(Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997)
Précis:
To get to where we need to go, sometimes we must leave people behind. We must leave those people behind that are not benefiting us in any way and try to make a better situation for ourselves. Jamaica’s relationship with her mother was a very important relationship that is repeated throughout the story because it sets the standards of what it means to be a good parent. Sometimes it means that we must make sacrifices to benefit our children, and we must do things to protect the welfare of our children. Jamaica always thought her mother was not a good parent but in a way she did protect her from many things, including herself. Returning to Antigua because of her brother’s illness allowed her to recognize things about her family she never knew before. Even though her brother died she was not sad about it because she has her own truth about death.
Quotes:
1. “…her presence only served to underline this- she had not said to a friend that if it were not for her vigilance, I would have ended up not in the home and situation that I now occupied but instead with ten different children by ten different men” (Pg.135).
Jamaica believed that her mother was unnecessarily hard on her all the time but I believe it was because she didn’t want her child to make the same mistakes she had made in the past. Jamaica should have been thanking her mom instead of resenting her for trying to protect her from certain things.
2. “This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don’t like at all and would like to avoid” (Pg. 137).
Everyone is going to die one day and we need not be depressed about death because our time will come soon.
3. “And my brother died, for he kept dying; each time I remembered that he had died it was as if he had just at that moment died, and the whole experience of it would begin again; my brother had died, and I didn’t live him; or, at any rate, I didn’t love him in the way that I had come to understand love” (Pg. 148).
Jamaica was never able to tell her brother that she actually loved him. She didn’t love him the way he wanted her to love him. It seems like she misses him now that he is gone.
It is true that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. The last time Jamaica saw her brother before she left Antigua, was when he was three years old. She returned several years later not knowing what to expect but she didn’t know how to proceed. Everyone had gotten so close and she felt left out of the family. I feel like she was a little sad about his death because she never got to develop a relationship with her brother. This does remind me of the fact that it’s stupid to hold grudges against people because you never know when your last day will be on this earth so make each day count for something. Don’t waste your life doing things you aren’t proud of, live your life.
