Jamaica Kincaid's (Book of) Walking through Reclaimed Paradise

Abstract

The essay deals with the postcolonial œuvre of Jamaica Kincaid focusing on the reclaiming of humanity beyond/other than the dialectics of master and slave. Along this general interest, Kincaid chooses to investigate the figuration of Eden, often the orientalized place of western imagination, as the trait that accompanies the development of her writing: Paradise is the place to refuse, to be rewritten, to be infused with new forms of knowledge, the natural location to be hybridized and populated with alterity. It is the original outcome of the creative poetics that identifies the journey as the main motif of life change: at the core of her auto-biographical attention, Kincaid places the diasporic experience, the search of different genealogies, her love for gardening, and the intensity of her travel writing.