LUCY

Author: Jamaica Kincaid
Year: 2017 (1990)
Publisher: Tranan
Language: Swedish (translator Lena Fagerström)

”The nice thing about identity is that everybody has one”, Dame Marilyn Strathern once told me during one of our few chats at Cambridge. My research at the time was in the onerous phase of deconstructing the concept of collective identity searching for the origins of its formation. I had come as far as realising that trying to establish the inception of a personal or group identity without understanding the mere concept of identity first was a bit like trying to find the source of the Nile without understanding the concept of water.

Another anthropologist, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, defines identity on the most basic level as “inward sameness, outward difference”. By this he seems to subscribe to a Platonian theory of forms where an idea, an item, a person, or indeed a group of people can be defined by some characteristics that apply particularly to them. We recognise and identify a chair by our consensus on a set of properties that all chairs have and only chairs have. That which is not a chair, must by necessity be something else.

For this definition to be useful we have to allow for a space where concepts meet to constitute a border, or an interface, where the inward/outward sameness/difference dichotomy is manifested. As articulated by Stuart Hall and later elaborated on by Lawrence Grossman among others, there are essentially two models for the production of identities: one offers that there is some intrinsic and constant feature to every identity that essentially immunises it from getting mixed up with other equally perpetual identities, the other proposes that identities are never translucent, never static, and never complete but instead subject to context, time, and often arbitrary choice.

On this backdrop and as someone who did his anthropological fieldwork in Haiti in the Caribbean: the Mecca, as it were, for those who take an interest in creolisation, identity studies, and flux, I had long wanted to read Jamaica Kincaid’s most famous novel “Lucy”. In this short book (my copy is less than 160 pages), Kincaid explores ideas of hard borders between cultural domains and proposes that they may be close to impenetrable so that even communication between them is prohibited or at the very least grotesquely disfigured.

Lucy is a young girl from a Caribbean island who is sent to work as a maid in a well-to-do family in Long Island, New York. She is warmly welcomed and promptly embraced by her host family who treat her with love and respect and who, from their standpoint, try their best to invite her into their midst. Especially Mariah, the mother, makes great efforts to connect with Lucy and share her world with her. Lucy on the other hand is reserved and grumpy and soon decides that integrating with her host family, as the lady of the house so desperately desires, is not an option.

As most of Kincaid’s writing, “Lucy” is largely autobiographical. Kincaid was also an island girl from Antigua sent away to work as a black maid in a white family in the US when she was just a teenager. She was also well-received and treated as part of the family and she also used it as an opportunity to make a future for herself in the new country. In fact, she made it better than most earning a professorship at Harvard and being repeatedly mentioned among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yet “Lucy” is written from the standpoint of resentment, anger, and even hatred and revenge. It is a study of resistance. This is what finally makes this book somewhat interesting. The trigger points are in Lucy’s relationships to people around her and how they shape her identity. The divide between her and Mariah. The rift between her and her mother. The unfinished business with her father. Her friendship with Peggy. Lucy is locked in a continuous struggle for personal space and the power to define her own existence and yet it is increasingly obvious that the more bitter her tussle, the more embedded it itself becomes in her identity. She slowly turns into the sum of her tug-o-war with the world.

In the end she realises that her only escape is isolation and denial. By removing herself from the universal social horseplay and by emotionally disconnecting from her past, present, and future personal relationships, she effectively tries to withdraw from the sameness/difference grating and in so doing obtain some form of liberty. Being something else, sometimes means being nothing. “I was all alone in the world, and this is no small accomplishment.”

I will be honest to admit that I did not altogether enjoy “Lucy” as much as I had hoped. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Maybe I was in the wrong mood. Maybe Lucy’s cantankerous character put me off. Although the topic is highly interesting, I found the story bland and the storytelling unappealing, unimaginative, and slow. I readily admit that while the author makes many powerful points and the underlying analysis and the understanding of the clash between several different worlds across generations, genders, geographies, ethnicities, and historical contexts are crisp and moreover from a perspective that is impossible for a white, European man to replicate or fully grasp, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired and, in my opinion, falls short of the masterpiece that this novel is frequently declared to be.