Jamaica Kincaid, PARTY
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the webinominated podcast.
[0:12]Moms don't have time to read books.
[0:13]This episode of Moms don't have time to read books has been sponsored by Himalaya,
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[0:31]I am just beyond excited to be talking to the legendary writer, novelist, and professor
[0:36]Jamaica Kincaid today.
[0:38]Jamaica is most recently the author of Children's Book Party, illustrated by Ricardo Cortez.
[0:43]Originally from Antigua, Jamaica, who was born named Elaine Potter Richardson,
[0:48]came to the United States to work as an au pair at age 16.
[0:52]She was a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine for 20 plus years.
[0:56]Her books include novels Annie John, Lucy, at the bottom of the river, the autobiography of
[1:02]my mother, Mr. Potter, a small place, my brother, my garden, among flowers, and see now
[1:09]then some of those were not novels, by the way.
[1:11]Jamaica teaches in the English, African, and African-American Studies Department at Harvard University.
[1:16]She has received the Guggenheim Award, the London Literary Award for Fiction,
[1:20]the Clifton, Fatima, and Mettle, and the Dan David Prize for Literature.
[1:24]She currently lives in Vermont.
[1:26]Hello, hello. Hi.
[1:27]Thank you so much for coming on my podcast and spending the time talking to me.
[1:32]So honored that you're doing this.
[1:33]Oh, thank you. I'm honored to. I mean, hi. Yes, I've got...
[1:38]Oh, I've got my son's podcast.
[1:40]But anyway, I mustn't waste time on my podcast history.
[1:45]So I have so many questions for you.
[1:47]But the first thing I want to talk about is your latest book,
[1:50]Party with Ricardo Cortez.
[1:52]And I just interviewed him too and he was lovely and told me all about everything,
[1:55]but how it became a book.
[1:57]But I want to hear it from your perspective.
[1:59]How did you do your first Children's Book party?
[2:01]Oh, well, it's because of him.
[2:03]I never thought of doing a children's book.
[2:07]I mean, I don't think there's such a thing as a children's book.
[2:11]I read all kinds of books and the idea that I don't know what a children's book means,
[2:16]really. Do you have to talk a different way to children?
[2:21]So I never thought of myself as doing a children's book.
[2:25]And when I was a child, I could have read the book and would have loved to read the books.
[2:30]I have written, but I don't consider I've written children's books.
[2:34]And sometimes I read the book I read as a child,
[2:37]which sometimes seem to have been wearing the children's library.
[2:41]And some of the books I read were not in the children's library.
[2:44]They were books I found from my mother or something.
[2:48]But in any case, I never thought of writing a children's book,
[2:52]but Ricardo apparently had read some of the stories I read for Talk of the Town, Talk Stories.
[3:00]And he liked that one and sources would be a good children's book.
[3:03]I was quite mystified by it at first because I think of those stories I wrote in Talk of the Town
[3:11]as sort of little sketches of how I would come to write.
[3:16]I mean, if you ever read the Talk Stories, they're very weird.
[3:19]They're not like Talk Stories at all.
[3:21]This is a traditional Talk Story, which is piece of reporting.
[3:26]But I would combine reporting with stylistic things, you know,
[3:31]Mr. Sean De
[3:41]And he did, I think, mean it as a compliment.
[3:43]He loved George and he loved me.
[3:45]So that story, I had gone to the 50th anniversary party of the Nancy Drew book.
[3:54]And I had loved them as child that they were in the children's library.
[3:59]Though I liked even more a series about cherry aims, who was a nurse.
[4:04]But the Nancy Drew stories, I remember them, and I've gone to the 50th anniversary
[4:09]with party.
[4:10]And I think at the time they were suffering in sales.
[4:14]It was in the early 80s or 70s, I can't remember it so long ago.
[4:18]And so they gave this big party an old house that was supposed to be a replica
[4:24]of something that Nancy and her friends would be trapped in after they'd gone to investigate
[4:30]some trivial something that seemed to be murder.
[4:34]But it made matters seem like a swimming party.
[4:38]Anyway, he said he couldn't make it, he would love to illustrate it.
[4:43]But I didn't do any writing.
[4:45]I think he may have edited it.
[4:48]I didn't pay much close attention to what he would do with the text so much as I loved his illustrations.
[4:56]I would buy the book just to look at the illustrations.
[4:59]They are beautiful.
[5:00]They're really, really beautiful.
[5:02]Really just tell a bucket of such a time and place and they're beautiful of the library.
[5:07]And they're really great.
[5:08]I must say, I had to read it a couple times.
[5:12]And I'm like, did I miss what the mystery of this was?
[5:15]You were the one who was at this event.
[5:16]Can you give us an inside scoop?
[5:18]What were they actually pointing to?
[5:21]What did they see?
[5:22]Well, they would have seen how I wrote this story.
[5:27]If you read this story, I was making fun of how to say this because it was my interpretation.
[5:36]But I was making fun of what we now call, I didn't have this word for it at the time,
[5:45]but what we now call white privilege.
[5:48]The idea of festival of these well-off girls who had lived comfortably someplace in New Jersey,
[5:58]they had nothing in their lives really.
[6:01]And they would look for something wrong.
[6:03]And there was something never really wrong, you know, the wrong with an invention,
[6:10]you know, some peerless person with horses or something.
[6:15]And the party really was about nothing, you know, just trying to drum up
[6:20]so this really kind of sexist racist story.
[6:24]I was making fun of, I think they were what we now call white privilege,
[6:29]but Ricardo could see another interpretation of that they would discover something
[6:37]which they would keep a secret.
[6:40]And so he thought it would be, he would leave it up to the imagination of the child.
[6:47]What did they see?
[6:49]And should they go back and look for clues in the drawings?
[6:53]And I think how I read it from his point of view,
[6:57]the clues, but this is only because of my own discussions,
[7:01]the clues would be in all the flowers scattered around and that what they see is some mysterious
[7:09]garden.
[7:10]And if I were, I'd say I left it up to him, but if I were to rewrite it,
[7:15]I suppose I would have put in the mysterious thing they saw would be Montezuma's garden
[7:21]or something like that or paradise or something, which would be garden related.
[7:25]But that would be my interpretation and it's up to the reader to say,
[7:30]well, what do you think they saw when go back through the pictures?
[7:34]And what do you think they saw as seen in which the people who are at the party made into
[7:40]Angel, or, you know, because they're not very nice people if you look at them and the institutions.
[7:49]So that's, you know, but I really left it up to him, but in my story,
[7:54]I was making fun of the nothingness of that was in the books as supposed to be the stories
[8:01]that later become interpreted as some empowering of females or something like that.
[8:08]I think empowering of female white females because white women always want to do what white men do.
[8:17]I think that's for them is a lure of equality. If men can kill 6 million people, why can't we do it?
[8:24]So that's my interpretation originally of the nothingness of in this house.
[8:32]But again, that's what I get from reading the story and I think Ricardo wisely thought it should
[8:39]stir up your imagination. What do you think they saw, given all the things where they're from,
[8:45]how they address their background, they walk up into this grand affair? What do you think they
[8:53]are looking for? I think he was very wise to do it. I agree. It's a great, it's a great book for
[8:59]any type of audience. I just love the pictures and I love the mystery of it, especially because
[9:04]it's about a mystery book. So anyway, I really enjoyed it. Thank you for sharing it in this form
[9:10]and everything. It's kind of a departure from you, although as you said, you can
[9:15]doesn't matter who reads it. You're just writing for writing, but I remember reading any John
[9:20]years and years ago and I recently finished reading your memoir about your brother, which you called
[9:25]my brother, and how you took care of him and went back to Antigua to deal with him when he had the
[9:31]AIDS virus. You wrote in such a thoughtful, really interesting way about your relationship with
[9:37]your mother in that book, which I was hoping to talk to you a little bit about. I'm just going to
[9:41]read a little quote. You said, my mother loves children. I want to say in her way, and that is very
[9:46]true. She loves us in her way. It never has occurred to her that her way of loving us might not be
[9:52]the best thing for us. It has never occurred to her that her way of loving us might have served her
[9:57]better than it served us, and why should it not?
[10:00]perhaps all of a self-serving, I do not know,
[10:02]I do not know.
[10:03]So I just wanted to,
[10:04]I wanted you to talk a little more about that passage
[10:07]and how you were feeling then
[10:08]and maybe how you feel about your relationship now.
[10:11]Oh, gosh, what's next about my mother is dead.
[10:14]And so my relationship with her,
[10:16]and I think about her every day, strangely,
[10:19]we didn't have to bring her up for me to ask both of us
[10:22]because my whole life seems to be saturated with her.
[10:28]So my relationship to her actually grows more warmly
[10:35]and positive the longer she stays dead.
[10:38]It's not impossible for her to come back, you know.
[10:40]She's that kind of person.
[10:44]It's not impossible for her to not skate dead.
[10:47]But for my relationship with her, as she's dead,
[10:51]grows better, I say more nice things about her
[10:55]while I remember her.
[10:56]I haven't forgotten the cruel, harsh things
[11:00]that she visited on as her children,
[11:03]but there was also a lot of good things.
[11:05]You know, for a member of her society,
[11:07]I was just telling someone how I learned to read
[11:09]and I learned to read by her teaching me words in books
[11:14]that she was reading.
[11:16]So that when I went to school, I could read everything
[11:20]by the time I was three, three and a half years.
[11:22]So I could read anything.
[11:24]And so when I went to school, I was three and a half years old,
[11:27]but I had to say I was five because they would only take you.
[11:30]It's your five.
[11:31]I was confronted with this thing called the alphabet.
[11:35]I had learned to read without knowing there was something
[11:37]called an alphabet.
[11:38]And to this day, I still have a problem with vowels.
[11:42]For the word vowel sounded, it sounded so amazing vowels.
[11:50]And then of course, the idea that it was just comprised
[11:53]of these five letters, which weren't even near each other,
[11:57]A, E, I, O, U.
[12:00]You know, they weren't, it wasn't like A, B, C.
[12:02]They were far away, seen far away from each other.
[12:06]They were vowels.
[12:06]It took me a long time.
[12:08]I was going to say to this day, I still have problems with it.
[12:10]But it paid me feeling a word that, again,
[12:15]well, permeates my writing.
[12:17]I have a lot of words, not all words,
[12:20]you know, I am very particular with them.
[12:22]I have a sort of affiliation with them
[12:25]that may not be good for writing,
[12:27]but they are very pleasurable relationship,
[12:31]you know, to just think of a word for
[12:33]or to find the right word for, to spend a year looking
[12:37]for the right word to go in the sentence.
[12:40]It's incredibly wonderful.
[12:42]And so I owe that to her.
[12:44]So yeah, I have reason to, as she's dead
[12:47]and stays as long as she remains dead,
[12:50]to find the thing very warmly and positively of her.
[12:55]Is it fancy or question?
[12:56]Yes, it does.
[12:57]Yes.
[12:59]And I didn't mean to imply a new she had passed away
[13:01]and I'm sorry.
[13:02]I don't know if she's lying anything.
[13:04]I hope I sound friendly and appreciative
[13:09]because I feel that way, but, you know,
[13:12]to you for doing this.
[13:13]No, of course.
[13:14]Of course.
[13:15]No, it's my pleasure.
[13:16]I thought it was so interesting in your book
[13:19]about your brother when you were growing up
[13:21]that you said your mother didn't like seeing you
[13:23]laying around reading and that she thought
[13:25]you were doomed to a life of slothfulness.
[13:27]And you said, as it turned out,
[13:29]I was only doomed to write books.
[13:31]Other people might read.
[13:33]So I wanted to hear a little more about
[13:35]how you got your start writing.
[13:37]And I read about the story of what happened
[13:39]when you came to the United States,
[13:40]but I would love for you to tell it in your own words.
[13:43]Oh, well, yes, you know, I was sent away
[13:46]to work as a servant and I did.
[13:49]And people knew me as a child,
[13:52]and not surprised that I became a writer,
[13:54]because apparently I would always pretend I was writing.
[13:57]Even though I didn't know that people still wrote
[14:01]seriously, Tricia, I think the last thing I read,
[14:04]I thought literature had stopped with Kipling.
[14:07]And so, surprisingly, when I was 19,
[14:10]that the woman in the household I was a nanny in,
[14:14]gave me, I think it was to the lighthouse.
[14:17]She was a feminist and a very big Virginia.
[14:21]Well, I think it was a lighthouse or a room of one zone.
[14:24]And then I, she had all these books
[14:26]that I just discovered, you know, modern literature.
[14:30]I remember that around that time,
[14:33]while I was there, a book by lighting a new book
[14:36]that had come out, I think it was ABA.
[14:38]Adha, I don't know how you pronounce this.
[14:42]And I was amazed.
[14:43]I read it, and I couldn't understand it at all.
[14:46]I didn't like it.
[14:47]It was perhaps the beginning of me thinking of,
[14:50]I like this, I don't like this, and so on.
[14:53]But I didn't know that people still wrote serious literature.
[14:56]I thought they just wrote penguin detective stories
[15:00]and romances, you know.
[15:02]I didn't know that there was such a thing as writing.
[15:05]But I must have always wanted to be an artist or something,
[15:08]because I thought I would be a photographer,
[15:09]and I studied photography.
[15:11]And I began to write out the photographs,
[15:13]and it just occurred to me then that, oh, I'm a writer.
[15:16]And so I quit the college I was going to in New Hampshire,
[15:19]returned to New York and started to write.
[15:21]And, you know, the funny thing about being in America,
[15:25]at least in those days, I don't know any more
[15:28]what America is like.
[15:29]But in those days, you could sort of,
[15:32]whatever you said you were, people said, oh yes,
[15:34]that's what you are, because you said so.
[15:37]So I was a writer and people said yes.
[15:40]And one thing led to the other,
[15:42]and then I started to write, show the New Yorker.
[15:45]Wow.
[15:46]Yeah, it's an improbable tale, but all too true.
[15:49]Hahaha.
[15:50]Every word of it is true.
[15:52]When you look back on all the many things you've written
[15:56]over the course of your career,
[15:58]is there anything that stands out as something
[16:00]that you're most proud of having written?
[16:03]Oh gosh, yes, I think the last book I wrote
[16:06]by the last novel I published,
[16:07]you know, then I sometimes,
[16:09]when I'm asked to read from it,
[16:11]because I never really read my own work,
[16:13]when I'm, unless I'm paid to, or that.
[16:16]This is, I was really worth looking at it again.
[16:20]But I guess when I have to read from that book,
[16:23]I sometimes want to stop and just admire
[16:26]some of the things I did in it,
[16:28]that I'd always dreamed of doing in a piece of writing,
[16:31]you know, of carrying on a thought
[16:34]for a long time, dropping something,
[16:36]picking it up again, all in one sentence.
[16:39]I really love that, the things I did in that book,
[16:42]the techniques of writing,
[16:44]that to me are so much like the way I think
[16:47]when I am silent, you know, when I'm thinking
[16:51]with no one around just to myself.
[16:53]So yes, I particularly love that book.
[16:56]Almost no one agrees with me,
[16:58]but I think it's the best thing I've written.
[17:03]And the short stories, I first wrote,
[17:07]the one sentence short story,
[17:09]in at the bottom of the river,
[17:11]I'm very proud of those things.
[17:13]I mean, I wouldn't say that unless you asked me,
[17:16]and I don't think I've even ever said admitted that.
[17:19]So I must be coming to the end of my life,
[17:21]which is very annoying.
[17:22]I hate to end it.
[17:23]And it doesn't mean you're coming to the end of your life.
[17:26]It could just mean you've reached a place
[17:28]of self-acceptance and you're willing to commend yourself.
[17:33]All right, that sounds much better.
[17:35]Anyway, I would say, yeah, I love, you know,
[17:39]writing that, well, I love reading philosophy,
[17:43]even though I'm the sort of person who read
[17:46]being and time and over and over again,
[17:51]because I love the way it asks you to understand
[17:58]a being, existence, even though you can't really,
[18:02]but it's, yeah, it's a powerful one.
[18:04]But I, yeah, so anyway, never mind.
[18:09]And I hear you're going to be a library lion
[18:12]at the New York Public Lions event this November.
[18:14]And I'm gonna be there as a guest,
[18:16]so I will have to look for you and when we're there.
[18:19]Were you excited to, yeah,
[18:20]so were you excited to get that honor?
[18:22]I know you've gotten many in your lifetime.
[18:25]My own, oh, in my life.
[18:27]Can I, oh, God, that sounds so old.
[18:30]My love, sorry, I wrote everyone did it again.
[18:33]I just turned 70 and I don't see any,
[18:39]I look at people who are 70 and I thought,
[18:41]oh, do I look like this, but I don't feel like that.
[18:44]And so I'm very sensitive.
[18:46]And not, I would never lie about my age,
[18:49]but I, you know, I see someone who died at 72
[18:53]and I think, oh, no, only two more years,
[18:55]but I haven't even planned at all the annual,
[18:58]I want to plant, never mind, on the perennials,
[19:02]but every time I'm given an award or something,
[19:06]I'm always surprised because I think,
[19:08]I deeply, truly think no one has ever heard of me.
[19:12]It's one of the ways I'm able to write what I write
[19:15]because I think, well, no one will ever read this.
[19:18]So I just do what I really want to do
[19:20]because no one will ever read it.
[19:21]So I think, well, no one has ever heard of me.
[19:24]Why would I be a literary lion?
[19:26]But I'm really quite thankful.
[19:29]I mean, and I'm happy, you know,
[19:32]when I was little and I was given prizes in school,
[19:36]you'd have to wear your dress uniform
[19:39]and get a wonderful stage and courtesy
[19:41]and everyone would clap.
[19:43]And so I find it sort of really everything wonderful
[19:46]that happens to me reminds me of my childhood
[19:49]as if everything terrible.
[19:52]Well, so yes, I am very pleased.
[19:55]The prize, and please, yes, I'll be very, very pleased.
[20:00]to help that. Yes, it's very nice. Gather my other honorees are so distinguished, I shall hide.
[20:08]No, not at all. When you talk to people just starting out on a writing career, what advice do you
[20:15]like to give them? Oh, never go to a creative writing school. Do not get an MFA, or if you do,
[20:23]it's only because you needed the time, but certainly don't take the advice of a teacher,
[20:30]no one can teach you how to write. Just remember, Homer was a blind person sitting at the city's
[20:37]gate. Just remember the Apostle Paul that no Galatians listened to him. In any case, there are no
[20:44]Galatians anymore, but his letters to Galatians, you can still find them. So just write this,
[20:53]you know, something depends on it, something that you don't know, but something important.
[20:59]And I don't mean to, because I teach creative writing, but as my students will tell you,
[21:04]it's so, you know, my teaching is just, but what would you like to do? What would you, because writing
[21:10]is so peculiar, it's so, you know, you can teach someone how the proper way to put paint on a canvas,
[21:17]but then the proper way to put paint on a canvas might not be the way you paint.
[21:22]Let's see, let's ask Jackson Pollock about that. You know, it's very hard to teach people to write,
[21:31]or to think you can, or you want to teach people to write, oh, I hope no creative writing
[21:38]professor listening to your podcast. They probably, they probably don't.
[21:44]Oh, we writers, we do have to make a living. On the other hand, you know, writing
[21:52]is not, it's not really a career. I don't understand it. Do I have a career I suppose I do,
[21:58]but I didn't mean to. You know, I didn't know one. I didn't know you could do this,
[22:05]that this could be done. I had no idea. But that's the other thing with young people starting
[22:10]to write is that they think perhaps this had something to do with being rich and famous and so on,
[22:16]and it really does. It's unfortunate that, you know, we writers a part of something called publicity,
[22:23]but it's really something quite wonderful and holy, I think, I think, but anyway,
[22:29]what so advice to young writers? Oh, well, I do have advice,
[22:33]publicly advice. Read, read, read, just read everything, even if it's in directions on a box of
[22:41]over-the-counter medicine. Just read it. Oh, I will now spend, I'll spend the rest of my day now
[22:46]at Rite Aid, you know, reading all the boxes. I had to find my inspiration and, you know,
[22:54]directions and dosages, so anyway, I knew I was forgetting to do something.
[23:00]Well, I just want to thank you so much. That was, that's the end of our little time together,
[23:04]but I just am so grateful for you for doing that to you for doing this and I really hope to meet
[23:10]you in November and I'll cost you at the party. Yes, I will be very disappointed if I don't find
[23:19]you. Okay. Well, enjoy the rest of the day gardening and thanks again for all your time.
[23:25]Thank you. Thank you. All right. Okay. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thanks again to today's sponsor of
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