자메이카 킨케이드의『내 어머니의 자서전』: 식민주의적 승자와 패자 관계에 갇힌 정체성

Abstract

This paper examines how slavery reconstitutes the formation of Caribbean subjects in relationship to the overwhelming power of the colonial episteme in Kincaid’s work. In The Autobiography of My Mother, Xuela, daughter of a Carib mother and a half Scot, half African father, tries to seek her identity in the context of the colonial victor and vanquished relationship. Xuela’s dead mother is analogous to her alienation from her mother country dominated by the imperialist power. Her life-long struggle to seek her identity and the history of her mother is completely trapped by the binary oppositional power relationship of the victor and the vanquished. I want to focus more specifically on the underlying issues of the heroine’s self-quest by analyzing characters, which reveals Xuela’s perspective of dividing the world into the victor and the vanquished. Chapter II concerns about Xuela’s mother, father, and Ma Eunice, teacher as her surrogate mothers. Chapter III includes three men who have sexual affairs with the heroine, their wives as well by positioning them as the dominant mode of binary power relations. I am especially drawn to the myriad tactics in which Xuela returns constantly to the raw materials of the self in order to survive. Trapped in harsh world of power relationships, Xuela comes to realize that the way to avoid being dominated is to destroy others. To be a victor, she has many survival tactics: By positing herself as the victor, she tries to overcome her sense of defeat, caused by the loss of mother, linked with historical realities. Xuela, who has never been loved, also fails to love someone else and becomes cold-blooded human being. Xuela, who owns nothing, uses her body as the tool of exercising power to men. She remains childless, refusing to be a mother because of the trauma of her mother. Although death is inevitable, Xuela, on seventy, outlives all people she knew—father, stepmother, husband, half-sister, and half-brother. Conclusively, the mother/daughter relationship is central to Kincaid’s fiction. Xuela’s lament for the lost mother connects her to the lost Caribbean subject in the native country. As a result, this article demonstrates how a postcolonial politics may indeed be rendered visible in The Autobiography of My Mother.