"I would rather be dead": Nostalgia and Narrative in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy

Abstract

Toward the end of Jamaica Kincaid's 1990 novel Lucy, the protagonist, Lucy, identifies the only things she claims as her own in the face of her chosen exile, her poverty, and her "history": "I had memory, I had anger, I had despair" (134). This announcement comes at a moment when it is especially clear that Kincaid's protagonist has chosen a particular identity for herself: that of an artist living in the metropole of New York City and that of a person who cannot go "back home." Although Lucy's emphasis on her memory, anger, and despair link her expatriation to colonial history and neocolonial alienation, I argue that the novel—like its protagonist—refuses to participate in now-familiar postcolonial plots of cultural reconnection and return. Lucy, in fact, reads as a pitched battle against the assumptions that shape many of the oppositional narratives of exile and displacement (most known through their cultural nationalist incarnations) that have become central to both postcolonial and Caribbean literary canons: namely, that the alienating experience of "exile" leads inevitably to the celebrations of "return."

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