The Power of Reading: Jamaica Kincaid on How Reading Formed Her | Louisiana Channel

my mother was a great reader and uh i was her only child for nine years um so when i was little she carried me around everywhere with her and one of the places she took me was the library because she loved to read books and she would sit there and read and i would interrupt her i couldn't understand why she was so interested in this thing the book i didn't know it was a book she was just interested in it but not me and so she thought if she taught me to read i would become interested in my own books and leave her alone and she did teach me to read but she didn't tell me there was an alphabet so i didn't know i just learned to read words the book i most remember uh reading from was she was reading a biography of um [Music] louis pasteur and i remember it in particular i think because she explained to me that the reason she boiled by my milk was a form of pasteurization and it's because of him so um you know but but she just went through the words and she would sound them out and then i somehow picked it up and then uh could go on i just somehow seemed to know i i and i actually have the ex remember the experience of of um and i have written about this of as if the words just leapt up into my mouth but which must only now be my imagination but i felt very uh connected to this process of the words just leaping off the page and entering me and uh so i learned to read but um i still bothered her so um by the time i was three and a half years of age i could read anything i didn't necessarily understand um but that wasn't the point was that i could just read things and uh people from the neighborhood couldn't believe it so they would come and bring me things and say here read this and i would read it and they would say oh that's wonderful and um i suspect that um you know sometimes people say i'm confident i don't think i'm confident at all but i suspect that that sort of vain praise at a young age you know makes you think um better of yourself than you are anyway three and a half i could i could read and was still uh botheration as we would say to my mother so she took me to um school uh the moravian school i remember and um but you could only go to school if you were five and uh she said to me now remember if they ask you how old you are you're five and so um i went to school and uh met something called the alphabet which i found very disturbing so many letters when i already knew how to arrange them and how to make them into something and even worse was this thing called vowels i didn't know what to do with vowels what did it have to do with anything you could just the words were what was important um so i i the little books they gave you you know c jack do this and so on um i've i i just found it um [Music] uh i i wouldn't have found it stupid but i found it um not interesting at all so i think perhaps i might have even diverted myself not only by undermining the class uh by making the other students misbehave um it's around then that i developed my talent for mimicry i i'm very good at at mimicking um one little book i can even remember the cover of it it was uh about a farmer and his name was mr joe and uh but he had no wife he had a cow and the cow had no name but he had a dog and the dog was named mr dan and uh uh a cat named miss tibbs um and a hen called mother hen and she had 12 chicks mother hen had 12 chicks uh 11 of them were little golden chicks you know the way chicks look the one and they had no names the twelfth one um was a little bigger and he was completely black feathered uh and his name was percy and he was always getting in trouble in fact he was the one i think um who was supposed to guide us into behaving well or to being obedient it was always percy don't do that percy did this bad thing uh one thing he wanted to do was to fly to the top of the railing of the fence and his mother mother head was very worried that since he was still a chick he would hurt himself and so she would say you know don't do it don't do it and but he was always trying to do it and one day he did he did succeed at flying to the top of the fence and sure enough he fell down and broke i cannot remember whether it was his leg or his wing but he broke something and it was very disheartening and worrying for his mother but the sentence that described this was percy the chick had a fall if in retrospect i suppose as i well that whole book never left me it was so i suppose attached uh to my being a reader it was attached in a way you might say to my even becoming a writer because it was the first time i was involved with reading with words and a lie or a fiction or a fabulation i was not five so i remember it uh percy the chick had a fall later i i could think well we were black children and uh uh we were trying to do something and we were always being told what we shouldn't do our whole lives really were about limitations you know we were for instance never going to be english people but we had to know all sorts of things about english people well to connect to the um limitations we were expected to really absorb and imbibe um one time i did something wrong and my punishment and the things i did wrong were misbehaving or encouraging other people to misbehave um and my punishment was to write out a thousand times ignorance is bliss it's folly to be wise basically you're a fool if you try not to be done yeah to ig it's it's wise to be ignorant it's good to be ignorant is what that means ignorance is wise it's fully ignorance is bliss ignorance is bliss it's folly to be wise um clearly that did not make a big impression on me only i remember that this was being done to me um much later uh around when i was seven again uh i had done something wrong in class misbehaved and my punishment was to copy books one and two of paradise lost by john milton and which as you know is the four uh poem about the fall of man and for some reason i remembered percy the chick had a fall um possibly because there was a photo print uh with a line um a print not a painting a print of lucifer um standing on a with one foot on one foot uh at one foot in the air he looked very uh like a ballet a ballerina um on a charred globe and he was all in black and he had um black curls and the curls were snakes so his hair was just like snakes alive and he was standing there and the line that for some reason i remember from it is uh better to better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven and i thought to me that is still true i um i didn't understand how i uh how i would absorb it so that i didn't understand it entered me um like a you know chronic disease really is what one what i would say um but but coming back to me was that percy the chick had a fall and that percy was black and that lucifer was black and that his um misbehavior was that he rebelled against um an overweight weaning authority um so that would be the beginning of my autobiography and reading and and writing um also around the same time for my seventh birthday my mother gave me a concise oxford dictionary and i read it the way you would have you would read a book i began with a and i ended with z or zed as we called it zed and uh and then i read it again um all of those things i i i could tell you uh up to the age of seven a number of things happened to be um that i remember uh at seven that are recurring themes in my life so and in my writing so the dictionary the part it would have played uh is the way words turn up in my writing the same words but meaning something different deployed in a different way and repetition and my obsession with paradise and the loss of it and justice and injustice i think would have come from those early days the other the other thing i read obsessively uh even then um was the king james version of the bible um though i had much difficulty with the bible uh uh in the new testament after the gospels um foreign i have started then an everlasting quarrel with the apostle paul and his letters to various sects of christianity but my um to balance that my admiration for him is it's very silly really i always say to my students well how many ephesians or galatians read paul a few but where are the ephesians and the galatians today none there are none but paul's letters exist and so that's what you want to do as a writer you want to write for your writing to exist long after the people who might read it are no longer even a trace that they only remembered because you wrote them letters people who knew me as a child are not surprised uh that i became a writer because apparently i was always writing imagine myself writing or reading to inanimate objects i would arrange stones in the yard and pretend that they were my audience and i would read shakespeare whatever was in my school books and i would read to them and scold them because they mispronounced there's always a very power dynamic as one always has in a colonial situation um the colonial situation is the oxygen of it is power of course so um i had that i read i read a lot as much as i could find at one point i'd read all the books in the children's section of the library and began to even steal books i would steal books from the library and put them in my underwear [Laughter] under my my clothes uh and then sometimes i would venture over into the adult section um and and read though i read a lot of non-uh fiction i didn't really understand novels but at some point i think i was 10 or so when i was misbehaving and this is a very big moment in my childhood and my french teacher a man named mr flax uh he just graduated from uh college or school wherever but he was um imposed on us and he was full of himself and we really gave him the business we were so mischievous anyway he could see i was the ring leader and um he had a book and he thrust it at me and dragged me off in a corner of the classroom and pushed me down and gave me the book and he said here read this and the book was jane eyre and after that i i became slightly different person i sort of separated myself in a way from my classmates because i felt they were after i read that book i felt i was in possession of some of some kind of wasn't knowledge some kind of thing that they were not privy to some kind of um oh i want to use the word resilience but i wouldn't it wouldn't be that um but i was in possession of something um and i began to uh right jane eyre myself and i was um can remember quite clearly being both the author of janea and jane eyre um i would take tans in um and i had read somewhere no i read on the back of the book um that charlotte bronte had lived in belgium and that she was poor and and so i was i would pretend in the tropical heat of antigua that i was living in cold belgium and i was hungry and i would walk around just pretending um yeah that i was uh uh charlotte bronte and so um in in in a big way that was an influence on my life i i actually became a nanny myself um [Music] which is a very poor version of a governess um and um you know it's quite easy to see my book uh lucy and her um character as very much influenced by jane it's quite easy to see that i think also her name is lucy which is her mother tells her is short for lucifer our education um [Music] i think was designed in by you know people who went to eaton who ran the british empire and you will find that there's a certain [Music] um upper certainly up until the 50s as certain uniformity to the education of people who were colonized by the british empire they all have the same curriculum every one of us know the wordsworth poem i wandered lonely as a cloud um we know the same shakespeare the same paradise laws the same uh lots of things the white cliffs of dover the the history we know so much about uh england we know the history of the romans in england uh in britain i can remember reading a book um called roman britain um why uh i don't know um except in my case it turns out to have been very uh um a good thing because it's made me interested in um it made me even interested in the uh whole business of empire the whole business of going leaving your home and going out into the world and subjugating people and taking their things and feeling good making yourself feel good about that but anyway um [Music] i remember we had to often the last hymn in a uh anglican a protestant church in uh antigua was a hymn about it's a goodbye hymn really uh and it was about seeing once again the white cliffs of dover and um you know these we black people would be singing about this geological formation um that we didn't know how it came about in any case and would never see so we were and that's just a crude example of of this uh empire business of making people uh displacing their natural sense of who they might be with something else something for something they were not familiar with at all you know a good psychiatrist could explain this better than i can but anyway we were singing the last hymn uh in church was the white cliffs something about the white cliffs of dover which are not really white anyway um [Music] so that was one thing uh the other thing was about you know lots of things we wouldn't see and i for some reason singled out i wandered lonely as a cloud and i think i might have been 10 or 11 when i decided i was going to unlearn the poem and now that sounds awfully precocious but it wasn't my mother was very political she was always involved in publicly in in various political uh engagements so that i would make that kind of decision is not so far-fetched anyway um so there's this poem that um it is a beautiful poem though i only came to see that much later um about daffodils i wondered loudly as a cloud and um if there's anything if there are ten beautiful natural things in a caribbean landscape one of them would be the clouds the clouds are oh gosh they're like huge buildings and thick and white they're extremely white and they just float around this blue sky and come back and forth so the whole thing um i wondered lonely as a cloud the image of it i i i knew it very well and uh but it was um to see these daffodils and we were asked to commemorate something that we would most of us would never see or would never um really understand so i uh took a dislike to daffodils which i've written about in my book um lucy much later uh as i came became a gardener i i never grew daffodils i always didn't understand them or didn't well i hated them because of this experience or felt i hated them and then one day as i became more of a writer and thinking about things i thought what an injustice i myself was inflicting on wordsworth and the daffodil because it wasn't wordsworth fault that i had been forced to learn the daffodils and he would have objected i think to my position as a colonized uh uh person so um uh in becoming a gardener i i started to plant daffodils on my i have an expansive lawn or something and i started by planting a thousand daffodils a year until i got to ten thousand and then um i call it redeeming wordsworth i recite the poem and drink cheap champagne um every year when they're in full bloom but i now have 20 000 and in the fall i plant 2 000 i plan to just plant daffodils until i die uh all over um the yard and now i i i find that there are a lot of things that one you you have to redeem you have to um take take out of the horror into which your many europeans have placed it the daffodil should never have been part of the colonial enterprise i don't know what should have been part of the colonial enterprise um so in that case there should never have been a colonial enterprise leave people alone be friends be fair go home it's interesting to me to see all these people migrating from other parts of the world migrating to europe and europeans are so uh upset with it you know they call people economic immigrants and uh but especially economic immigrants but when europeans were going out into our parts of the world all of them were economic immigrants no one left europe because they were rich they left because they were poor and they went to africa the caribbean south america to make money well these people coming here are poor so it's a reverse and um somehow it should be understood and i don't know you know it's sort of so weird to see the british especially saying you know you can't come in you can't come in they went everywhere and it up

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Keywords: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum, art, literature, jamaica kincaid, jamaica kincaid literature, jamaica kincaid caribbean, what is jamaica kincaid famous for, jamaica kincaid family, jamaica kincaid mother, jamaica kincaid stories

Id: wTakQJM18oA

Length: 26min 23sec (1583 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022