Kincaid's Biographical Autograph in Mr. Potter

Jana Evans Braziel

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, Let there be light and there was light and God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day and the darkness he called night. (Genesis 1:1-5)

. . . and this [her absence] was followed by a large blank space of darkness and light, sometimes separated, the darkness and light, sometimes mingling, the darkness and the light, and this single blank space of only darkness and light — separated or commingled — was where Elfrida Robinson, his mother, stayed. (Mr. Potter 83-84)

Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter is the author's most recent foray into the complex and challenging terrain of autofiction (a hybrid genre intermingling fiction and autobiography); or more precisely, alterbiography, a textual rending of autobiography through the inscriptions of alterity and difference. The novel is subtle, nuanced, lyrical, passionate, and literary. For those who know Kincaid's work well and are committed to the ardor that reading her texts demands, it is not only an immensely rewarding read, but a new and unexpected episode in a literary drama that continues to unfold with breathtaking poetry and philosophical brilliance. Mr. Potter recounts the simple, sparse life of a chauffeur (who first works for an exiled Lebanese merchant and later for himself) on the island of Antigua, the place of Kincaid's own birth. The story reveals the daily events of Mr. Potter's life: his affairs and the numerous daughters (who all share his nose) that he birthed, but for whom he never provided and certainly never loved; his illiteracy and his humble attempts to make a life for himself, if not for his children. The novel is not just a biography of this man (who could not read or write), but also the autobiographical reflections of his daughter (the one who could read and write): Elaine Cynthia Potter. In the novel, Kincaid movingly tells of Mr. Potter's abandonment and rejection of the young girl (born on May 25, 1949), after her own mother, Annie Victoria Richardson (then Drew), seven months pregnant at the time, left with his money that had been saved and hidden under the mattress and with which he intended to buy a car. Through his story, we discover that he too has suffered loss and abandonment: his father, Nathaniel Potter, refused to acknowledge his paternity of the boy Roderick, and his mother, Elfrida Robinson, committed suicide by walking into the sea when he was just a small child. The book is a painful account of loss and desire, and it memorializes the pain itself, as much as the man who suffered it, and the man who in his own turn, passed on this line of disinheritance to his daughters, the legatees of his illegitimacy, anonymity, and illiteracy, save one: Jamaica Kincaid.

Mr. Potter is a postcolonial, postmodernist creation myth — postmodern in its sensibilities (language constructs transitory truths), yet modern in its historical crises (the past haunts not only the fleeting moments of the present, but also the future). In the novel, Kincaid engages her paternal genealogy, breathing life into anonymous ancestors and in-name-only fathers, without eclipsing maternal obsessions, which always recur in Kincaid's writing of worlds. Genealogy, in the novel Mr. Potter, becomes the foundation for genre, as it does in Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother; genealogy inflects genre and the writing of genre; in this sense, genealogy is inseparable from genre. The inflections of genre imbue other historical and mythological relations — those of genesis and genocide, creation and annihilation. Kincaid weaves and knots the entangled threads of genre, genealogy, genesis, and genocide. For Kincaid, this knot is woven and unwoven, tangled and untangled in the genres of biography and autobiography — a Gordian knot not exclusively of mother, father, me; but more vastly, of lineage, language, history, and subjectivity. Throughout the text, a preoccupation and engagement with Genesis informs the narrative subtext, forms the backdrop for this humble narrative about a simple, if not always honorable Antiguan man; yet genesis is also absolutely crucial to Kincaid's philosophical framing of the novel.

This paper proposes an inquiry into a phenomenon that I define as "Caribbean Genesis,"¹ reading Glissant's theoretical writings in Caribbean Discourse alongside Kincaid's engagements with genesis in Mr. Potter and in the essays from My Garden (Book):. In this paper, I have several interrelated objectives: First, I situate Kincaid's preoccupation with genesis as myth and as a response to history. I outline what Glissant identifies as a Caribbean "quarrel with history," discussing how Kincaid's engagements with genesis are intimately related to this "quarrel." Then, I examine genre and the writing of genre in relation to genesis — particularly as it relates to biography and autobiography, and more specifically in relation to the writing of biography as autobiography. Probing Kincaid's aesthetic and philosophical play on genesis (and genocide) in the novel, I ask how these forces shape her writing of auto/biography. And finally, I analyze the presence and import of Kincaid's biographical autograph in the novel Mr. Potter.

I. Genesis, "In the beginning was the Word . . ." (as light to darkness)

"In the beginning . . ." (Genesis 1:1)

"In the beginning was the Word . . ." (John 1:10)

"And to start again at the beginning" (Mr. Potter 188)

"In the beginning" — so begins the book of Genesis and so begins a world. The words reverberate across centuries and new myths of creation, history, and time, echoed anno Domini in the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word." The creation of worlds in words for a new age. For Jamaica Kincaid, writing in the twenty-first century of the third post-Christian millennium, words and worlds remain imbued with creative power, if only transitorily, and the author as creator takes up her pen to write new lives and new worlds into being. In Mr. Potter, a novel that swirls around creations, Kincaid reiterates these biblical beginnings, but forces creation and creativity to her will, wielding her pen to confront history and so-called divine orders (the fatal European belief in the "Great Chain of Being"). "And to start again at the beginning" (188), telling and writing (and creating) Mr. Potter and his story, if not history (or, History with a capital H), Kincaid laments, and yet embraces the fact that

Mr. Potter was not an original man, he was not made from words, his father was Nathaniel and his mother was Elfrida and neither of them could read or write; his beginning was just the way of everyone, as would be his end. He began in a long day and a long night and after nine months he was born . . . (55-56; emphasis added)

Kincaid's portrait of Roderick Nathaniel Potter renders him an ordinary man, not original; a real flesh-and-blood — or as she later states it, "tissue, bones, and blood" (62) — man. Kincaid makes the man, her father, in words, and yet she claims here, "he was not made from words" (56; emphasis added). Working within, but also against Logos (both the principle of order in Greek thought, as well as divine word and its incarnation in biblical terms), Kincaid creates a portrait of her father. Here Kincaid's tracing of genealogy evokes the begotten sons of biblical fathers; in Kincaid's cosmogony, they are begotten and forgotten sons, or more accurately, disinherited daughters. The passage is ambivalent; its movement twofold; its effect double — as Kincaid first renders her father humble and material, and then, second, creates his image in language even as she renounces the idea of transcendent ideas. Does Kincaid's portrait of Mr. Potter evoke divine creation even as she renounces that possibility? Does Kincaid's novel Mr. Potter mark a return to or a revenant of mythic beginnings? or contrarily, a creative writing away of all possibilities for divine creation, for definitive origins?

In Kincaid's engagements with genesis, she joins a Caribbean "quarrel with history" that is above all a preoccupation with genesis (origins, creation, filiation), even through its disavowal or a Caribbean turning away from the possibility of creative beginnings. In this sense, Kincaid joins other Caribbean writers such as Derek Walcott and Édouard Glissant in their poetic revisions of genesis, creation, and myth. Glissant returns again and again to notions of genesis in his pioneering work on Caribbean aesthetics, Caribbean Discourse, not to locate an origin and point of beginning, but as a way of recreating past in present and future, even without origins.²

Genesis: as narrator, writer, daughter, Kincaid writes worlds into being and fills her worlds with mythic characters. A Potter descended from a long line of potters — she is the demiurge creating and destroying worlds at will: in the text, she is divine and diabolic, godlike and fallen, moving across spheres celestial, earthly, and infernal that she has created in words. Traversing genres, Kincaid's mythos is at once epic and tragic, narrating the trajectories of modern diasporas (African, Lebanese, Czechoslovakian, Dominican, and finally, Antiguan) through the biographical and textual lives of Nathaniel Potter, Elfrida Robinson, Mr. Shoul, Dr. Samuel "Zoltan" Weizenger, his nurse and wife Mae Weizenger, Roderick Nathaniel Potter, Annie Victoria Richardson, and their biological daughter Elaine Cynthia Potter (Richardson). It narrates the epic movements of modernity and the cultural clashes that created a 'New World' — so-called discovery, conquest, colonialism, indigenous subjugation, forced migration in the Middle Passage and then forced labor on the British Caribbean's sugar cane plantations, the Second Middle Passage and Asian indenture. The stories are both intimate and abstract: Roderick Nathaniel Potter is both Caribbean everyman whose history began and ended, as Kincaid states, 500 years ago in 1492 and the five-year old orphaned boy (nicknamed Drickie) whose father Nathaniel Potter has never acknowledged and whose mother Elfrida Robinson walked into the sea one day to deliberately drown herself.

As in Genesis, Kincaid begins (and I thus begin) with a meditation on light and darkness, "sometimes separated . . . sometimes mingling" (83). From the very first page of Mr. Potter, Kincaid establishes a play on light and darkness that is both metaphoric and metaphysical, that is biblical, creating the contrasting boundaries that demarcate day from night, and human being from human being in the novel. In the opening chapter, a contrast — as dark to light, and night to day — is painted between the character Mr. Potter, the Antiguan chauffeur of African descent, and Dr. Weizenger, the exiled Czechoslovakian doctor who has newly arrived and who will be driven to his new home by Mr. Potter. Unaccustomed to the brilliant light of the Caribbean sun, Dr. Weizenger embraces the sun's rays, while fearing the darkness (or absence of light):

And Dr. Weizenger was thinking how beautiful light of any kind was, light that did not come from a furnace, a real furnace fed by the fuel of coal or human bodies; light, real light, with its opposite being darkness, real darkness, not a metaphor for the darkness from which Mr. Potter and his ancestors had come. (16)

As a man escaping the Jewish Holocaust and fleeing European anti-Semitism, Dr. Weizenger remains plagued and haunted by images of annihilation: "And his own extinction had almost succeeded and how surprised he was by this, and how he would remain for the rest of his life" (23). Despite this near-death brush with genocide, though, Dr. Weizenger also remains unaware of other earlier historical genocides, oblivious to the same fatality suffered by others in the world; he experienced his confrontation with death and annihilation "as if such a thing had never happened before, as if groups of people, one day intact and building civilization and dominating heaven and earth, had not the next found themselves erased and not even been remembered in a prayer or in a joke by the rest of humanity; as if groups of people had not been erased from the beginning of life and human memory" (23).

For Dr. Weizenger, his own exile in Antigua is like a "descent" into darkness, a darkness that borders on the metaphysical, yet also remains too palpably physical or material: too visible, too epidermal. In his worldview, Dr. Weizenger racializes the terrains of light and darkness, even as he maintains the distinction between metaphysical darkness and material darkness. He thus disallows the African Antiguans around him even the space of a negative ontology, an ontological negation: for him, they remain too earthbound, too physical even to ascend (or descend) to metaphysical absence (of light). Dr. Weizenger overwhelmingly feels that he has "vanished into darkness, yes darkness!" (33). Is Dr. Weizenger's absorption into darkness annihilatory or life-sustaining? This darkness is mental as well as corporeal, and his experience of it is as if "a vast darkness had descended over many things he had known" (33). He finds this darkness indistinct, unknowable; he cannot quite describe it. It is "not a darkness like the night, and not a darkness that was the opposite of the light in which he was now standing, not a darkness that was the opposite of the light into which Mr. Potter had temporarily disappeared"; for Weizenger, it is a racialized darkness. It is "more like the darkness from which Mr. Potter and all he came from had originated" (33). Dr. Weizenger's racism is made manifest again later in the novel when he insists that his young medical assistant, Annie Victoria Richardson, scrub the black children, his patients, before he will treat them. Ironically, although Dr. Weizenger feels himself absorbed into darkness and thus destroyed, his escape to Antigua, to the island's "darkness" as he conceives it, saves him from an otherwise certain death at the hands of "white" German fascists who erroneously and homicidally proclaimed their own so-called "enlightened" worldview.

The passage remains, though, marked by a fundamental ambivalence: black absorbs white, darkness light. Does the passage reveal light returning to darkness? Darkness from whence it came? In the passage, Dr. Weizenger both (negatively) racializes darkness and strips it of potential metaphysical valence; yet, this darkness persists as an a priori cosmic force, as if prior to creation (a divine force in and of itself). In the biblical account of Genesis, there are three fundamental divine separations-light from darkness; sky from water; land from sea. The proclaimed separation of created light (Let there be light . . ., 1:3) from darkness is primary; the separation of heavens from waters secondary; and the division of land from sea tertiary. Kincaid reminds her readers that these divisions are acts of (divine and human and ideological and mythic and historical) power; however, even within myth, there is an indivisible a priori. In Genesis, darkness is the a priori. Darkness precedes light; darkness exists prior to created light; it is a priori, before. Within biblical accounts of creation, the a priori darkness casts a fundamentally ambivalent shadow over divine creation: if it exists a priori, before creation, then it exists outside of the reach of God's creative hand. Kincaid draws on this fundamental ambivalence — the a priori nature of darkness within the created universe — to establish darkness as a field outside of divine or human intervention, a source of energy, power, and unbound nature that precedes the created world. As such, it remains beyond creation, even as it is separated or divided from creation (And God separated the light from the darkness, 1:4).

Contrasting with a priori darkness, light is substanceless, yet translucent, imbuing all objects on which it falls with "substance" although light itself is without substance. The light has no spatially defining characteristics of its own; like water, it takes on the attributes of the object into which it streams or flows. Compare the line from Mr. Potter in which the biological grandfather Nathaniel likens light and water: "And there was the world of sky above and light forcefully illuminating and forcefully streaming through the sky and the awe of great bodies of water flowing into each other even as they remained separate" (37). In another passage, we see through Mr. (Roderick) Potter's eyes, rather than those of Dr. Weizenger. Arriving at Dr. Weizenger's new house in St. Johns, Mr. Potter opens the doors and then the windows. Struck by the light, Mr. Potter gazes through the window at the world outside the house (in this passage as in many others in Kincaid's oeuvre, the house itself is a world contained). When Mr. Potter sees the light, he observes its translucence:

it was the light as he had always known it, so bright that it eventually made everything that came in contact with it transparent and then translucent, the light was spread before Mr. Potter as if it were a sea of water, it covered and yet revealed all that it encompassed; the light gave substance to everything else: the trees became the trees but only more so, and the ground in which they anchored themselves remained the ground but only more so, and the sky above revealed more and more of the sky and into the heavens, into eternity, and then returned to the earth. (19-20)

Mr. Potter destabilizes the cultural privileging of light (over dark), without negating light's beauty, its power, its translucence. Mr. Potter can sustain a world of light and dark intermingled, mixed, creating shadows, unlike Dr. Weizenger for whom the light and the darkness remain fundamentally separated (as if by divine decree; compare Genesis 1:4), or else one threatens to destroy and erase the other (thus, Dr. Weizenger's fear and feeling that he has vanished into darkness!). For Dr. Weizenger, even though he inhabits the shadows (like Mr. Potter and Mr. Shoul who live in the diasporic shadows of new worlds), he remains part of the singular world (and worldview) that cannot admit or "speak of the shadows" (114). Kincaid blurs the boundaries of created light and a priori darkness in the passage in which the young boy Roderick Nathaniel Potter (nicknamed Drickie) grieves for his dead mother (Elfrida Robinson) who committed suicide by drowning, a death by water, and abruptly left her son, from that moment on an orphan, to the world alone. The five-year old boy naively awaits his mother's hoped-for, but never-fulfilled return, craving a glimpse of her face, but "all this [expectation and desire] was followed by a large blank space of darkness and light, sometimes separated, the darkness and the light, sometimes mingling, the darkness and the light, and this single blank space of only darkness and light — separated or commingled — was where Elfrida Robinson, his mother, stayed" (83-84).

Kincaid also writes genesis into the novel in other ways-first, in creating a life for Mr. Potter; second, in creating a life for herself through Mr. Potter's story; and finally, through evoking biblical language throughout the novel in the creation of her own chaosmos, a world with constellations and infernal fires and geologic subterranean shifting plates. By writing genesis into the novel, Kincaid powerfully revisits Glissant's idea that "Genesis legitimates genealogy" (Caribbean Discourse 140). I turn now to the Caribbean "quarrel with History" and Kincaid's role in this quarrel.

II. The Caribbean "Quarrel with History"

Édouard Glissant's Le discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) was a groundbreaking work for theorizing Caribbean identity, history, and literature in ways that resisted dominant colonialist paradigms. One of the most provocative ideas in Glissant's text is the idea that History and Literature in the West have functioned as totalizing systems that consolidate grandiose ideals about Western civilization; for Glissant, "History (whether we see it as expression or lived reality) and Literature form part of the same problematics" (69). As Glissant further theorizes, "History (like Literature) is capable of quarrying deep within us, as a consciousness or the emergence of a consciousness, as a neurosis (symptom of loss) and a contraction of the self" (70).

Critiquing the transcendence of History and Literature in the West, Glissant remarks on an Antillean "quarrel with History" in Caribbean Discourse, wherein he refigures the relations of history and literature and notes the colonialist imbrications of myth-making and history-defining.³ In a chapter entitled "The Known, the Uncertain," Glissant displaces Western notions of history — what Glissant defines as History with a capital H — as grounded within a distinctly Hegelian frame. According to Hegel's hierarchical, eurocentric, and racially-determined parameters, Europe constituted the place of the Historical, Asia the prehistorical, and Africa the ahistorical. Glissant critiques Hegel's world-historical model, explaining, "'History [with a capital H] ends where the histories of those peoples once reputed to be without history come together.' History is a highly functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone 'made' the history of the World" (64). The ahistoricity imposed on Africa in Hegel's thought — and thus, in other Western discourses — passed over the Black Atlantic, Glissant argues, through slavery and diaspora and also negatively defined the hierarchical plantation orders of the Caribbean,

the site of a history characterized by ruptures and that began with a brutal dislocation, the slave trade. Our historical consciousness could not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment, as it were, as happened with those peoples who have frequently produced a totalitarian philosophy of history, for instance European peoples, but came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces. This dislocation of the continuum, and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, characterize what I call a nonhistory. (62)

This "nonhistory" is one imposed by colonialism, enslavement, and diaspora. For Glissant, "the negative effect of this nonhistory is therefore the erasing of the collective memory" (62). Caribbean theorists and writers re-envision and recreate memory and history by writing future pasts into the present. "Because the Caribbean notion of time was fixed in the void of an imposed nonhistory," Glissant explains, "the writer must contribute to reconstituting its tormented chronology: that is, to reveal the creative energy of a dialectic between nature and culture in the Caribbean" (65). Submarine histories displace a hegemonic sense of History ('with a capital H,' as Glissant writes), and transAtlantic stories chart submarine histories. In a section of Caribbean Discourse subtitled "History—Histories—Stories," Glissant writes: "The implosion of Caribbean history (of the converging histories of our peoples) relieves us of the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History that would run its unique course. It is not this History that has roared around the edge of the Caribbean, but actually a question of the subterranean convergence of our histories. . . . Submarine roots: that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its networks of branches" (66, 67).

Kincaid also stages her own "quarrel with History." She enters this Antillean "quarrel" in her numerous meditations on "history" in the West Indies in published interviews. In a 1990 interview with Selwyn Cudjoe, Kincaid noted how a childhood fascination with history remained an adult preoccupation, if not obsession, for her: "I read A History of England. [. . .] I read about the history of the West Indies, all different books, because I keep thinking that someone will say it happened differently. I can never believe that the history of the West Indies happened the way it did[:] . . . the wreck and the ruin and the greed" (223-24). Kincaid told Donna Perry in 1993,

When I was little I had this great mind for history. And I never really understood it until I realized that the reason I like history is because I also reduce the past to domestic activity. History was what people did. It was organized along the lines of who said what and who did what, not really unlike how the society in which I grew up was organized. The idea that things are impersonal occurrences is very alien to me. I personalize everything. (137)

In the interview with Perry, Kincaid also commented that she "personalize[s] everything"-even, or perhaps especially, her history and her heritage, and these elements are, of course, entangled with notions of genealogy, genesis, genre, and ultimately, even genocide. In a 1993 interview with Allan Vorda, Kincaid defines her history and heritage in a way that mirrors Xuela's, the protagonist of The Autobiography of My Mother: "I'm part African, part Carib Indian, and part — which is a very small part by now — Scot. All of them came to Antigua by boats. This is how my history begins" (81). . . . how my history begins. This engagement, or quarrel, with history, then, is very much an autobiographical venture; Kincaid explains how one "struggle[s] to make sense of the external from the things that have made you what you are and the things that you have been told are you: my history of colonialism, my history of slavery, and imagining if that hadn't happened what I would have been" (83; emphasis added). Kincaid's words reveal how one's autobiography must necessarily be written within and against the parameters of history and those historical forces (such as colonialism, slavery, and genocide) that have shaped the Caribbean "New World." To Perry, Kincaid attests this relationship of self to history, stating, "my history is so much about dominion; in fact we were called 'the dominion,' and all the colonies were 'the dominions'" (134-35). The relationship of self to history, although intimately personalized in these quotations, is also abstracted and collectivized: it is the collective histories of colonialism, slavery, and genocide in the Caribbean that must be confronted within the autobiographical. For Kincaid, history is autobiography, and autobiography history. One cannot be disentangled from the other. It is in this sense that Kincaid writes history's autobiography and deconstructs autobiography's history.

One of the most provocative and intellectually probing essays in My Garden (Book):, entitled "In History," opens the parameters of the "New World" and its "discovery" to a rigorous theoretical critique. This history, Kincaid explains, has profound consequences for those who dwell in the Americas and for whom the personal legacies of that history are still unfolding. For Kincaid, the Americas remain bound within "this spell, the spell of history" (Autobiography, 218). She begins the essay with a series of questions that strike at the heart of colonialism in the Americas and its impact for colonized persons:

What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me?
Should I call it history?
If so, what should history mean to someone like me?
Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound with each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again and again, over and over, and is this healing and opening a moment that began in 1492 and has yet to come to an end? Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself?
Why should I be obsessed with all these questions? (153)

Kincaid herself conjectures an answer to the questions she poses, and her initial response is direct, to the point, even as it absolutely echoes the consistent tone of almost every history of the West Indies written, a documented history that erases other histories: "My history begins like this: In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World" (153). Then, revealing the true complexity of this history, and how it has been woven into dominant constructions of truth and knowledge, she reflectively adds: "Since this is only the beginning and I am not yet in the picture, I have not yet made an appearance, the word 'discover' does not set off an alarm, I am not yet confused by this assertion. Discover is a fact that I accept; I am only taken by the personality of this quarrelsome, restless man" (154). To discover, Kincaid intimates, is to conquer and to appropriate as one's own. Because she is interested in Columbus's "personality," as she says, Kincaid asks, "Who is he?," who is "this quarrelsome, restless man?, before writing a biomythography for this historical figure:

His origins are sometimes obscure, [...] His origins are sometimes quite vivid: his father was a tailor, he came from Genoa; as a boy, he wandered up and down the Genoese wharves, fascinated by sailors and their tales of faraway lands; these lands would be filled with treasures, all things far away are treasures. I am far away but I am not yet a treasure, I am not a part of this man's consciousness, he does not know of me, I do not yet have a name. And so the word "discover," as it is applied to this new world, remains uninteresting to me. (154)

Kincaid thus creates a mythic biography for the great West Indian "discoverer," just as his exploits created a history for her and those who look like her, revealing that his biography, like his "discoveries" are not just history, but history writ large as myth. She then returns to intellectual, philosophical inquiry, wondering, "When did I begin to ask all this? When did I begin to think of all this and in just this way? What is history? Is it a theory?" (159). Kincaid knows, and she states, "I no longer live in a place where I and those that look like me first made an appearance. I live in another place. It has another narrative" (159).

Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, "the naming of the 'fact' [the "Discovery of America"] is itself a narrative of power disguised as innocence"; as Trouillot astutely demonstrates, "Naming the fact thus already imposes a reading and many historical controversies boil down to who has the power to name what. To call "discovery" the first invasions of inhabited lands by Europeans is an exercise in Eurocentric power that already frames future narratives of the event so described" (114).⁴ At the close of Kincaid's essay "In History," she again implores (of herself, of history itself, to its actors, and to those who had the power to write its scripts): "What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history? And if so, what should history mean to someone who looks like me? Should it be an idea; should it be an open wound, each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again, over and over, or is it a long moment that begins anew each day since 1492?" (166).

Fictionally, Kincaid meditates once again on history and its profound (indeed devastating) effects on lives lived under its spell in the novel Mr. Potter. The year 1492, as a simultaneous point of historical beginning and ending, is reiterated in Mr. Potter, and in the novel, it is associated with genealogy, descent, and a search for origins. In the novel, Kincaid writes, ". . . the sound of Mr. Potter's voice, [was] so full of all that had gone wrong in the world for almost five hundred years that it could break the heart of an ordinary stone" (23). Mr. Potter's voice rings with tragic "discoveries," and his birth from a "motherless" mother named Elfrida Robinson descends from a long line or sentence of "motherless mothers." Kincaid directs her readers in the imperative,

See her as a small girl motherless, and see her mother before her motherless and that mother, too, motherless, and on and on reaching back not so much into eternity as into a sentence that would begin with the year fourteen hundred and nine-two; for eternity is the unimaginable awfulness that makes up the past and the unimaginable peace and pleasure that is to come. (72)

History and genealogy are intertwined here, even if in broken lines; Roderick Nathaniel is born to Elfrida Robinson, a motherless mother who is herself the daughter of a motherless mother who is herself this motherless daughter. For the boy Drickie and his mother Elfrida, this historical and genealogical disinheritance is a "sentence," a damnation, a condemnation to ancestral anonymity; it is also a tragic consequence of European colonial history and its abominable enslavement of people of African descent.

The year 1492 ("fourteen hundred and ninety-two") thus marks a broken line of historical descent for people of African origins in the 'New World'. Time, and the movement of time, is marked differently for those who are the victors and those who are the vanquished. In the novel, the Anglican cathedral, which stands on the spot at which Market Street ends on Newgate Street, is the temporal and spatial landmark of both victory and defeat: it has been built for the Anglican believers by the African slaves "from whom Mr. Potter could trace his ancestors" (177); the tower clock on the cathedral ("with four faces looking north, south, east, and west, making the cathedral seem as if it simultaneously captured and released time") marks time for the victors, but for Mr. Potter (as for all who looked like him), "he was all by himself: a definition of time captured and released, released and captured" (177). The tower clock, Kincaid notes, was built "hundreds of years before," by Mr. Potter's ancestors,

And Mr. Potter's lifetime began in the year fourteen hundred and ninety-two but he was born on the seventh day of January, nineteen hundred and twenty-two, [...] And all through this small narrative of this small life was the loud and harsh ringing of the church's bell, and this loudness and this harshness was such a surprise to the people who had ordered the cathedral and its clock and bell that these two peoples agreed to call the harsh loudness a chime and the chiming of the church bells marking off time eventually became a part of the great and everlasting silence. (177-178)

Time ultimately is measured not through the chiming of the church's bell, but rather in the "great and everlasting silence" of history and defeat and death. Mr. Potter's death, his end (as if in a narrative; as if written by his daughter Elaine Cynthia Potter), is associated with this "great and everlasting silence" that is both temporal and eternal; however, "his end has a beginning," a textual return:

And Mr. Potter did not move with great hurry or inexorably toward his inevitable end, it was only that the end is so inevitable, his end was beyond avoidance, and yet like the hours trapped in a clock-let it be the clock on the top of the cathedral with its four faces, each facing a corner of the earth-the end of each hour is the beginning of the next, his end has a beginning . . . (178)

Mr. Potter's movement toward death is monumental: a temporal entrapment ("hours trapped in a clock"), yet as each hour ends, it begins again in the new hour to which it gives birth. Mr. Potter's end, his beginning: a narrative cycle of return and creative force: he creates the child — Elaine Cynthia Potter — whom he abandons who creates his life (Mr. Potter) in narrative for eternal recurrence, removing Mr. Potter from the eternal and vast silence that is death and that is history. Kincaid shrouds her dead father in mythic layers, making him an artifact not only of history and literature, but also of myth. Here, I want to return to a discussion of genesis in order to illustrate how the Caribbean "quarrel with History" is intimately bound to ideas about myth.

III. "Caribbean Genesis": Writing New Worlds

History and Literature, which Glissant argues "first come together in the realm of myth" (71), have operated in the West through an ideology of "dominant sameness" (70) that relegates diversity and difference to the peripheries of documentation or representation: according to Glissant, this dynamic is deeply embedded within the notion of Genesis. Caribbean writers' contestations of history also mark their engagements with genesis. And Genesis (capital G), according to Glissant, is the foundational narrative for History (capital H) and Literature (capital L):

Genesis, which is the fundamental explanation, and ordering, which is the ritualized narrative, anticipate what the West would ascribe to Literature (that is almost divine creation: the Word made Flesh) — the notion of Genesis — and what would be the realm of historical consciousness (a selective evolution) — that of Ordering. (72)

And "the encounter between genesis and ordering" in myth separates, opposes, and structures the relations between the realms of nature and culture (73). Within Western myths of genesis, Glissant argues that nature is almost always subdued to the ordering principles of culture and that "the control of nature, and of one's nature, by culture was the ideal of the Western mind" (73). In genesis myths of the West, Glissant contends, "it is a matter of learning the natural Genesis, the primordial slime, the Eternal Garden, and embarking — even at the risk of condemnation (like the myth of Adam and Eve . . .) — on a journey to an ordering — knowledge" (73). This dynamic, according to Glissant, operates both within History and within Literature, manifest in History's notions of evolution and progress and in Literature's, particularly realism's, privileging of the linear, chronologically ordered narrative: "the linear nature of narrative and the linear form of chronology take shape in this context" (73). Herein lies the idea that "Genesis legitimates genealogy" (140): for Glissant, time, history, lineage all affirm myth's quest for origins, legitimacy, and filiation. In contrast, the modern American hero, Glissant argues, "will have to return to the demands of the 'here and now' (which is, not the known, but the done), so renouncing, the beginning of history. . . . The literary work, so transcending myth, today initiates a cross-cultural poetics" (82).

Does Jamaica Kincaid also so renounce the "beginning of history"? Or does she pose the aporia of history and historical beginnings as her fundamental question? After all, as Glissant intimates, "the important thing is not the reply but the question" (81). Indeed, Kincaid's Mr. Potter continually evokes the idea of "beginnings": in the novel, she meditates on "my beginnings" (54); to tell Mr. Potter's story, his history, she says that she must "start again at the beginning" (188); of the diasporic individuals (Mr. Potter, Mr. Shoul, Dr. Weizenger) living in Antigua, Kincaid notes, "they had to begin again, re-create their own selves, make something new" (194). In Kincaid's tangled narrative, though, beginnings border on and merge with endings. Kincaid thus also paradoxically meditates on beginnings that end in Mr. Potter: writing about her biological grandfather, Nathaniel Potter, and his place on earth, Kincaid explains that "he was part of its mysterious and endless beginnings" (40); commenting on Mr. Potter's death, Kincaid laments his end, but more hopefully articulates that "his end has a beginning" (178); she also grieves, though, that life with "its glorious beginnings end and the end is always an occasion for sadness" (184, emphasis add). Even endings are not final, and in the novel, endings almost always spill over into new points of becoming, into new beginnings: in a passage recounting Dr. Weizenger's flight from Prague through Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Shanghai to St. Johns, Antigua, the exile recalls conversations about the "end of the world" (32) with "days of the world ending again and again, and within the very days were ends, as if the day did not constitute and define a limitation" (32-33; emphasis added). In Mr. Potter Kincaid sets a world spinning on its axis, creates a chaosmos of creative beginnings and tragic endings wrought through the forces of creation and annihilation, of genesis and genocide.

Kincaid's Antiguan chaosmos is one in which "the sun, a planetary body [is] indifferent to the significance of individuals" (140) and the world "in all its parts, was complicated, with plates beneath its surface shifting and colliding, with vast subterranean cauldrons of steam and gases mixing and then exploding violently through the earth's crust" (125). This chaosmos is not only planetary and geologic; it is also psychic and metaphysic, haunted and driven by the question to her father, "What am I to call you? [which] seemed to arrange not only a singular world but a whole system of planetary revolutions" (169). This world is volatile and changing, not static. Kincaid writes, "The world as we know it will from time to time do that, collapse, engulfed by a fire" (104). Unsurprisingly, Annie Victoria Richardson is a force (both divine and diabolic) in this world: she is sulfuric and volcanic, "flames in her own fire and . . . very beautiful" (135); she is an unstable archipelago, "herself already a series of beautifully poisonous eruptions, a boiling cauldron of strange fluids, a whirlwind of sex and passion" (141). Later, evoking the same language of infernal destruction, Kincaid takes on the fiery force of her mother, and the author sees her life "in a tunnel, ablaze with torrents of fire, . . . and at that time I glowed not like an ember surging toward ashes but like a stout log enveloped in flames" (165). To maternal fire, Kincaid contrasts paternal, oceanic flow: in the writer's elemental engagements, father is likened to sea and sky, with "the end of his life itself rushing like a predictable wave in a known ocean" (194); his death deeply affects Kincaid (though she writes that her existence did not seem to alter him at all), and she mourns "that a source from which I flowed had been stanched" (185). On the day of his burial "the sun was blotted out, blotted out by an eternal basin of rain" (182). If mother is godlike, father is a lowly man, like his own father Nathaniel Potter, "and their worlds, the one in which they lived and the one in which the existed, ceased, and the small irregular stumble that their existence had made in the vast smoothness that was the turning of the earth on its axis was no more" (55). Mother is to father as God is to man; as fire is to water.

In Kincaid's created world, readers bear witness to plagues and curses and prayers and betrayals and destructions that rival those of the Torah or the Old Testament. Kincaid's paternal grandfather Nathaniel, in this Caribbean chaosmos, is accursed, cast out, among the banished: he becomes an Antiguan Job, a fisherman whose catch dwindles daily, finally to nothing, rather than increasing ten fold, and who curses God; he then is smote by the God he cursed, stricken with deadly, festering boils, "and when he died, his body was blackened, as if he had been trapped in the harshest of fires, a fire that from time to time would subside to a dull glow only to burn again fiercely, and each time the fierce burning lasted for an eternity" (47). Nathaniel suffers infernal destruction (hellfire and brimstone?), as one cast out, as if by God, to the margins of history and culture. Kincaid shocks our emotions, pulling us toward this "New World" Job and his dreadful reversal of fortune. One sympathizes with Nathaniel, not the God who dared to strike him down; feels pity for the man, not adoration for the God. Mr. (Roderick) Potter, like his own father Nathaniel who abandoned him, is not only a mortal inhabitant of this created world; his body is the world itself. Mr. Potter's heart is not only corporeal, but also a human geography, a bodily map of Kincaid's Antigua. Kincaid charts a cartographic journey across "the many interstices of Mr. Potter's heart: valleys of regret and hope and disappointment; mountains of regret and hope and disappointment; seas of longing; plains barren of vegetation and plains full of dust; shallow gutters of joy; deep crevices of sorrow; a sharp ledge of awe" (152). Mr. Potter's heart is the world that his lovers and daughters inhabit, although "all of this was a secret to him" (152): it "resembled the surface of some familiar but not yet found planet" (153)-his heart inhabited by the lovers (and mothers), girls (and daughters) that he abandons. The sorrow he creates for his abandoned lovers and disinherited daughters also creates new geographical alterrains (or alternative terrains): once deserted, each woman "was recomposed, not made new, only recomposed into an ordinary mother with her girl child, and their tears could make a river and their sighs of sorrow and regret could make mountains, and the pangs of hunger in their stomachs could make a verdant valley . . ." (152). If for Glissant, the quintessential unconquered territory is the forest, for Kincaid it is the body of Mr. Potter and the worlds spawned in the sorrow he creates for those who love and lose him, for the girls he sires and then forgets.⁵

So what do Jamaica Kincaid's worlds create in their creation? Why does she engage genesis to write new worlds? Does she attempt in Mr. Potter to write new worlds destroyed by the myth of the "New World"? If European colonial history constructed a worldview that subsumed all other worlds into its own, eclipsing alternative terrains (other histories, other peoples, the planets spawned in their imaginations) through a "dominant sameness" (Glissant 70), then Kincaid rends this singular and cyclopean world with textual worlds that were or might have been. Her creation is less a past remembering of worlds lost (is paradise lost ever regained?) than a future remembrance — creating for posterity what might have been, what will be (or the yet to become) in worlds of words — in honor of histories erased, if not in their stead. If European myths of creation (or genesis) obliterated and destroyed other worlds-those of the Africans forcibly deracinated from homeland and enslaved in new lands; of the Americans (such as the Taino, the Aruac, and Carib Indians) decimated under early Spanish colonial rule, and of the Asians exiled and indentured throughout the Caribbean, primarily by British colonialists — then Kincaid's revisions recast the relations of encounter, contact, and power, re-envisioning those other worlds; she does so on a scale that is both cosmic and human, celestial and mundane. The so-called New World brought together — by force, if not by choice — peoples from across the globe; yet it established and echoed the hierarchical relations of the Old World. Rewriting genesis, and creating worlds (new and old, discovered or lost), Kincaid settles the scores of history: she evokes history's wounds, its legacies of disinheritance for those who live in "the shadows": for "the world would not allow them to . . . speak of the shadows in which they lived, the world would first shudder and then shatter into a million pieces of something else before it would allow them to do so" (114). In the final section, I examine how Kincaid's engagements with genesis also manifest a concern with transmuting genres, particularly those of autobiography and biography.

IV. Transmutations of Genre: Kincaid's Biographical Autograph in Mr. Potter

"And I, writing all this now, came into being just at that moment and I, who am writing all this now, came into being a very long time before that" (142):- So writes Jamaica Kincaid, the narrative figuration in the present of the past child Elaine Cynthia Potter in her fictional biography, Mr. Potter, of her biological father, Mr. Potter. Kincaid's self-creation in language, in words, both parallels and subverts divine creation (an extension of deity into language and flesh: In the beginning was the Word). In this section, I address the question of biography as alterbiography in Kincaid's novel Mr. Potter, an alterbiographic text that decenters and deterritorializes the matrix of self-other-text. The novel displaces the autobiographical "I" and its referentiality into the biographical Mr. Potter, a fictional portrait of the author's biological father, and yet, a historical figuration of an African descendant of slaves in the Caribbean island of Antigua. In the novel, Kincaid confounds the referentiality of biographical texts, and thus, transmutes or alters our understanding of auto/biography; she writes alterbiographically. I plumb here Kincaid's writing of autobiography as biography in Mr. Potter, focusing on the novel's preoccupation with genealogy, genesis, and even genocide as frames for rethinking the boundaries of genre. Father and daughter are related not exclusively through genealogy, but also through genealogical abandonment: each is marked at birth by "an empty space with a line drawn through it" where the father's name should have been inscribed on their birth certificates (100). I will trace, then, "the line" that Kincaid believes is "drawn through me which I inherited from him, and this line drawn through me binds me to him even as it was very much meant to show that I did not belong to him" (161). I read this "line" as Kincaid's biographical autograph. This autobiographical extension — the inscription of her biographical autograph in the text — is intensely linked (through genesis and genealogy) to her transmutations of genre in the novel Mr. Potter.

"I began to realize," Kincaid noted in a 1993 interview, "how my writing and my use of images are based on my understanding of the word as good and evil as influenced by two books in the Bible, Genesis and Revelation" (Vorda 93); in the interview, she also intimates that "the beginning and the end are the real thing" (Vorda 94). These biblical resonances — Genesis, Revelations — sweep through Kincaid's texts as the forces of creation and destruction, of genesis and genocide, and these forces enter into Kincaid's writing of genealogy and genre, specifically those of "life" writing-or, of autobiography and biography. Kincaid philosophically tests the generic frames of autobiography and biography in literary texts such as the short story "Biography of a Dress," the novel The Autobiography of My Mother, the memoir My Brother, and most recently, in the novel Mr. Potter. For Kincaid, the genres of biography and autobiography are intricately woven into the parameters of memory and history, but also more indelibly, they are marked with the fractures of genesis, genealogy, and genocide in the Caribbean. In this section, I theorize the relations of genre to genealogy, focusing specifically on Kincaid's transmutations of autobiography and biography.

Biography is, of course, by definition necessarily situated within the frame of autobiography. Having emerged alongside the genre of autobiography in the eighteenth century, biography stands between the literary expectations of autobiography and the documentary demands of reflective historiography. Feminist and literary scholars such as Liz Stanley and Laura Marcus, and more recently (and in my mind, more sophisticatedly) Alison Donnell and Leigh Gilmore have explored the imbrications of biography and autobiography. According to Gilmore in The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, "Kincaid maximizes the nonmimetic capacities of autobiography through her emphasis on autobiographical extension, a self-representational practice allied with and knowable through metonymy"; in her reading of Kincaid's literary texts as serial autobiography, Gilmore explains that "insofar as autobiography represents the real, it does so through metonymy, that is, through the claims of contiguity, wherein the person who writes extends the self in the writing, and puts her in another place" (101). I argue here that the places where Kincaid situates the autobiographical self or selves are in other lives, or even objects — a dress in "Biography of a Dress," and the lives of Xuela Claudette Richardson in The Autobiography of My Mother, Devon Drew in My Brother, or Roderick Potter in Mr. Potter. In the most recent novel, Kincaid writes, "I see now that all change is its same self and all different selves are the same" (139). These biographical and metonymic displacements push autobiography to its generic limits, but it also allows Kincaid to create lives — her own and others — from memory and imagination, and to refuse the destruction of those lives through anonymity and historical erasure.

Autobiography, then, almost always exceeds the individual who writes it, exceeds the life and the subjective experiences of the writing subject; autobiography will also be about the others who surround the writing subject and whose experiences are enmeshed with those of the writer. Autobiography is inherently entangled with biography, the writing of other people's lives. These biographical others may or may not include one's family — one's mother and father, siblings, spouse or partner, and child(ren) — and they are certainly not limited to genealogy and filiation; however, even when absent, genealogy is still silent and invisibly present in the autobiographical text. In Kincaid's alterbiographic texts, she challenges the presumed insularity and discreteness of the autobiographical form, opening it to representations of alterity: through alterbiography, Kincaid powerfully writes other into self, biography into autobiography, annihilation into creation, and death into life. She thus forces us to rethink the presumed boundaries of these terrains; she does so through her transmutations of genealogy and genre.

What, then, is the relation between genealogy and genre, particularly in autobiographical and biographical forms? Genealogy, as autobiography and as biography, are also embedded within history writ large: New World "Discoveries"; British maritime history and its legacies of piracy, pillaging, and ceremonious parading of one's loot or booty (human and mineral and botanical); the Atlantic Slave Trade; chattel slavery in the Antilles, the enslaved Africans beginning a life of drudgery in this "New World"; and lost to posterity, the Caribs and other indigenous peoples of the West Indies who suffered the worst and most irrevocable form of historical "progress" (always to the gain of one group of people, but to the insurmountable and incalculable loss of another): genocide. Kincaid's alterbiographical texts are not just about the imbrications of autobiography (or the autobiographical form) and biography (or the biographical form); nor is it just about the interweaving of autobiography with genealogy or filiation; but it is also about the inherent entanglement of autobiography with history.

Here, an etymological turn is instructive in understanding Kincaid's constructions and deconstructions of genres — autobiography and biography. Both genre and genealogy (like genesis and genocide and many other modern English words) have their root in the Greek term genos, which (like many Greek nouns) has a somewhat broad denotation. Its most common (or pervasively documented) meaning is "sort or kind" — from which we derive words like generic, general, generally, and even gender, but also clearly, genre. The word genos also denotes a family; hence, modern equivalents in English, such as genealogy, genealogical, and even more scientifically, genes, genomes, genetic, and genetics. This last meaning is also closely parallel to a third meaning denoted by genos: a race, tribe, or other group of people. This third meaning (or usage) for genos is similar to another Greek term, ethnos, which also means a race, tribe, or group of people and from which modern English words such as ethnic and ethnicity are derived.⁶ From these etymological insights, we must examine how language itself is part of the matrix — if not the matrix — from which ideas about genre, race, literature, and nationality emerge. (This etymological relation or affiliation — between genre and genealogy and genocide, from the root genos — also raises the question of the racialization of genres, which is regrettably beyond the scope of the current paper.) Kincaid's weaving and unraveling of genres (autobiography, biography) opens one space for doing so, and her transmutations of genre are informed by genealogy (both familial and racial, as the root genos supports); Kincaid's transmutations of genre also perspicaciously expose racial violence at the heart of history, of colonialism, of slavery, of genocide, and even of the modern nation-state (which emerged from these historical parameters).

The philosophical and textual transmutations of genealogy and genre inform the novel Mr. Potter, a text in which Kincaid indelibly inscribes her biographical autograph. In the novel, Kincaid unequivocally links not only the story of Mr. Potter's life to her own, through genealogy, but more intimately, through its biographical telling: "he could not read and he could not write and he could not render the story of life, his own in particular, with coherency and I can read and I can write and I am his daughter" (130). The genesis of Mr. Potter's story through language (wherein text is likened to "a bolt of cloth" and writing is figured as both weaving and dyeing) also borders on its unraveling or unfolding. Kincaid writes, "in this way I make Mr. Potter and in this way I unmake Mr. Potter and apart from the fact that he is now dead, he is unable to affect the portrait of him I am rendering here, the scenes on the bolt of cloth as he appears in them: the central figure" (158). In her telling and untelling, or making and unmaking, of Mr. Potter's biography, genealogical and chronological order are reversed, as daughter gives birth to father. The writer speaks and names and creates two lives-her father's and her own: "And I now say, 'Mr. Potter,' but as I say his name, I am reading it also, and so to say his name and to imagine his life at the same time makes him whole and complete, not singular and fragmented, and this is because he is dead and beyond reading and writing and beyond contesting my authority to render him in my own image" (193). This image — though seemingly based on self-sameness and similitude — is not metaphoric, but rather metonymic: it displaces self (daughter) into other (father), while inverting time, paternity, and knowledge ("reading and writing"), as well as gendered and biblical myths of genesis. Daughter divinely creates father in her own image, but this image is shifting; it is imagined, as all images ultimately are; and it is written. Kincaid reveals how "Mr. Potter's life advanced and exploded on the page" that narrates his genesis ("Those Words that Echo," 3).

Reflecting on the novel (then in-process) in an essay printed in The New York Times, Kincaid describes Mr. Potter's home as "on the page, the white page, the clean white page" ("Those Words that Echo," 3), an image evoking Xuela Claudette Richardson's description of her own birth in the novel The Autobiography of My Mother: "I was new, the pages of my life had no writing on them, they were unsmudged, so clean, so smooth, so new" (214-15). The "page," though, is not a metaphor for the autobiographical self; rather, it is the textual site of auto/biographical extension, of creative possibilities for genesis, of future and past becomings; it is the metonymic starting point for new autobiographical beginnings. Writing lives into being, Kincaid metonymically writes and rewrites her own lives. Writing biography, Kincaid enters autobiography.

Throughout the novel Mr. Potter, Kincaid incessantly comments on Mr. Potter's illiteracy and her own ability to read and write; this difference between her and her father is profound. Because she can read and because she can write, she can also write Mr. Potter's story, his biography, and thereby save him from eternal loss. This difference is a difference of power — she can read, he could not; yet, Kincaid desires to save her father, despite his paternal abandonment of her as an infant, from an unknown and unrecorded life. (One poignant memory vividly, if ironically, recalls the self-absorbed man waving a young Elaine away as she comes to him for money to buy a writing tablet.) Kincaid's power, though, is surrendered in her generosity toward this man who, in part, gave her life. She writes, "because I am his daughter, for I have his nose, and because I learned how to read and how to write, only so is Mr. Potter's life known, his smallness becomes large, his anonymity is stripped away, his silence broken. Mr. Potter himself says nothing, nothing at all" (189). Kincaid, the abandoned and renamed (self-named) daughter, "creates" a story for the illiterate Mr. Potter and so saves him for eternal oblivion and everlasting anonymity.

Kincaid's life is thus intimately connected to her father's, even if she did not know him well during his lifetime: they share a line of "illegitimacy" — a line that joins father and daughter in name and in disinheritance, in life as in death. Kincaid writes, "he died and will never be heard from again, except through me, for I can read and I can write my own name, which includes his name also, Elaine Cynthia Potter, and like him and his own father before him, I have a line drawn through me, a line has been drawn through me" (191-92). Elaine Cynthia Potter, the disinherited daughter — later self-defined as Jamaica Kincaid — "creates " a story for Mr. Potter and in so doing "creates" her own narrative and rewrites herself: here the writing of biography becomes the writing of autobiography; the writing of other (father) becomes a reclamation of self (daughter). She thus breaks the "line" (of illegitimacy, of illiteracy, of disinheritance) in her auto/biographical reclamation. And Kincaid sadly notes that Mr. Potter "lived his life deliberately ignorant of my existence, as if I were in a secret chamber separated from the rest of the world and the world would never know of me, or suspect that I was in the world" (193). This secret chamber is a sepulcher of sorts, condemning daughter to genealogical death; yet the author bestows narrative life on Mr. Potter, freeing herself both from her father's death and from the internal death that his indifference toward her created within the girl that she was. In writing Mr. Potter's story, Kincaid is excavating the effigy of the child Elaine Cynthia Potter, "laid to rest in the pose of the newborn which is also the pose of the dead" (147). Life, death; daughter, father-both are entangled together in "this borning and dying" (101) that becomes the auto/biographical writing of worlds. Herein lies Kincaid's biographical autograph.

Kincaid's engagements with genesis are deeply imbricated with her profound "quarrel with History" and her radical critiques of historical consequence (material and political and cultural). Returning to broken points in severed genealogical lines, Kincaid rewrites the stories-indeed the histories-of her own genesis and that of her biological father (and her biographical protagonist), Mr. Potter. Kincaid's alterbiographic engagements with genesis and genealogy in Mr. Potter also offer powerful literary transmutations of genre (or categories of division and difference): she textually and aesthetically erodes the boundaries dividing biography and autobiography, autobiography and history; just as she philosophically blurs the boundaries between self and other, life and death, light and darkness. Kincaid thus writes alternative histories (to contest the dominant forms of European colonial history in the "New World"): these created (and past-driven, yet future-oriented) histories are marked by different times, different points of geneses-creating new worlds for those who have suffered the erasures of historical time writ large in the Caribbean (slavery and genocide and colonialism). In closing, then, I return full circle, or to quote Kincaid:

And to start again at the beginning: Mr. Potter's appearance in the world was a combination of sadness, joy, and a chasm of silent horror for his mother (Elfrida Robinson) and indifference to his father (Nathaniel Potter), who had so many children that none of them could matter at all; and to the world he was of no consequence at all, for the world is filled with many people and each of them is like a second in a minute and a minute is in an hour and an hour is in a day and a day is in a week and a week is in a month and a month is in a year and a year is in a century and a century is in a millennium and a millennium is in the world and the world eventually becomes a picture trapped in a four-sided frame. (188)

Notes

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