SOURCE: Ferguson, Moira. “At the Bottom of the River: Mystical (De)coding.” In Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body, pp. 7-35. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Ferguson views colonialism as a central theme of the stories in At the Bottom of the River.

I can see the great danger in what I am—a defenseless and pitiful child. Here is a list of what I must do.

I looked at this world as it revealed itself to me—how new, how new—and I longed to go there.

—At the Bottom of the River

By her own admission, Jamaica Kincaid views her first publication, At the Bottom of the River (1983), as the text of a repressed, indoctrinated subaltern subject: “I can see that At the Bottom of the River was, for instance, a very unangry, decent, civilized book and it represents sort...