A few years back, I noticed a strange shift in the way people spoke about Black women writers. I can trace it to the first time I heard someone say "Mama Toni" in reference to Toni Morrison. Oh, I remember thinking. I do NOT like that. It felt strange to reduce a woman with as prickly an intelligence and as harsh a literary moralism as Morrison to "Mama." But maybe, I thought, it was fair if it got people to read her books. But it still irks me, this desire for Black women speakers to adopt a maternal position whenever they speak in public life. 

Jamaica Kincaid has resisted the Mama-fication of other Black women writers like Morrison and Alice Walker (another odd choice for maternal deification). I think it is, in part, because so much of her work is about the complication of mothers, of being a daughter. It's hard to fall into odes to motherhood when reading Kincaid. In novels like Lucy and Annie John and of course The Autobiography of My Mother, she writes about relationships between Black women and their mothers in all their knotty, complicated, guilty glory. That willingness to always stay sharp is on display in her latest collection of nonfiction, Putting Myself Together, Writing 1974–. 

The collection includes essays like her now classic "Last of the Black White Girls," her 1976 review of a Diana Ross show. There, she writes about Ross, "It's much easier for a white person to play at being black than it is for a black person to play at being white.… For a white person it becomes an exercise of the intellect.… But for the black person who has the most to lose in terms of cultural identity it's deadly serious business.… Diana Ross, of course, did this when it was completely unfashionable, and even dangerous, to do." I love this string of sentences because it is a compressed example of the best part of cultural criticism. It takes a cultural truism—Black people's need to dissect which of our celebrities are really Black and which are spiritually, culturally white—and complicates it one step further, reminding us all of the drag on both sides. 

For Kincaid, nothing is sacred and nothing needs to be held up in reverence. It is a welcome departure from the cultural criticism of our time, when everything is bathed in either oily vitriol or empty platitudes about what is iconic. For Kincaid, neither of those things matter. It is only what is interesting. Kincaid operates with the secure unsentimentality of a Black artist who has grown up in a majority-Black environment. The most scathing essays here are her assessments of the deep corruption of her home country, Antigua. In her 1994 essay "An Antiguan Election Journal," she writes, "I know all too well what really happened to the descendants of the slaves. Once freed, they proceeded to create for themselves their own moral abyss." 

The other thing I love about this collection is the craft of Kincaid's sentences. In the essay "Those Words That Echo … Echo … Echo Through Life," about writing her 2002 novel, Mr. Potter, Kincaid includes the sentence she is turning over in her mind: "Mr. Potter was my father's name, my father's name was Mr. Potter." It has the simplicity of a children's rhyme, but its statement of a fact with slightly different wording, and all that the wording implies, reads to me like a brief example of the legality of language, the question of inheritance and race and self that makes up what came to be called being Black in the Americas. When I read that sentence, I see Black codes and "the child takes the legal status of the mother" and the one-drop rule and a family tree. Perhaps I am reaching. But I don't think I am. The rest of the essay is about Kincaid attempting to write about her father, who himself could not read, while she lives in Vermont while raising her children and dodging creditors and genuinely living an everyday life. It is the language that connects her, though—first to her father, then to history, then to the strange and lonely exercise of writing fiction. It is her command of language that allows her to write another sentence that mimics the flow of time and seasons on the page. "The days then rapidly grew thick into all darkness with only small spaces of light (that is autumn) and then remained solidly all darkness with only small patches of light (that is winter), and then the darkness slowly thinned out (that is spring), but the light was never as overwhelming in its way as the darkness was overwhelmingly dark in its way (that is summer)." 

Sometimes I read this book and argue with Kincaid's conclusions, and sometimes I read this book and feel my mind rearranged by the beauty here, but I never read this book and want to call Jamaica Kincaid "mother."

For this newsletter, we will ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week's writer is Sasha Bonét, author of The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters.

Sasha Bonét: "I've never been more creative than when I rented a tiny room (away from my teenager) in a struggling office building in Manhattan. I painted it an awful pink and called it the Writer's Womb. I hung a pink City of Women 2.0 map. I made an altar board with photos of Baldwin, Morrison, and many women from my lineage. And every morning while writing The Waterbearers, I would sit with them and ask them to show me the way, ask them for courage, and thank them for the opportunity to serve. It was a room of my own, but I wasn't there alone."