In the following excerpt, Ferguson offers an interpretation of Kincaid's "What I Have Been Doing Lately," and claims that the story is "a discrete narrative about a child growing up in a world where psychological, physical, and political dominations seem the order of the day."

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 un-angry, decent, civilized book and it represents sort of this successful attempt by English people to make their version of a human being or their version of a person out of me. It amazes me now that I did that then. I would never write like that again, I don't think. I might go back to it, but I'm not very interested...