SOURCE: Berrian, Brenda F. “Snapshots of Childhood Life in Jamaica Kincaid's Fiction.” In Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature, edited by Janice Lee Liddell and Yakini Belinda Kemp, pp. 103-16. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

In the following essay, Berrian identifies and discusses recurring motifs in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John.

Increasingly, books by English-speaking Caribbean women writers concerned with the female protagonist's recollection of childhood memories and her fight for self-independence within the context of close family relationships have been showing up in bookstores in North America, England, and the Caribbean. One writer—and one who has captured the admiration of well-established writers like Andrew Salkey, Derek Walcott, and Anne Tyler—is Jamaica Kincaid of Antigua. In 1983, Kincaid, then a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, published a collection of ten unusual short stories under the title of At the Bottom...