Adrian Blevins is a poet and essayist who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College System. In this essay, she explores how the digressions and contractions in Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother ultimately help the author explore her reactions to a family tragedy reveal the way the self is often split between love and hate, obligation and self-preservation, and action and inaction.

Toward the end of My Brother, Jamaica Kincaid says that she "became a writer out of desperation." She elaborates in this way: "when I first heard my brother was dying I was familiar with the act of saving myself: I would write about him. I would write about his dying." Like much of Kincaid's memoir, this statement is ironic because My Brother is not really, and certainly not only, about Kincaid's brother's sickness and death. As many critics have...