Just What I Have Been Doing Lately: a Matter of Reflection Martha S.

Held

The Chapter What I Have Been Doing Lately rests exactly in the middle of the book entitled At The Bottom of the River . It begins with the sentence What I have been doing lately: I was lying in bed and the doorbell rang (Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River ,40) The sentences, Its you. Just look at that. Its you. And just what have you been doing lately? are precisely in the middle of the chapter, and, in fact, bisect the book. (Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River ,43) The chapter ends with the sentences: I dont want to do this any more. And I went back to lying in bed, just before the doorbell rang.(Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River ,45) The story is thus divided into two equal parts, bracketed with the images of the narrator lying down. This story is about reflection. It also is a representation of a journey between two cultures; it is about a changing landscape, the people whom Kincaid knew when she left her home, and those whom she encountered as she arrived in a strange place. It is above all about language as representation, and how language constructs human relationships differently in different societies. For whom does Jamaica Kincaid write? I believe it is a question that haunts her. While reading her book, it occurred to me that no matter how entranced I was by the rich imagery, another person having lived in a cultural setting different from my own would also enjoy the reading; however, they might retain a different understanding from their

reading from my own, because of their cultural experience. Therefore, I believe that Jamaica Kincaid writes for at least two publics. The potential for such parallel readings is exciting; at the very least, the book represents a cultural interface. However, I sense that shifting between cultural codes was, in reality, a source of acute torment for Kincaid. The chapter What I have Been Doing Lately seems to explore the impetus and means of her journey between the two cultures: the written language she learned to inscribe in government school ink. The journey was a troubled and difficult one. In her new life, the words she recorded in the ink proved incapable of resurrecting the people whom she had loved in the past, figures as inanimate as the damp dust that imparted the inks taste, and the lifeless people composed of mud in the chapters final paragraphs. Language was only a tool of remembering and reflecting upon loved ones whom she had left behind, whose faces blurred increasingly as she became further estranged from both their actual presence, and the linguistic and cultural codes of her childhood. In essence, this is a self-portrait that represents her loneliness, and furthermore, alienation from herself. The story defines a multiple self that is depicted by images that share physical properties, such as falling (the narrator, a ball, a stone, a shadow), the same dialogue, and mimicked mannerisms. They share one trait especially: the sentient beings perceive, see, or look hard at one another. The question of how this many-faceted self may have arisen is a matter that can be illustrated by the remarks of both Edward Said and Toni Morrison. Both theorists comment on the hegemonic forces of language and western literature. Edward Said discusses how western language and cultural conventions exclude reality as existed by those of a dominated culture, while Morrison addresses how American literature not only

excludes all protagonists that are non-white, it portrays non-white persons as impossibly fragmented, and as appropriated objects, on which schemes of fear and longing are projected by a white male reading public. As Said noted, It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a represence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, and apparent veracity of a written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as the Orient. Thus all of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient; that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, there in discourse about it. And those representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient. (Coursepack, Orientalism , Edward Said, 229-30) In the process of her transition from one environment to the next, Kincaid was thrust headlong into a culture whose representations would not convey her identity. Filtered through the new representations, her identity was strangely dehumanized and splintered. In her chapter Romancing the Shadow, Morrison remarks that this is the hallmark of American literary tradition: The way in which artists- and the society that bred them- transferred internal conflicts to a blank darkness to conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies is a major theme in American literature.(Morrison, Playing in the Dark ,38) Morrison explains that Africanist people were included in stories to serve as literary devices, as much as characters, whose specific function was to conveniently reflect aspects of the protagonists characters that could not be easily expressed through dialogue or description: What I wish to examine is how the image of reined-in, bound, suppressed, and repressed darkness became objectified in American Literature as an Africanist

persona. I want to show how the duties of that persona - duties of exorcism, reification, and mirroring- are on demand and on display throughout much of the literature of the country(Morrison, Playing in the Dark 38-9) She concludes that: If we follow through on the self-reflexive nature of these encounters with Africanism, it falls clear: images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable- all of the self-contradictory features of the self. (Morrison, Playing in the Dark ,59) Thus western code refracts the non-white identity: American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.(Morrison, Playing in the Dark ,47) Kincaids disparate figures merge into one another, exchanging properties, and appear to be offshoots of the same organism: aspects of the narrator. Her confusion of interior and exterior states is extremely intriguing, particularly if it can be read as the narrators incorporation of aspects of a foreign environment, and a play on the such catch-words of cultural transition as assimilation, or acquisition. The passages in the chapter indicate this effect in many ways. She comments about a monkey, Ah, a monkey. Just look at that. A monkey.(Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River ,41) In the middle of the story, she saw a lone figure coming toward me (her reflection in the mirror?), who said, Its you. Just look at that. Its you.(Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River ,43) Hence, the narrator becomes the monkey, as well. Secondly, she falls (like an old suitcase) into a deep hole, in which she was surrounded by things written. But perhaps it was in a foreign language, because I couldnt read them. (Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River ,42) Falling into a deep hole can be read as falling into a deep depression; this was a condition to which she reacted. I said, I dont want to fall anymore, and I reversed

myself, ostensibly beginning to recognize herself engraved in the strange signs written on the sides of the hole. (Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River ,42, italics mine) She stood again at the edge, bade the hole to close, and it complied. She then regarded the monkey again, (a symbol of her pre-verbal self?), threw a stone at it, again perhaps in frustration, and the narrator/monkey cast the stone back, which cut a deep gash on the narrators forehead. This time, the lip of the depression opened into the narrators head, and it healed shut, closing like the deep hole, but not convincingly. At the end of the chapter, and at the end of her journey, she describes the depression differently, caressing her new false skin, I felt very sad so I sat down. I felt so sad that I rested my head on my own knees and smoothed my own head. I felt so sad I couldnt imagine feeling any other way again. I said, I dont like this. I dont want to do this anymore. And I went back to lying in my bed, just before the doorbell rang.(Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River ,45) There is a good deal more to this chapter, which I suspect would speak to diverse reading publics. I have selected one small theme to highlight, that of Kincaids poignant description of a passage between two cultures, those which, while sharing the same language, possess diverging cultural codes. The possibility that Jamaica Kincaid did not find an acceptable correlate role for non-whites implicit within her new cultures codes, that she had to labor to identify this horribly complex problem, and had to struggle to articulate her loss in their codes, which were the source of her anguish, is extremely illuminating and exceedingly regrettable.