Summary

My Brother opens with Jamaica Kincaid seeing her brother lying in a bed in the Holberton Hospital in the Gweneth O'Reilly ward on the island of Antigua, where he is said to be dying of AIDS. Jamaica recalls his birth at their family home when she is thirteen years old. The family has just eaten their evening meal of boiled fish, bread, and butter, and her mother sends her to fetch the midwife, a large woman whose buttocks roll up and down while she walks, and who says that she will attend once she has finished eating.

The arrival of the new child disrupts the family life, and the other children are sent to sleep at neighbor's houses. The new baby has a reddish-yellow skin, and the author hears his first cry, and listens to a discussion taking place about how...