Lucy By Jamaica Kincaid

“History is full of great events; when the great events are said and done, there will always be someone, a little person, unhappy, dissatisfied, discontents, not at home in her own skin, ready to stir up a whole new set of great events again.” (147) Lucy is an autobiographic novel written by one of the most important women Caribbean writers, Jamaica Kincaid who now lives and works in the United States. Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 on an island called Antigua that was colonized by the British. (http://voices.cla.umn.edu) She is widely known for her novels in which she explores the theme of complexity of identity as well as the relationship between mother figures. Lucy, her first novel represents the events of Jamaica Kincaid’s life when

“Mariah was like a mother to me, a good mother.” (110) There are two side of the relationships between Lucy and Mariah; the feeling of love and rejection. When Lucy and Mariah first met, they have a feeling of rejection toward one another. “The maid said she did not like me because of the way I talked told me that she was sure I could not dance.” (11) Lucy is being described as a nun. “I spoke like a nun, I walked like one also, and that everything about me was so pious…” (11) But as the novel continues, they both grow to love each other. “Mariah said to me, ‘I love you.’ And again she said it clearly and sincerely, without confidence or doubt.” (26) Toward the end of the novel, the relationship between Lucy and Mariah is based on employer and employee. When Lucy irritates Mariah, she will speak to her harshly and begin to make up rules which Mariah insists that Lucy should follow. Lucy views herself as part of the family that she works for, but at the same time being separate from the family by her identity of being a girl from the West Indies. She lives in “a small room just off the kitchen- the maid’s room… The ceiling was very high and the walls went all the way up to the ceiling.” (7) Her room is being compared to “a box in which cargo traveling a long way should be shipped.” (7) A cargo brings up the theme of Middle Passage, when people who come from somewhere and get send

But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence” (133). In Lucy, Kincaid underlines the complexity of identities of a “young woman from the fringes of the world” (95) in a new environment, in which there are many influential factors such as classes, races, genders and most importantly mother figures. Although the novel focuses on the journey of a teenage migrant who comes to North American to achieve freedom, it also highlights the two mother figures; biological mother and Mariah have a great influence to the transformation of Lucy’s identity. “I saw the book Mariah had given me… I opened the book. At the top of the page I wrote my full name: Lucy Josephine Potter.” (163) Lucy believes that “your past is the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in” (137). By starting a new page in her journal indicates that Lucy realized that she has establish her new individual identity. The last scene of the novel shows how Lucy has been shaped by her biological mother and Mariah. “At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it. And then as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me.” (164) She feels ashamed toward her relationship with her mother and