My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

full of something, I do not know what, but this occurred to me long after I was in the midst of doing it: that just as I was deciding not to eat my mother’s food anymore, and thinking (and feeling) that this decision was really a decision to rid myself of a profoundly childish attachment to her, I was only reliving a memory, for when I was a child I would not eat the food my mother cooked. When I was a very small child, I would eat food only if she chewed it first; then I must have outgrown that, because I remember the difficulty I had with eating was in eating anything she cooked at all. And so not eating food my mother cooked for me as a sign of distancing myself from her was a form of behavior I had used a long time ago, when I felt most close to and dependent on her.
    When my father died (this man who was not my real father; my real father eventually died also, but I did not know him and his life and death do not at all concern me, except when I am visiting the doctor and my medical history becomes of interest), I had been living away from my family for ten years. I learned of his death three months after he had died and been buried. My mother and I were in one of our periods of not speaking to each other, not on the telephone, not in letters. In the world I lived in then, my old family was dead to me. I did not speak of them, I spoke of my mother, but only to describe the terrible feelings I had toward her, the terrible feelings she had toward me, in tones of awe, as if they were exciting, all our feelings, as if ours had been a great love affair, something that was partly imaginary, something that was partly a fact; but the parts that were imaginary and the parts that were only facts were all true. She did not like me, I did not like her; I believe she wanted me dead, though not actually; I believe I wanted her dead, though not really. When my father died and she wrote to tell me three months later, I could not have known that such a thing, the death of this man, would make me feel as if I could not be moved from the place I was in when I read of his death. I had received the letter just before the onset of the Christmas season, and it made a time when I was always unhappy even more so. I had many friends, but they were not my family, they were only my friends; they had their own families, I was not their family. I wept. I did not think I should die, too, not consciously, not unconsciously.
    In the letter telling me that my father (that is, the man who was not really my father but whom I thought of as my father, and the man who had filled that role in my life) had died, my mother said that his death had left them impoverished, that she had been unable to pay for his burial, and only the charitable gifts of others had allowed him to have an ordinary burial, not the extraordinary burial of a pauper, with its anonymous grave and which no proper mourners attend. The letter was not designed to make me feel guilty. My mother did not know of such a concept, guilt outside a court of law, feelings of guilt resulting from accusations made among ordinary people in their lives as lived day to day; she only knew of guilt as it existed in a court of law, with its formality of accusation and deliberation and then judgment. To her, she had simply described the reality of her situation, but I felt condemned because I had so removed myself from my family that their suffering had gone unnoticed by me, and even as I wept over my father’s death, I would not have done much to prevent it, and even as I wept over my father’s death and my mother’s description of emotional pain and financial deprivation, I would not do a thing to alleviate it. It was ten years after I left my home that he died, it was ten years after he died before I saw my home again, and among the first things I wanted to do was to see the place in the graveyard where he was buried. But no one wanted to take me there; my mother said that since they had not