SOURCE: “The Broken Plate of Heaven,” in The Nation, February 5, 1996, pp. 23–5.

In the following review, Segal offers a favorable evaluation of The Autobiography of My Mother.

The heroine of Jamaica Kincaid's new novel [The Autobiography of My Mother] is Xuela Claudette Richardson. “Xuela” is for her Carib mother, “Claudette” for “some nuns from France” who brought the mother up, “Richardson” is for the Scottish half of her father's blood and the whole, she says, is a humiliation that could intoxicate you with self-hatred.

What those nuns from France brought her mother up to be was a “long suffering, unquestioning, modest, wishing-to-die-soon person,” for she died giving Xuela birth. The father put the baby, along with his dirty washing, into the care of Ma Eunice, who was not unkind, recalls Xuela. “She treated me just the way she treated her own children. … In a place like this, brutality is...