SOURCE: “Reflections, and The Bottom of the River: The Transformation of Caribbean Experience in the Fiction of Jamaica Kincaid,” in Wasafiri, No. 9, Winter, 1988–89, pp. 15–17.

In the following essay, James discusses Kincaid's place in contemporary Caribbean literature and issues of self-awareness, alienation, and female identity in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John.

‘Jamaica who?’ To speak of Jamaica Kincaid, from Antigua, as an important Caribbean writer, often causes surprise. Her writing has had its passionate admirers for some years, and has appeared under a popular paperback imprint in Britain, but it has received surprisingly little academic notice outside the United States. At the 1988 Conference of West Indian Writing in Jamaica she was a main speaker, but only one paper was presented on her work, against several on other major Caribbean contemporary writers. Why has she been neglected?

It is partly because her work does not fit...