impera-tive her mobile protagonist rejects; Lucy carefully links Mariah’s feminist project to the subtler project of a national identity sustained by class, gen-der, and racial roles. She moves beyond national borders and takes into account not just white feminism’s racism toward US citizens of color, but also its colonizing tendencies. She shows that the 1970s feminist argu-ment that women share a core experience simply because they are women disguises an ideology of sameness that demands assimilation, just like the immigrant myth Kincaid dismantles in Lucy’s opening pages.

The symbols in Lucy of a stifl ing, oppressive culture also become the symbols of a stifl ing, exclusionary feminist agenda. The novel’s primary example of this is Kincaid’s introduction in the fi rst chapter of pale yellow as a symbol of western oppression; she describes the weak winter sun (5) and the overwhelming blondness of Mariah, Lewis, and their four look-alike daughters (12) in the context of their desire to symbolically colonize Lucy by making her part of their family, pressuring her to become more like them (instead of being a “poor visitor”). The chapter fi nishes with a dream in which Lewis chases Lucy over yellow ground that looks “as if it had been paved with cornmeal,” while Mariah urges him to “catch her, Lewis, catch her” (14). The yellow of the path combines with the yellow of Mariah and Lewis’s family to signify a suffocating colonization.

Much ink has been devoted to the British colonial connection Kincaid


elucidates through her reference in the second chapter to William Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils” (a scene to which I will return), but lit-tle attention has been paid to the other ghost of colonialism and lover of things yellow who appears in the text, the French painter, Paul Gauguin. In a 1996 interview published in The Mississippi Review, Kincaid reports that she was reading Gauguin’s published journals while writing Lucy (“Interview” n. pag.). Using as an example Gauguin’s decision to pub-lish a highly critical, dismissive letter about his work by his contempo-rary, August Strindberg, as the introduction to one of his exhibit catalogs, Kincaid explains that her interest in Gauguin lies in the way he embraced rejection and took satisfaction in violating his contemporaries’ conven-tional notions about painting. Gauguin’s contrariness is refracted onto the canvas of Kincaid’s novel through Lucy’s reaction to his work and his life. His brief role in the novel, perhaps more so than Wordsworth’s, sheds light on Kincaid’s textual practices of outing “purity” as a deeply-rooted seed in American culture and using her protagonist to interrogate its conceits. Lucy’s visit to a Gauguin exhibit helps her begin to see the world as an unfi nished narrative—and herself as much a creator as a character—rather than as a completed project that may be resented but never altered.

She contemplates art’s potential to imagine difference and grasps that it is not enough to observe and critique (as an anthropologist might), but that her liberation depends upon her ability to paint new visions of the world and herself. At the same time, she is keenly aware of how Gauguin’s attempt to do the same was inextricably linked to French imperialism.

The color yellow becomes key in this moment of reckoning: Kincaid plays on the color’s ubiquity in Mariah and Lewis’s life to simultaneously

“other” these representatives of bourgeois American cultural hegemony (by recognizing them as all the same—i.e., not like Lucy with her dark skin and kaleidoscopically colorful culture) and depict them as a homogeniz-ing force that threatens Lucy’s identity. Lucy’s encounter with Gauguin endows Kincaid’s repetitive use of the descriptor “yellow” with subtle satire, recalling the omnipresent gold and ocher tones in Gauguin’s char-acterizations of the indigenous Tahitians, an aspect of his work that is well-documented in his own and others’ writings about his oeuvre. His Yellow Christ paintings are two of his most famous works, linking the color yellow directly to divinity. However, yellow paint for Gauguin rep-resents not just otherworldliness but an other world; his diaries refer to the beautiful gold and yellow tones of the Tahitian land and people:

Everything in the landscape blinded me, dazzled me. Coming from Europe, I was constantly uncertain of some colour [and kept] beating about the bush: and yet it was so simple to put naturally onto my canvas a red and a blue. In

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the brooks, forms of gold enchanted me—Why did I hesitate to pour that gold and all that rejoicing of the sunshine on to my canvas? Old habits from Europe, probably,—all this timidity of expression [characteristic] of our bas-tardized races . . . (Writings 20)

Gauguin thus uses color to create a binary between East and West that fi g-ures prominently throughout his work. His description of Europe’s “bas-tardized races” suggests a disgust with its mixed and borrowed cultures in contrast to that of the pure, authentic culture of the other, assumed to be untouched by the infl uences of migratory individuals (ironically, since Gauguin was himself one such individual). His obsession with the color yellow did not go unnoticed by his peers. Gauguin writes about his effect on his friend, Vincent van Gogh, claiming for himself the “task of enlight-ening [Van Gogh].” He infl uenced Van Gogh’s famous Sunfl owers; Nancy Mowll Mathews considers Van Gogh’s prominent use of the color yel-low to be a paean of admiration to his friend and teacher; furthermore, Gauguin’s work with the effects of sun seems to have inspired Van Gogh’s consideration of light and shadow. In his private journal, Gauguin wrote that another artist, upon seeing Van Gogh’s use of yellow in his series of sunfl ower paintings, cried, “Marde! Marde! [sic] Everything is yellow! I don’t know what painting is any longer!” (Intimate 32-33).

Kincaid’s brief reference to this legacy anchors many indirect references to Gauguin within the text. For Kincaid, the yellow color that dominates each one’s vision of their adopted land exists not in Tahiti for Gauguin or in the US for Lucy, but in the mind of the artist—whether Gauguin or Lucy. In linking Gauguin to Lucy and using his favorite color to describe Lucy’s American employers, Kincaid throws the color back onto the West as a pale yellow, an indirect castigation of the cultural colonizing Lucy struggles against throughout the novel. She suggests that Gauguin painted his own mistaken assumptions onto every canvas, helping to render a world that, decades after his death, is still awash in the uniform tincture of western assumptions about the nonwestern world. In contrast, Lucy tries to infuse her narrative with as much color as she can, especially when remembering Antigua. The text’s color scheme is a deliberate reversal of the monotony of Gauguin’s yellow: in Lucy, the monotony occurs in the western eye’s insistence on seeing all nonwestern people and places in the same tones—the monolithic other.

Lucy demonstrates this at several points in the novel, describing in vivid color her memories of Antigua and indirectly comparing the ubiqui-tous yellow of her US surroundings to her own bright dresses, dark skin, and black-and-white photography. One of many yellow-infused descrip-tions of her US environment reads: “The yellow light from the sun came


in through a window and fell on the pale-yellow linoleum tiles of the fl oor, and on the walls of the kitchen, which were painted yet another shade of pale yellow, and Mariah, with her pale-yellow skin and yellow hair, stood still in this almost celestial light” (27). By way of comparison, consider Lucy’s recollection of her childhood in Antigua:

[A]ll sorts of little details of my life on the island where I grew up came back to me: the color of six o’clock in the evening sky; . . . the white of the chemise that my mother embroidered for the birth of my second brother; the redness of the red ants that attacked my third brother; . . . the navy blue of the sailor suit; . . . the absence of red lipstick on my mother’s mouth; . . . the day the men from the prison in their black-and-white jail clothes came to cut down a plum tree. (131)

These two different verbal color schemes make a clear distinction between Lucy’s background and that of her employers; contrasting these quotes highlights Lucy’s metaphorical position as the agent of difference, var-iegation, and change.5 Similar examples abound throughout the novel. Lucy’s descriptions of herself, her memories, and her room are much more colorful than the descriptions of Mariah, her family, and the US landscape. She describes her skin as “the color brown of a nut rubbed repeatedly with a soft cloth” (5), remembers “a bowl of pink mullet and green fi gs” (7) and “a dark, purple plum in the middle of her pink palm” (25), and recalls curtains in her window with “loud, showy fl owers printed on them” (144). On the other hand, in the US she fi nds “a pale-yellow sun, as if the sun had grown weak” (5), “six yellow-haired heads of various sizes” (12), “snow . . . the color and texture of a half-cooked egg white” (23), an entire house “painted a soothing yellow,” and a lake that “looked so ordinary, gray, dirty, unfriendly . . . not [like] the big blue sea I was used to” (35).

Kincaid emphasizes the yellow motif when Mariah and Lucy clash over the springtime appearance of daffodils. Flowers and plants function as metaphors for gender identity throughout Lucy, and the daffodil—a yel-low fl ower—does double-duty as a symbol both of colonization and patri-archy. This metaphor fi rst appears as Mariah anxiously awaits the arrival of spring and all the seasonal offerings she will share with Lucy:

She said, ‘Have you ever seen daffodils pushing their way up out of the ground? And when they’re in bloom and all massed together, a breeze comes along and makes them do a curtsy to the lawn stretching out in front of them. Have you ever seen that? When I see that, I feel so glad to be alive.’ And I thought, So Mariah is made to feel alive by some fl owers bending in the breeze. How does a person get to be that way? (17)

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The conversation reminds Lucy of a childhood incident in which she was made to memorize and recite Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” an event that epitomizes for her the relationship of colonizer to colonized, since, in lieu of learning her own history and culture, her education centered on training her to be a good subject of the British Crown. (As Ferguson notes [107], the novel takes place in 1967, around the time of Antigua’s partial inde-pendence from England.) Mariah describes the daffodils as an indistin-guishable mass forced by the wind to curtsy, a feminine bow of deference originating in aristocratic custom, an image that both feminizes the fl ow-ers and subordinates them to the will of an external power (the breeze). When Lucy shares with Mariah her anger over the memory of the poetry recital, Mariah responds with envy: “What a history you have” (19), miss-ing the point. It is precisely because of the colonial education system that Lucy does not have a (national) history, at least not one she learns about in school; Antigua’s history is subordinated to England’s, much as Mariah subordinates Lucy’s concerns to her own.

The reader comes to understand yellow as a symbol of white or western ubiquity, an inescapable presence caused by the colonial exportation of western culture to the whole world. Simultaneously it represents Mariah:

Mariah, with her pale-yellow skin and yellow hair, stood still in this almost celestial light, and she looked blessed, no blemish or mark of any kind on her cheek or anywhere else, as if she had never quarreled with anyone over a man or over anything, would never have to quarrel at all, had never done anything wrong and had never been to jail, had never had to leave anywhere for any other reason than a feeling that had come over her. (27)

Yellow takes on many meanings: it is the color of a fl ower species associat-ed in Lucy’s mind with western imperialism; it is the color of privilege and the color of pure innocence. Kincaid’s references to yellow link Mariah’s politics to those of western imperialism, and Lucy’s take on both is evi-dent in her reaction to Mariah’s “yellowness.” One day, as Lucy gazes at Mariah, standing in shadows, she describes the image as Mariah’s young-est daughter might see it—a vision of “her beautiful golden mother”—and then rewrites it as Mariah appears to Lucy in that moment: “what I saw was a hollow old woman, . . . her mouth collapsed as if all the muscles had been removed” (46). Lucy’s description symbolically renders Mariah empty of substance (“hollow”), with nothing to say and no facility for saying it (“her mouth collapsed”), a critical analogy for western feminism itself.

Throughout the story, Mariah is positioned as a second-wave feminist: she takes Lucy to her own doctor and introduces her to birth control (67); she offers her a copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (132); she


does not shave her legs or underarms (“as a symbol of something”); and she lost her virginity long before her marriage (80). Mariah uses feminism as a way to connect to Lucy (e.g., they are both women and therefore share a common burden); this is understood by Lucy as both naïve (an inno-cence born of privilege) and suffocating (because of Mariah’s attempts to indoctrinate Lucy into her worldview—“Mariah wanted all of us, the children and me, to see things the way she did” [35-36]). By extrapolating the connections between Mariah and western imperialism via Kincaid’s use of yellow to symbolize both, the reader can connect Lucy’s critique of her surrogate mother to Kincaid’s critique of Americanization as a process that necessarily positions US national identity as both beyond reproach and desirable (“no blemish or mark of any kind”). This imbrica-tion is especially apparent in light of Gauguin’s presence in the text, which explicitly invokes the reduction of difference to a monochromatic vision of sameness.

Lucy contrasts Mariah’s “yellow” subjectivity with the memory of her mother’s friend, Sylvie, whose face is scarred where another woman bit her in a fi ght over a man. As a child, Lucy “was sure that the mark on her face was a rose she had put there on purpose because she loved the beauty of roses so much she wanted to wear one on her face” (25). She refers to the scar as a “dark, purple plum” that Sylvie caresses with her pink palm as she (Lucy) explains, “though I might not end up with a mark on my cheek, I had no doubt that I would end up with a mark somewhere” (25).

In the following scene, when Mariah blindfolds Lucy and takes her to the park to see the daffodils, Lucy is engulfed with rage:

Along the paths and underneath the trees were many, many yellow fl owers the size and shape of play teacups, or fairy skirts. They looked like something to eat and something to wear at the same time; they looked beautiful; they looked simple, as if made to erase a complicated and unnecessary idea. I did not know what these fl owers were, and so it was a mystery to me why I wanted to kill them. Just like that. I wanted to kill them. (29)

Although Mariah tries to control Lucy’s reaction (the blindfold may be read as a symbolic veiling of Lucy’s mind), Lucy sees past the attempt. The daffodils function as a symbol of white US feminism (and feminin-ity) that Lucy rejects. For one thing, they are all the same. For another, they are domesticated; as “something to eat and something to wear,” the daffodils call to mind both the gendered work of cooking and sewing and the image of bourgeois women dressing up (“fairy skirts”) to have tea (“play teacups”). Most tellingly, their beautiful simplicity tries to hide the complexity of gender identity and women’s experience (the “complicated and unnecessary idea”), especially when, as in Lucy’s case, that identity is

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always tangled up in issues of race, class, and nation. In comparison, Sylvie’s “fl ower” is a wound the presence of which

clearly marks the differences among women and the violence such dif-ference can foster. Her scar is a one-of-a-kind reminder that no common identity—gender, national, or otherwise—can account fully for the indi-vidual’s subject position in a fi eld of complex power relations; to think otherwise is a sign of immaturity: “That was how I came to think that heavy and hard was the beginning of living, real living” (25). The distinc-tion between a fi eld of identical, simple fl owers and the singular “rose,” a fl ower of innumerable varieties and one known as much for its thorns as for its beauty and scent, represents the distinction between a naïve US feminism and a more sophisticated global feminism that has room for dif-ference and the expression of the individual. Lucy explains to the reader the signifi cance of the scene when she writes, “I had cast her beloved daffodils in a scene she had never considered, a scene of conquered and conquests; a scene of brutes masquerading as angels and angels portrayed as brutes. . . . It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t my fault. But nothing could change the fact that where she saw beautiful fl owers I saw sorrow and bit-terness” (30). Her interpretation dominates the narrative—Mariah never offers a response to Lucy’s criticisms—and a seemingly trivial object, the daffodil, becomes a glaring symbol of interlocking exploitations. Once Kincaid establishes the pro-feminist Mariah’s racism and colonizing ten-dencies through the daffodil scenes, in three ensuing scenes she builds on this complaint and confronts American feminism’s fl aws directly as Lucy challenges Mariah’s viewpoint.

In the fi rst of the series, Mariah, Lucy, and Mariah’s four children take a train to a Great Lakes summer home, and Lucy notices that all of the passengers are white like Mariah and all of the train employees are black like Lucy. Mariah is oblivious: “Mariah did not seem to notice what she had in common with the other diners, or what I had in common with the waiters. She acted in her usual way, which was that the world was round and we all agreed on that, when I knew that the world was fl at and if I went to the edge I would fall off” (32). Mariah erases difference by ignoring it: Lucy is with her and is therefore like her. Mariah enacts here what Bailey calls a “privilege-evasive whitely script” (293), a form of white liberal discourse on racism that chooses not to recognize race in order to avoid having to confront the ways white individuals, even when supposedly anti-racist, benefi t from white privilege. This pretend colorblindness also works to colonize people of color into a universality of whiteness by deny-ing the presence of any other color. Lenz, in discussing Lucy’s standpoint, argues that the scene speaks more to power relations than to race, since Lucy herself rejects identifi cation with the African American workers


on the train as well as with Mariah, in a “conscious decision to create a third space between the privileged and oppressed” (112). Another way of reading Lucy’s conceptualization of her space in this social microcosm is to interpret Kincaid’s use of physical space—the setting, the discussion of

“the world,” the actual organization of multiple viewpoints in the narrative trajectory—in conjunction with Lucy’s refl ections on her experiences with Mariah.

Kincaid mocks Mariah’s pretense at equality through Lucy’s reference to the earth being round. By representing Mariah’s worldview in terms of a proven scientifi c truth that, presumably, only the most illiterate or extreme fundamentalists would attempt to dispute, Lucy characterizes Mariah’s inability to consider other people’s perspectives; in contrast, Lucy clearly sees a world with a safe center and dangerous margins. Mariah’s privilege is that she has never had to leave the center—her comfortable subjectivity

—and cannot imagine any other position in relation to it.6 This passage again reinforces the dynamic Kincaid’s text sets up between its charac-ters through plays on meaning: as they travel through space together on a moving train, Lucy ascribes to Mariah a very literal interpretation of “the world.” Then, having defi ned Mariah’s superfi cial understanding of it, she uses this interpretation to launch her own more fi gurative, abstract under-standing of the world as a plane governed by irrational social laws. While Mariah can assume that she and Lucy share the same position because they are sitting next to each other in the dining car, Lucy knows that despite their physical proximity, Mariah stands fi rmly at the center of the world and Lucy moves precariously along its edge. Paradoxically, in the act of naming this reality, the text decenters Mariah’s position by privileg-ing Lucy’s perspective: it is Lucy who interprets both her viewpoint and Mariah’s, and it is with Lucy that the reader sympathizes.

The tension between the two characters’ different views, coupled with Lucy’s resentment of Mariah’s impulse to smother Lucy’s individualism, grows in the next scene, at the family summer home, when Mariah returns from a successful fi shing trip:

She sang out, “I will make you fi shers of men,” and danced around me. . . . “My fi sh. This is supper. Let’s go feed the minions.”

It’s possible that what she really said was “millions,” not “minions.” Certainly she said it in jest. But as we were cooking the fi sh, I was thinking about it. “Minions.” A word like that would haunt someone like me; the place where I came from was a dominion of someplace else. (37)

Lucy then tells Mariah a story from her childhood: after her mother reads to the young Lucy the Bible story about Jesus’s miracle of feeding the multitudes with only a few fi sh and several loaves of bread, Lucy asks

202 NICHOLS

her mother, “‘But how did Jesus serve the fi sh? boiled or fried?’” (37-38). Lucy’s mother is amazed at the question, but to Lucy, there is nothing unusual in the idea that the multitudes “might go on to pass a judgment on the way the food tasted. I know it would have mattered to me” (38).

Several themes are investigated in these scenes. First, it is clear that “minions” has no resonant meaning for Mariah, and neither does the dou-ble entendre Lucy hears in her comment about being fi shers of men; Lucy again believes that Mariah is trying to “collect” apostles of her views, a colonization not unlike that of Christian missionaries. Second, Lucy says

“it’s possible” that she misheard Mariah; this uncertainty reminds the read-er that Lucy’s subjectivity stands between the reader and the text. Not only does Lucy routinely suggest multiple meanings for a word or phrase, but she even determines what words are spoken by other characters. Kincaid gives her protagonist control of the narrative, allowing her to malleate its substance; even as Lucy questions her own version of events (was it “min-ions” or “millions”?), she still sculpts the reader’s comprehension, since what follows Mariah’s comment is an extended interpretation of a word that may or may not have been spoken: what counts in this scene is what Lucy hears, not what was said. Although Mariah occupies the speaking position in this scene, it is her audience, Lucy, whose voice is heard; this represents a strategic repositioning of narrative power that is echoed in Lucy’s childhood memory of the biblical story.

By recalling her reaction to the miracle of Jesus feeding the multi-tudes, Lucy confronts Mariah’s imperial attitude and reminds her that even though the “minions” are supposed to be grateful for Christ’s benefi cence, they are still individuals with opinions and preferences (for example,

“judgment[s] on the way the food tasted”). Her childhood reminiscence brings Lucy back to the present, where Mariah cooks fi sh for “the min-ions” without having asked Lucy how she would like her fi sh prepared. As though circumnavigating Mariah’s round world, the scene has circled back around to its beginning: Mariah as fi sherman leads to a biblical refer-ence with imperial overtones that reminds Lucy of another Bible story in which individuality is disregarded, which in turn recalls Lucy’s childhood as a colonized subject, further reminding Lucy of her cultural differences from Mariah. Mariah’s earlier reference to the minions now holds con-crete meaning.

In the third scene, after the dinner of fi sh cooked Mariah’s way, they are saying good night when Mariah spontaneously tells Lucy, “‘I was looking forward to telling you that I have Indian blood, that the reason I’m so good at catching fi sh and hunting birds and roasting corn and doing all sorts of things is that I have Indian blood. But now, I don’t know why, I feel I shouldn’t tell you that. I feel you will take it the wrong way’” (39-40).


The “wrong way” for Mariah means not understanding the connection between herself and Lucy, a connection she bases on their shared essence, the humanist conviction that a core element unites them in spite of their different subject positions (in this case, the Indian blood, but elsewhere, the fact that they are both women). By declaring herself part Indian (read: primitive—“good at catching fi sh and hunting birds and roasting corn”), Mariah can absorb Lucy’s difference into herself, washing it away by making it part of her own identity while simultaneously claiming her authenticity as a native inhabitant, not an immigrant. Mariah again enacts a desire to control the narrative: she wants to be the voice that is heard, even as she tells Lucy she no longer wants to speak (“I feel I shouldn’t tell you”), and in the very act of denying this desire to be in control, does tell Lucy, after all.

Since the previous scene infl uences the reader to make a judgment against Mariah on behalf of Lucy, and Mariah appears to understand that some sort of judgment is imminent, it comes as a surprise that Lucy’s reac-tion is one of confusion: “[Mariah’s words] really surprised me. What way should I take this? Wrong way? Right way? What could she mean? To look at her, there was nothing remotely Indian about her. Why claim a thing like that?” Instead of the binary opposition the reader expects, Kincaid offers an open fi eld of potential meanings, in which even the concept of the binary—“Wrong way? Right way?”—is challenged. Lucy’s pause to interpret Mariah’s comments causes the reader to suspend judgment until Lucy offers her own analysis. Kincaid is shifting the discussion; instead of responding to Mariah’s confi guration of her own racial identity, Lucy refutes the very understanding of race on which Mariah stakes her claim. Race, for Lucy, is an outdated category to be left behind, not claimed as a trophy; “my grandmother,” she insists, “is my grandmother, not an Indian. My grandmother is alive; the Indians she came from are all dead” (40). Again, Lucy individuates, while Mariah amalgamates.

Lucy uses her relationship with Mariah as a place from which to redi-rect herself toward a different feminist subjectivity, one that can account for the complexities of her situation as a transnational domestic worker living amidst white privilege. Lucy recognizes that the emancipatory feminism Mariah represents provides tangible benefi ts, but produces no true liberation. Mariah’s project of making Lucy into an echo of herself is no different from that of the British education system or the American assimilation imperative. Lucy’s exchanges with Mariah establish western feminism’s imperialist tendencies, revealing its reformative nature by vir-tue of its colonizing praxis. Kincaid moves on from this point to set up similar arguments about American environmentalism and white, western counterculture in the novel’s third and fourth chapters, until, a year after

204 NICHOLS

Lucy arrives in the US, the fi nal chapter fi nds her at the start of a new phase of her life, a fi tting ending for a protagonist whose philosophy is to embrace life’s continual motion. Her introduction to American liberal feminism and its underlying imperial impulses has armed her with the knowledge that she will, in a sense, always be a “poor visitor,” unwilling to assimilate into institutional structures that limit the individual’s poten-tial. Yet the last chapter’s title, “Lucy,” signifi es that she has reclaimed her identity from its circumscription by institutional forces. She is no longer one more immigrant who has landed, but instead has an identity that bears no immediate relationship to the soil on which she stands.

In the novel’s fi nal pages, Lucy contemplates the passage of time and how each moment separates her from who she was in all previous moments. Appropriately, the chapter that bears her name is a paean to the fl uidity of time, the inevitable motion of change that crumbles, sometimes softly, sometimes with force, the foundations of history. She understands that this year has changed her: “I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of exis-tence” (133). In place of that girl is an unfi nished project: “I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition. I did not have anything exactly in mind, but when the picture was complete I would know” (134). Lucy assumes the role of artist here, and the quote neatly sums up Kincaid’s nar-rative strategy throughout the novel, which has left open-ended interpre-tive possibilities—nothing “precise” or “calculated”—scattered about for the reader to intuit through the surrounding context. This fl uidity of mean-ing is both Kincaid’s device and Lucy’s resistance. When Lucy, looking out the window of her new apartment, observes, “Everything I could see made me feel I would never be part of it, never penetrate to the inside, nev-er be taken in” (154), she is self-identifying as a permanent outsider. Not only does Lucy choose to remain outside the institutions that beckon her, but she also makes the space she occupies into a fi eld chiefl y character-ized by its mutability; margins, generally defi ned only in opposition to the center, become spaces to be imagined outside of that binary. The margin gives Lucy—a transnational, racialized, female domestic worker—agency, allowing her to defi ne herself; the story’s shifting ground always gravi-tates to Lucy’s perspective, and the reader fi nds Lucy’s perspective more sophisticated than that of her American employers, a refreshing change from immigrant literature that reveres US cosmopolitanism.

Lucy’s consideration of the outsider’s relationship to the US translates


into the possibility of “resizing” America on the world map, dismantling its position as a unilateral cultural agent that defi nes the rest of the world in comparison with itself. Perhaps most important is the metaphorical use Kincaid makes of Lucy’s role as domestic worker: Kincaid is a spy in the house of American liberalism, much as Lucy is the ever vigilant observer of her employers’ lives and philosophies; the reader benefi ts from her cri-tique by seeing things through a narrative that shifts the dominant perspec-tive out of the limelight. Through her protagonist, Kincaid intervenes in the story western liberal feminism likes to tell and points to the soil of rac-ism and imperialism in which it has fl owered. Desperate to appear happy and liberated, Mariah ignores the problems of her own reality—her phi-landering husband, her shallow desires—and presents herself instead as a model to be emulated. Seen from the margins, western feminist agendas do not give much cause for hope; instead, the marginalized must fi nd ways outside of such institutionalized agendas to create their own new visions of the future. Kincaid has the advantage of hindsight as she critiques 1960s American feminism, but nevertheless her criticisms feel new, both because they still apply and because of the way she conducts them. The motion and fl uidity that shape Lucy mentally move the reader to engage in the perceptual shifts Lucy orchestrates in her telling of the story, so that, for the reader as much as for Lucy, “what seem[s] to be one thing frequently turn[s] out to be something altogether different,” enabling the breakdown of readerly assumptions and prejudices that are that much more effective because they are so unexpected.

Notes

1. My use of the term “western feminism” may seem reductive, but for the sake of brevity, I use this term as shorthand for the US second-wave feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was largely driven by the agendas of young, white, college-educated women focusing on their desire to be equal to the men of their race and class. The exclusions of this period in feminism’s history have been well-documented; in particular, feminists of color, especially during and after the 1980s, have responded to these exclusions in a number of well-known texts, including such anthologies as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (1982). Later, I discuss the racial ten-sions caused by the universalist assumptions of white second-wave feminists. 2. See, for example, Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (1999), edited by Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem.

206 NICHOLS

3. Judith Butler claims that this criticism was leveled “in the early 1980s” (15), but as Maxine Williams’s writing demonstrates, the argument is older than that. 4. See, for instance, bell hooks’s essay, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women.” hooks also writes, “From the onset of the movement women from privi-leged classes were able to make their concerns ‘the’ issues that should be focused on in part because they were the group of women who received public attention” (Feminism 38).5. I would be remiss not to note that the colors she remembers—white, red, and blue—as she relives her decision to leave Antigua and her family’s limited hopes for her are the colors of both the Union Jack and the “star-spangled banner,” twin emblems of imperialism, and that their appearance is followed by a reference to the black and white stripes that signify literal and metaphorical imprisonment (the jail uniform and the restrictive binary of black-or-white thinking that does not allow for shades of gray). 6. Lucy’s analogy calls to mind a central myth of white history: the apocryphal popular convention that the Columbian Exposition, which paved the way for the European conquest of the Americas, proved the earth was round. This fact was an accepted truth in several world civilizations long before Columbus ever set sail, but the myth’s persistence demonstrates the tenacity of whiteness in central-izing its place in the history of the world’s development. Lucy implicitly suggests Mariah’s complicity with this aggrandizing Eurocentrism.

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Braziel, Jana Evans. “Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations: Narrative Coming of Age in the Diasporic Writings of Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 3.2 (2003): 110-31.

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Kincaid's Lucy