Danielle Rose
Autobiography
Professor Blumberg
February, 2016
The Memory of Her Brother
In an interview for Transition magazine, Jamaica Kincaid talks about the death of her brother Devon, which she chronicles in her memoir My Brother, saying: “To me the fact that my brother Devon died of AIDS transforms his death, his dying, his life, into something mythical—into something more than the ordinary” (Frías, 121). But looking at the hard data reveals that in 1997, over 30 million people across the globe were living with HIV/AIDS. Over two million people died of AIDS that year alone. And with the egregious lack of HIV/AIDS care in her home country of Antigua – another primary focus of Kincaid’s memoir – the fatal prognosis for these cases is all but certain.
From this statistical lens, Devon’s death is far from being exceptional or mythical. Devon becomes nothing more than scientific data, another number on a graphical chart. More importantly, the gruesome, lurid descriptions that Kincaid gives of Devon’s ravaged body as it succumbs to the decay of disease also lead the text away from the realm of the mythic and into the grotesque: “His penis looked like a bruised flower that had been cut short on the stem; it
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This is more than just disrespect towards the dead. It is denotive of a much deeper disinterest for perpetuating and preserving the past. The grave was never marked, foretelling that it was known from the outset; no one would ever care to visit. And “no one” from the family would take Kincaid there, implicating the entire family in this relegation. Nothing was left of their father to bear witness to the life that he lived. It is true that he bore children, which as Kincaid laments, Devon did not do, but one must ask what they are worth if they do not care to pay him