My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid

all dreams, or so it seemed to me, took place outside; and in any case, as soon as we woke up, the first thing was to observe the outside of our house to make sure it had stayed the same as when we last saw it the night before. But at that moment, again in 1986, when I was lying inside the house in which my brother was living, my mother was outside talking to herself, or to a chicken that got in her way, or to the cats she had adopted which were just recovering from fish poisoning, as was my mother, but the cats were lagging in their recovery. Our mother—and sometimes I think of her as my mother only, and then sometimes she is the mother of my brothers also, and when she’s our mother, she’s another entity altogether—had recovered almost at the same moment she became sick from eating some fish, grouper, that must have fed on something poisonous in the sea and had sickened everyone and everything that had eaten it. A dog got in her way and she cursed him; my brother’s friend got in her way, she cursed him and he laughed; she cursed my brother and he laughed. I did not get in her way, I was inside on the bed lying down, but in any case, I no longer got in her way, I had removed myself from getting in her way, I was in a position in my own life that did not allow for getting in my mother’s way, she could not curse me, I no longer needed her. Even so, I still ate the food she cooked, and that was what she was busy outside doing then: cooking some food for me. She was a very good cook; I did not like her cooking when I was a child, but when I was lying in my brother’s bed I loved all the food she cooked, all the food I would not eat as a child: fungi, saltfish with antroba (eggplant), breadfruit, doukona. I longed for these foods and was so glad to have them cooked for me, and not just cooked for me but cooked for me by her. It was while my brother was ill and I began to visit him (I did not take care of him, I only visited him and took him medicines, his mother took care of him) that I decided not to eat any food she cooked for me, or accept any food she offered me at all. It was not a deliberate decision, it was not done in anger. My brother, the one who sells food in the market, the one who had stopped speaking to my mother even though he lived in the same house as she, cooked his own food and would not let her cook anything for him and would not eat anything she cooked no matter how hungry he was. He did not like his mother anymore, he did not love his mother anymore. He called her Mrs. Drew, the name that ordinary people called her, just that, Mrs. Drew; he called her only, used her name only when he could not avoid it, when to address her without speaking her name would cause attention to be drawn to himself (someone might wonder, Why does he not speak to his mother directly?). My brother who was dying (and he was dying; there were times when he seemed sick, just sick, but mostly he was just dying), he too before he got sick called her only Mrs. Drew, but as the life of his death overwhelmed him, he came to call her Mother, and then only Muds. “Muds,” he would say, “Muds.” At that point in his life, that moment in 1986 when I was lying on his bed, looking up at the beams of his ceiling that would eventually remind me of his dry, rotting, shriveling body, he too no longer ate the food she cooked; this was part of a separation he wished to make between himself and his family. It was at this time that he proclaimed himself a Rastafarian and spoke constantly of Jah. The impulse was a good one, if only he could have seen his way to simply moving away from her to another planet, though perhaps even that might not have been far enough away.
    And so I stopped eating my mother’s food, inspired by the acts of two of my three brothers, who were much younger than I (by eleven and thirteen years). In my case, my case of not eating the food my mother provided for me, this act was