SOURCE: Braziel, Jana Evans. “Jamaica Kincaid's ‘In the Night’: Jablesse, Obeah, and Diasporic Alterrains in At the Bottom of the River.” Journal X 6, no. 1 (autumn 2001): 79-104.

In the following essay, Braziel asserts that Jamaica Kincaid's utilization of Obeah, a Caribbean diasporic religion, in “In the Night” “is linked to contemporary Caribbean diasporas and the traversal of spaces, times, and cultures that such migration enacts.”

Jamaica Kincaid's first book, published in 1983, was a collection of short stories entitled At the Bottom of the River. Composed of ten interlocking short stories, seven first published in the New Yorker, the collection astounded critics with its breathtaking lyricism, fluid images, and innovative lines of poetic prose, even as it confounded critics and readers alike with its abstract language, its abstruse and ethereal narratives, and its recesses of metamorphic meaning. Opening with the terse, dialogic story “Girl,” the collection explores the mother-daughter melodrama...