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Through intimate portraits and compelling interviews, photographer Mariana Cook explores the unbreakable bonds that hold the women in a family together in her new book, Generations of Women. Writer Jamaica Kincaid, her mother, and her daughter discuss the intricacies of their relationship in this excerpt.
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Annie Drew
Grandmother
housewife
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I was raised by my father in Dominica. If I had been raised by my mother, I wouldn't be so rough, but I wouldn't have been able to storm through life; no work was too hard for me.
Growing up, Jamaica had me close to her, I would do everything and she would get the time to read. I don't know if she can still play music, but I sent her to learn to play. I didn't have anybody to raise me the way I did her, but it is to my own interest now that I'm old, because she's my support. All of us get on nicely. Jamaica looks after us and we love her. Even if sometimes she may say one or two things that are fiction, I'm never vexed. As a writer, what she will write is just fiction.
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Jamaica Kincaid
Mother
writer
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I was an only child for a long time and my mother and I were very attached to each other. She read a lot, mostly nonfiction. She taught me to read when I was three and a half, so I could have my own books and would leave her alone to read her books. I remember learning to read as if I'd always known how the words looked in a book.
My mother would make incredibly grand gestures, but there was nothing behind them to sustain them. I remember her sending me to a certain school, but then I had no schoolbooks. I came in first anyway, by borrowing other people's books. She insists she gave me a musical education, but she did not. She sent me to a piano class, but I had no way to practice because we had no piano. I don't mind her stories being amazing, and I don't mind the facts. What I mind is their emotional dishonesty and blindness.
At sixteen I was sent away to America to help support my family. That was the beginning of my adult life. I dutifully sent my paychecks home, and then one day it dawned on me that I was being asked to support someone else's mistake. I hadn't had more children than I should have had; all I had done was be the oldest child. I was a brilliant young girl who should have gone on to a university.
Nothing was dependent on the sacrifice of my life. It was willful that somebody just interrupted life for these people. I stopped sending them money and stopped writing to them and began to send myself to school. I became the parents I didn't have for myself.
At the time Annie was born, I hadn't seen my mother in twenty years. I have powerful feelings of despair, dislike, and even sometimes revulsion toward my mother. I don't know her really, and I don't know if she wanted any of us. She did some incredibly loving and intimate things, and then some things were not acts of love at all. I feel I'm similar to her in some ways - we're both fearful of intimacy - and that's painful.
In the natural order of things my mother will probably die before me, and I think it will be very hard for me to live in a world without her, to construct the world without her presence. I'm so used to starting my life beginning with her and with her mother, whether her mother was the woman I knew or the woman she claims was her mother. What's interesting about her story is that she's made a romance of her life.
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Annie Shawn
Daughter
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My mom and I love each other very much. I'm kind of similar to her, but I'm more forgiving. My grandmother and I have the same name, and when I'm being mean my mom says, "Oh, you're just like Grandma Annie," but I don't think I am. Sometimes my mother acts like my grandmother a little bit. I think my mom's going to look like her mother when she gets old.
My mom's not like any of my friends' mothers, they're all normal, not very interesting. Everyone says my mom's the coolest mom and 1 agree. At my parties she dances and teaches everyone weird dances.
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