Visiting Lecturer Jamaica Kincaid

It is Monday afternoon, the fiction writing seminar's introductory meeting has just ended, and a swarm of students surrounds visiting lecturer Jamaica Kincaid, heaping praise on the lanky writer.

Out of the throng, a student approaches, smiling shyly and shifting her weight from side to side.

"I feel a little unworthy," she says. "I'm just a freshman."

"Ohhhh," Kincaid gasps, grinning, grasping the first-year by the shoulders.

"I haven't read any of your work," the student continues.

"Well, I haven't read any of your work, either," Kincaid says reassuringly.

Not everyone knows Jamica Kincaid; unlike other visiting professors, notably her colleague Spike Lee, Kincaid can walk down Cambridge streets unnoticed. Her apparel is unassuming--a T-shirt, shorts, clogs.

Her demeanor is subdued--that is, until you get her going.

Kincaid, 43, is the author of the 1983 novel Annie John and the much praised story collection, At the Bottom of the River. She remains a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

This fall, she will teach, an Afro-Am seminar, "Domestic Life in Literature," and a fiction writing workshop.

A mother of two, Kincaid says she came to Harvard for one reason: Afro-Am Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has convinced a number of prominent figures to teach in the department.

"He's very persuasive," she says. "It's hard to tell him no if he really wants you to do something."

Philip B. Harper, an assistant professor in the English and Afro-Am departments, calls Kincaid "a writers of consciousness."

Harper, who uses Kincaid's work in several of his classes, says her writing follows the tradition of such modernists as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

And while her fiction is often taught in Courses that dwell on political themes, Harper says, it is not political.

Instead, her novels and stories are about identity, Harper says. "They're really about a character's search for her own identity, how that search is impinged on by various social and political factors."

The search is personal for Kincaid, who proudly claims to have no identity: "I'm no one and I'm quite happy about it."

Kincaid says she writes to discover who she is. If she knew the answer, she would stop writing immediately.

"I only know who I am, or who I think I am, when I'm at my desk," Kincaid says.

Yet Kincaid is clearly somebody--somebody enough to draw the adulation of students and to attract widespread interest in her two courses.

This is Kincaid, the acclaimed writer, whose byline has appeared in Rolling Stone as well as The New York times op-ed pages, and whose passion for the craft is unmistakable.

"I write on a typewriter, I write by hand," Kincaid says. "I often write with people sleeping on my lap. I write in bed, I write at the dining table, I write at the kitchen table. I write whenever I can."

If Kincaid is impassioned, she is also particular, admitting openly that "a certain kind of student interested in a certain kind of writing would be hard for me to teach."

She isn't interested, she explains, in "how things get form here to there." She doesn't want to know about how one gets from inside to outside. She just wants to know what happens when one is there.

To select students for her fiction writing workshops, Kincaid surprised applicants by asking them to write about a tree.

"It's really more of a statement about myself," Kincaid says. "It's the sort of thing that I supposed I would have responded to."

"For me, these things are points of departure," she says. "What does it bring up in you...I can imagine hundreds of pages on why it would mean nothing, and even that would be about the tree."

At the English Car meeting, she is softspoken as she reads aloud a nonfiction passage about trees and shrubs. She waves her hands gracefully, occasionally lifting her index finder for emphasis.

Writing is lying, she tells the potential students. "If you don't know the text of something, you can't make an untruth about it."

This is the way Kincaid talks, a stream of easily flowing words that often ends in something unexpected, some striking statement.

She can talk endlessly on any subject, it seems, and her speech is peppered with personal wisdom in spontaneous, colorful phrases.

Some of those phrases center on the relationship between mothers and daughters, a recurring theme in her writing. "I'm always suspicious of women who don't like children," Kincaid says. "I think they don't like themselves."

Some refer to her childhood in Antigua, an island in the West Indies.

"It was typical of a childhood anywhere," Kincaid says. "I was miserable. A child is a powerless person. Powerless people are always miserable."

And sometimes she focuses on subjects she finds less clear and harder to define--subjects like race.

Kincaid is a visiting lecturer in the Afro-American Studies Department on a campus that constantly grapples with issues of race and ethnicity. To many, her work may seem particularly timely and significant.

Harper says students might want to examine her work in the context of campus events, and consider "how the issues of identity that they're grappling with on campus are really related to much larger issues of identity."

But Kincaid, who feels uneasy defining even herself, is uncomfortable with much of the language and rhetoric that often characterizes campus discussions on race.

"This idea of race is so odd," she says, earnestly and sincerely. "I believe your ethnicity is a controlling force for other people, but it's got nothing to do with you.

"I think left alone, I wouldn't say I'm Black. I don't know I'm Black until someone tells me I am," Kincaid continues. "It's quite true I'm Black, But I can't say that I find any solace in it, or I find any particular pride in it, But it's just a fact."

One of the great things about coming to the United States, Kincaid says, was the freedom to be different--a freedom she didn't have in her more homogeneous homeland.

Had she written her books in the West Indies, she says, "the people I wrote for wouldn't have accepted them...it would have seemed to them that I was putting on airs."

Kincaid travelled here in 1966, at the age of 17, to attend college and to "better myself." While her stories are usually set in the west Indies, her perspective has necessarily changed.

"I'm sort of someone with a dual personality," Kincaid says. The American side is used to privilege, accustomed to taking more than her share of the world's wealth. The Antiguan side is a native of a third world country, no stranger to life without the simplest necessities.

"I...remember that I was the person at the other end of the stick," she says. "But it doesn't stop me--does it?--from eating and having more than I should."

That conflict, she says, "is all I ever write about."

The overarching theme in her work, she says, is the powerful and the powerless. That embodies the relationship between mother and child, between colony and empire--and today, though perhaps not forever, between Black and white.

While much of her work is taught in courses that focus on "ethnic fiction," Kincaid says she would really rather not be categorized that way.

"I wish they were taught for literary value primarily, if they have any," she says. "It would be terrible, when Black women...no longer need my books, if they were bad books and they were just thrown away."

Judging from the glowing reviews, the frequency with which her books are taught, and the popularity of her courses, Kincaid's reputation won't change anytime soon.

But to the dismay of many students, Kincaid says she will remain merely a visitor at Harvard.

Her Afro-Am office, which overlooks the Square, is lined with bookshelves she doesn't expect to fill. She doesn't plan to stay at Harvard beyond this year.

"I think I would find a wholly academic life very confusing," Kincaid says.

She suspects that juggling the duties of writer, mother and teacher might be too much for her.

In any case, this semester will be a sort of trial period, a chance for Kincaid to learn whether she can do it all.

Think of her as Jamaica Kincaid, the student.