Hail King Kincaid, for she is fierce, uncompromising, honest, and brave. Jamaica Kincaid spends much of her time dispensing with what one critic so accurately expressed, terrible truths; truths that people spend a lot of time trying not to acknowledge. Understanding this Jamaica Kincaid takes us on a journey of discovery. We did not think or want to continue, but once there we became familiar with the landscape. Although we have never been there before; however our existence now, depended on our familiarity with said scene, then.

In “My Mother’s Autobiography” Jamaica Kincaid takes us down this path. Oddly enough, Jamaica Kincaid’s autobiography of her mother is similar to the autobiography of my mother, your mother, our mothers, of mothers past and future. Well, by revealing the story of Xuela that begins with the death of her mother. The story of Jamaica Kincaid is the story of her mother. Kincaid’s mom’s history as Lamarckism or osmosis is revealed in Kincaid’s amniotic fluid, as the colonial history of her beloved island is exposed to Jamaica Kincaid in a foreign land. Xuela did not have to live on that little island or meet her mother. They are consequences of her upbringing. Like genetic evolution or ideology repeated over and over again; her identity, her island pride revealed in another country; a set of contradictions and ambivalences that come to define, or upset, our lives.

But what’s so horrible about that? Well this is the exciting part. Kincaid is sexual, very sexual without apology or shame. A big problem, because sexuality likes a lot of contradictions, intruders, shame and guilt. They show up in all sexual matters bent on defining us. Their presences are Kincaid’s nemesis. There to be won over by Kincaid’s empowering sexuality. Shame and guilt show up in “Girl” for criticizing the pre-teen daughter for squeezing the bread. And for being the type of person the baker won’t let squeeze the goods. Criticized for playing marbles in a skirt. Criticized for the way Xuela combs her hair or smells like Lucy.

Kincaid’s mother, like her island’s morality, is there to compromise her. And if you pay attention, they will reveal terrible truths. Not only in your life but in your mother’s. As tireless as he is, Kincaid is showing a need for love with his willingness to compromise. This search for love will eventually define her. Like her little island. And his mother died of him. Available only in the arms of someone else’s husband to be conquered. Or in foreign land and symbols: the white man, white lady; also to be captured by this woman who arrived on a banana boat.

Xuela Claudette Richardson, our protagonist, is sensual like Kincaid. She reveals herself in the sexuality exposed in her unloved life. What Xuela looks for in her sexuality is the feeling that she lacks from her. A nemesis, not a lover. She is looking for someone to love or hate; Her Phoenix-like sexuality rises from the ashes of her mother, like all of us. Kincaid “accepts that we are living in incredible contradictions and ambivalences.” Xuela is alone without her mother and her father. And she replaces that loneliness with a sexual appetite. She is hungry, but she is aware of her hunger. And she takes control. She’s not overwhelmed by sex; she embraces sex as a friend, a companion whose company she enjoys, a harlot as “mother as daughter.” Like the death of her mother, she accepts sex, it’s natural.

And Xuela control does. She describes her lover: “He was like most men I know, obsessed with an activity he wasn’t very good at…” Xuela doesn’t need sex, activity. She is in need of sex, of feeling; a feeling out of place in contradictions and disappointments-her mother. With sex, Kincaid is a conqueror. Why did mommy have to die? But her mother is alive, alive in her, revealing herself in the causality of Xuela’s life.

Because Xuela “long ago came to recognize this as perhaps an incessant part of my way of being and that is why I looked for a man who could offer relief to this feeling.” Kincaid tells us this story, when he is about to unravel his chest with her pointy purple fruity nipples, he writes that they are in a state of constant sensation. Xuela needs a man to suck her nipples to relieve the feeling of irritability. Kincaid is taking over conquering as his mother.

While Xuela was alone caressing herself. She deliberately trapped her hands in her hair between her legs. She remembers a man. The man she knew, a man she dreamed of, a man who was far from her, a man she wanted on top of her. Not the man who is currently on top of her, because he is not at all the person she dreams of lying on top of her. Well, that dream belongs to another woman’s husband. And it made sense that she would want this other woman’s husband, benign though he might be a conquest. And Xuela like Kincaid is a conqueror.

Emotionally and physically Xuela is on the attack. The little island of hers, colonized by Great Britain. Protected against insinuations of uncivilized creatures only fit for banana production. The metaphorically represented colonizers with a white skin wrapped in English culture will be defeated. Kincaid rages against the colonial spirit, “a spirit that lives in hierarchies of skin color.” Moira, the wife of his lover, came to symbolize the epitome of colonial culture. She was pleased to be of the English people. her identity full of charitable sympathies for others with contradictions, and many complaints.

Like Kincaid’s West Indies provincial counterpart. Jamaican dancehall queen, the one called Lady Saw, who boasts: “I’ve got your man and you can’t do anything about it / You may think he’ll come back to you, but… I doubt it / There’s no point, you even call Your man, try to figure it out / ‘Cause I’ve got your man, and you can’t do a thing about it.” Kincaid, however, is mundane and brutal with her attacks, even deadly. In describing Moira, Kincaid gives an accurate account of the vain selflessness of colonialism. She she Moira, a lady “a combination of elaborate fabrications, a collection of external facial arrangements and body parts, distortions, lies, and empty efforts.” Moira is far above the ordinary woman who moans during sex and grunts when she excretes. Unladylike Xuela is a woman, ordinary and indistinguishable from the rest. Lady Moira, far from sympathizing with others, is a contradiction and ambivalence of self-loathing, dehumanization and false sympathies, a liar to herself.

Forceful, brutal, shameless is Kincaid, and go Selfish, at least with its protagonist Xuela. When describing her sex with Phillip. For the moment, it began to fade, and she was not a prisoner of those primitive and essential feelings, orgasm and sex. At the time when Phillip was softening her privacy. Her mind asks Roland for a new source of pleasure- Wow! Kincaid’s honesty isn’t quite human. And one of those terrible truths, well, genuinely human truths. Once again, Kincaid hints at his mother’s influence in dealing with the pleasures of his life. Because he, Ronald, was a married stevedore, the same kind of man as his father; He will also be conquered symbolically.

Not that conquering is easy. For him to be conquered by her first, she loves honestly, with the truth. For Ronald she serves as an essential emotional symbol. Xuela, aware of the consequences, affirms: “who would betray whom, who would be captive, who would be a captor, who would give and who would take, what would I do”. And what she does is take no prisoners, brutality, honesty: “because she couldn’t have loved Ronald the way I did if he didn’t love other women.” She said this after Ronald’s wife slapped her on the head, hard! To which Xuela responded without bitterness: “I consider that he is inferior to me to fight for a man.”

And in the middle of a “fight” Xuela gives perspective. As she rents her clothes, her mind is on the sensation of Phillip sucking on her nipples. Her animating her chest, splitting in two. Because she Xuela could not decide which feeling she wanted to dominate over the other. A breast in Phillip’s mouth or the sensation of saliva evaporating from the one she just left her mouth. In the middle of a fight! With a strong-armed married West Indian woman who is hell-bent on keeping the man from her. Even producing a list of names, of another woman she had presumably slapped. Undaunted, Xuela declares that she possesses herself. Phillip will be another on her list; and that the wrath of his wife, like the best sunday of her, and the intentions are out of place.

Again Kincaid is right. Like Phillip’s wife, we are wrong. Whose ambivalence of hers sees her conquering a husband by fighting over a man. A man, a misguided symbol of her fear. Lost and found in “My Mother’s Autobiography”, her mother. Xuela is right, of course. It is you who have to Possess. The people we meet with are there to help us navigate this unfamiliar terrain now. Familiar with all of us, then. Like angry lovers, they reveal nothing because they, too, are on the same quest to discover her mother in her autobiography, sometimes loving her, sometimes hating her, and rarely telling the terrible truth.