David Remnick: All manner of writers have graced the pages of the New Yorker in the past century, including many of the greatest prose stylists of our time. It's very rare to find one who nailed their unique voice right off the bat the way Jamaica Kincaid did. It was 1974 when Jamaica first began writing for this magazine, reporting about life in New York, very often for the Talk of the Town section. She was a young immigrant from the Caribbean island of Antigua. Kincaid started writing with a wit and a particular bite about the world she had entered.

She went on to write about her family, about Antigua, about how people from the Caribbean see Americans next door. She wrote about the dissolution of a marriage, about gardening, which she took up with extraordinary passion. She once said, "Everything I write is autobiographical, but none of it is true in the sense of a court of law. You know, a lie is just a lie. The truth, on the other hand, is complicated." Jamaica Kincaid's new book is a collection of pieces that spans almost half a century in print. It's a total delight. It's called Putting Myself Together.

Jamaica, I've been reading you for half my life. I have to say, there are so many pieces here that I knew very little about. In a way, they form a rough autobiography of your writing life, at least. Your first words printed in the New Yorker, it turns out, were a dispatch from the West Indian American Day parade. This is for our listeners who haven't attended a huge event that marches through Brooklyn on Labor Day. Could you read an excerpt from that very first Talk of the Town piece that you wrote for the New Yorker in 1974?

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes. "I got to watch the parade from the second-best platform of dignitaries. The first best platform of dignitaries was reserved for politicians. West Indians are the only group of people I know who still have a great deal of respect for politicians, men of the cloth, and schoolteachers. Anyone who makes a career in any of the above fields automatically becomes dignified. I saw Shirley Chisholm. She sat with her legs crossed at the ankles. Howard Samuels was there. No one seemed to recognize him, and he looked like a man who had got himself invited to the wrong party.

Soon after the first float appeared, it carried the Carnival Queen and her lady-in-waiting. The queen looked regal enough in her long, white gown and silver crown. Instead of waving to the crowd and smiling like a dummy the way queens usually behave, she was snapping her fingers, wiggling her hips, and shuffling her feet all at the same time. I liked her very much and personally think she's going to start a new vogue in royal public behavior."

David Remnick: [chuckles] Jamaica, this is you right off the bat. You're 70-- How old now?

Jamaica Kincaid: Now I'm 76.

David Remnick: You were 25. It sounds like you. Don't you think, when you read this? Do you hear yourself?

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes, I'm surprised it sounds like me.

David Remnick: Tell me how you came to write that piece. You came as an immigrant from Antigua, then still a British colony, and at age 25, you're writing a Talk of the Town piece. In short order, how did that happen?

Jamaica Kincaid: My mother took me out of school. I was very smart, and the idea was to send me to work to help support the family. I was very resentful and even bitter, though I didn't have words for these feelings. Anyway, they sent me off to America with a family, and I then proceeded to get a GED, go to school late night. By the way, that would have made me, in those days, an illegal alien. Though now I think an undocumented person.

David Remnick: You're saying ICE would have been hunting you down if it had been today?

Jamaica Kincaid: Absolutely. For all I know, they still might. They might find something wrong with my records. Maybe, I don't know. I wait for them to turn up, and I'm not afraid of them.

David Remnick: You were working, as I remember, as-- is what we now call--

Jamaica Kincaid: An au pair.

David Remnick: An au pair. A nanny.

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes. Though I called myself a servant because au pairs were usually young white women from Europe, taking a break or something. The family I lived with did not think of me as a servant. They had people who cleaned their homes and so on. I mainly looked after their children, but I always had in mind that I would do something on my own. I didn't know what it was. I'd always liked writing and reading, though I never really wrote anything. I would pretend I've written the book I was reading.

David Remnick: You're one of the few writers that I've ever heard of whose-- you say that the first book you read was the dictionary.

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes.

David Remnick: Then you say something that I think most writers wouldn't be able to say, that you read the Bible whole.

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes.

David Remnick: I believe both of those things when I read you.

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes. That repetition of words comes from the dictionary, and giving the same word a different meaning. The way of telling a story, again, repetition. You know how the Bible will begin a story and then tell it again. The way it will tell it is to begin with a conjunction, which you're not supposed to do. I think not enough is written about or thought about the profound philosophical implications of the word "and".

David Remnick: How do you mean?

Jamaica Kincaid: If you begin a sentence with "and", there's a whole world that is not described, and it's joined to what you're writing, but you don't see it, it's somewhere off the page.

David Remnick: How did you come to write at age 25 for the New Yorker? How did that happen?

Jamaica Kincaid: George Trow used to write about me in Talk of the Town. He would refer to me as our sassy Black friend, Jamaica Kincaid. One day, I remember saying something to him. He'd taken me to dinner at a Lebanese restaurant. I said something to him, and he laughed so hard. He said, "Would you like to meet Mr. Shawn?" I had no idea who Mr. Shawn was.

David Remnick: The editor of the magazine at the time.

Jamaica Kincaid: I said, "Oh, sure, yes." He took me to meet Mr. Shawn at the Algonquin for lunch. I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu because I was always hungry. Mr. Shawn ordered cornflakes, I think. I was horrified because I thought I had used up the lunch budget.

[laughter]

Jamaica Kincaid: We talked for a while. Then afterwards, that was the spring of 1974. Later, he said to George, "She should give it a try." I did. That must have been April or May, because I still have the dress I wore. I didn't really have anything to write, but the West Indian Day Parade was coming up. What I just read to you was supposed to be a summary. I thought Mr. Shawn would rewrite them or have George rewrite them. He published it just the way I wrote it. That's when I knew that I was writing.

David Remnick: Somewhere in the book, you say that you didn't think of yourself as Black or African American. That you grew up where everybody was Black.

Jamaica Kincaid: I did.

David Remnick: How did that shape your arrival, your identity, in those terms?

Jamaica Kincaid: People were racist, as you can imagine, all the time. I never understood it. I thought they were just badly brought up. They were so rude. I never had the feeling that if I was in a place and I was the only African American, Black person, whatever John MacArthur wants to call me now. It didn't seem to affect my inner self, that self of who I think I am.

David Remnick: When you came here, Jamaica, you had a different name. Was that part of a reinvention of yourself? Was it part of a creative exploration, an idea of yourself as a writer? Why did you do it?

Jamaica Kincaid: When I was sent away by my mother, and I was so bitter about it, and all I could think about was my mother, what my mother had done, how she had brought me up. I immediately started to write. I didn't want her to know that I was doing this thing that I was sure I would fail at. I was sure I would fail at it, but that wouldn't have stopped me. My mother was so full of pride. She didn't want people to know that I understood the darkness that she had cast me into by sending me away and interrupting my education.

She would pretend she never read it, which was very good for me, because then I could just write, because she's never going to read it. That was another reason to, later, I could understand why I had to change my name, because Elaine Potter Richardson could not write about Elaine Potter Richardson, but Jamaica Kincaid could write about Elaine Potter Richardson.

David Remnick: You write a lot about your childhood and your family. There's another piece that appeared in 1992 in the journal Grand Street, quite a wonderful journal, one that changed a lot over time, and it's a piece called Biography of a Dress. Would you read that passage for us, Jamica?

Jamaica Kincaid: "My second birthday was not a major event in anyone's life, certainly not my own. It was not my first and it was not my last, I am now 43 years old, but my mother, perhaps because of circumstances I would not have known then and to know now is not a help, perhaps only because of an established custom but only in her family, other people didn't do this, to mark the occasion of turning two years old had my ears pierced.

One day, at dusk I would not have called it that then, I was taken to someone's house, a woman from Dominica, a woman who was as dark as my mother was fair, and yet they were so similar that I am sure now as I was then that they shared the same tongue, and two thorns that had been heated in a fire were pierced through my earlobes. I do not now know and could not have known then if the pain I experienced resembled in any way the pain my mother experienced while giving birth to me or even if my mother, in having my ears bored in that way, at that time, meant to express hostility or aggression toward mes, but without meaning to and without knowing that it was possible to mean to."

David Remnick: There are many things fascinating about this piece of writing, and one of them is a technical thing that you're able to indicate with your voice, but the reader on the page would see more vividly is your use of parentheses constantly. Through one paragraph, there are probably, I don't know, a half a dozen, at least, sets of parentheses.

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes.

David Remnick: Tell me about that. You're telling a story and you're recollecting something, but you're also moving in and out of time. The use of parentheses is just masterful.

Jamaica Kincaid: It turns out that I have been obsessed with the notion of time from before I even knew there was such a thing. I grew up in a place where you told time by the way the church bell rang one o'clock, 1:00, two o'clock, 2:00, three o'clock 3:00. I would sit there listening for the time in between one and two. Sometimes it would seem forever before two came along. Something happens between then and now. I've written a book called See Now Then, to put time in a domesticated way because it's one of the things we humans do with time is we domesticate it. Lunch at noon, dinner, and so on.

Just yesterday, I read that this very day we are in is the shortest day of the year because the Earth will only go around the sun not quite 24 hours. Scientists don't know whether it's the moon moving away. There are all sorts of explanations. Now, I'm the person who, when I see that and read that, my day's completely undone because I think, "What--"

David Remnick: Time is your obsession.

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes.

David Remnick: Somewhere in the book, there's a reference to reading Proust, who is the great poet of time.

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes, but I read Proust and then I couldn't read it anymore.

David Remnick: Why is that? Too much chocolate cake? By chocolate cake, I mean the real-- It's very rich in the way a cake--

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes, yes. I began to think of it as this indulgence Europeans have, diverting themselves from the terrible things they've done. Yes, the chocolate. I want to say to Mr. Proust, "Do you know how this chocolate gets made, or these madeleines, and all these little fine things you're interested in? Do you know what happened?" Now, people hear me say that, they say, "Oh, but the aesthetics, the this, the that." I cannot, for some reason, get away from the fact that--

David Remnick: You know where the sugar was made.

Jamaica Kincaid: I know where the sugar was made. I know where these things come from. Yes.

David Remnick: Yet I would say, Jamaica, in your own fiction, the politics of things, the history of things is not-- I mean, it's not like Dickens. It's not like that political realism. It's well submerged in a sense. No?

Jamaica Kincaid: Yes, I would say that because it's not that I'm opposed to the chocolate being made. I would like it recognized. There is a way-- Life is complicated, and we human beings are always in violation, and we seem unable to help it. I wish it would be more recognized that the chocolate didn't just come out of the clouds.

David Remnick: Or a box.

Jamaica Kincaid: Or a box. The box had to be made to-- that it has a reality to it that is even magical. I don't mind Columbus Day at all. I don't mind. I have a bust of Thomas Jefferson in my garden. I don't mind things, but I like them to be at least admitted.

David Remnick: Now, Jamaica, I know you fault me for this, and you're 100% right to do so, but I'm not an outdoorsman. I'm what's called an indoorsman. You are a passionate, passionate gardener. I'd like you to read a bit from The Kind of Gardener I Am Not. That essay opens with a passage about you and another writer, Ian Fraser, an old buddy of yours.

Jamaica Kincaid: Oh, gosh.

David Remnick: You're on a road trip together. You've stopped at a small town in Montana.

Jamaica Kincaid: [laughs] Yes. Let me see. It goes like this. "There was still quite a bit of daylight, so Sandy, Ian Fraser, who had been to Cut Bank before, drove us around the small town, and then we got out and walked a bit. It was in Cut Bank that I saw the garden and the kind of gardener that I am not. In the front yard of each little house, the houses were small, bungalow-like, a style of architecture very much suited to vast expanses of landscape, were little gardens blooming with flowers. The flowers, almost without exception, were petunias, red, purple, white, impatiens, portulaca, and short, red salvia. There was one garden that seemed more cared for than the others and that had a plaque placed prominently in a garden bed that read: 'Garden of The Week.'

That is exactly the kind of gardener I am not and exactly the kind of garden I will never have. A garden made for a week is unknown to me. For years, I have been making a garden and unmaking it too. It isn't out of dissatisfaction that I do and don't do, it is out of curiosity. That curiosity has not led to stasis. It has led to a conversation. And so it is, I have been having a conversation in the garden. And so it will be until I die."

David Remnick: You will forgive me, Jamaica. What does it mean to have a conversation in the garden?

Jamaica Kincaid: Ah, people, when they're in the garden, they say it's relaxing and it's all sorts of things that I do not find the garden to be. When I'm in the garden, I'm thinking. I'll have a conversation with a plant I was putting in the ground. It turned out to be named after Thomas Jefferson, but its common name is Twinleaf, and it has one leaf, but the leaf is divided in two, and the two halves are not identical. That seemed to me to reflect his personality as I know it from breeding him.

The other way around, which I know is going to sound awfully hooey, but it happens to be true. Plants in my garden tend to be taller than the literature, and they stoop over the way my back is stooped. Plants that you never really think of as self-sowing put themselves in places that I haven't put them. Of course, it's a bird or an ant or something that's moved the seed around. The garden itself is having a conversation with me and I with it. I really take it-- I don't take it as a plant, as just something for my enjoyment or my enhancement.

I really believe we are having a back and forth. I was trying to understand the various ways leaves arrange themselves on a stem. As I was-- I think you'd call it research, though I just call it reading. I came upon something called Fibonacci. I had never heard of Fibonacci, but there are some plants that arrange themselves in this way, which is-- You know the Fibonacci. See, everybody knows but me.

David Remnick: I don't know [crosstalk] just for the record.

Jamaica Kincaid: Okay, the mathematics of it is 1 and 1 make 2, 2 and 1 make 3, 3 and 2 make 5. It's mathematical. That is the conversation. Here I am, 76 years of age, and I've just understood something that every school child understands.

David Remnick: How are the rabbits and the deer this summer? Are they eating you alive?

Jamaica Kincaid: No, because there's been a lot of rain. There are a lot of things to eat. The rabbits, I think, have been more malicious. The deer look at it longingly from a distance, and I run outside with a shotgun that I shoot over their heads. I think that will tell them that there's somebody who's not kind to them. They really, and I do believe they can read. The deer can read. They're always going to a place that says, "This place is protected from hunting." It's silly, but not silly. It's arrogant, I think, to think that things don't know. The other existences don't know.

We have something that's a back and forth. I don't mean to be a Buddhist. I'm not talking about something spiritual, though I suppose it is. I don't mean it to be, but I can see with my own eyes that there are things in the garden that respond to me and me to them.

David Remnick: What are you writing these days? Is your attitude toward writing, whether it's ambition or passion, or focus, is it any different than the piece that we began our conversation about?

Jamaica Kincaid: For me, the world began in the year 1492. The world, which is different from the Earth. 1492 is the year of the expulsion of Jews from Europe. If you follow the way human beings have treated each other. 1492, the vegetable kingdom was rearranged completely. Tea was sent somewhere. Sugar cane was sent somewhere. Not that things shouldn't change, but they can be changed without bloodshed. There can be an exchange between people without domination and evil.

For me, as I reflect and look at this book of things, I always tell my students, a writer should know everything and know nothing. There's that thin line you walk, and the know nothing is your unconscious. I'm really amazed at how consistent certain things have been in my writing. One of them is the world begins in 1492.

David Remnick: Jamaica Kincaid, thank you so much.

Jamaica Kincaid: Thank you, David. It's wonderful talking to you.

David Remnick: It's so much fun. It's a great guest to see you. Jamaica Kincaid's new collection gathers writings from 1974 on, and it's called Putting Myself Together. You can also find work by Jamaica at newyorker.com, and of course, you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well. Newyorker.com.

[music]

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