My Brother

by Jamaica Kincaid

Book Overview

Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374525625
• ISBN13: 9780374525620
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Jamica Kincaid, a story of family and loss

Jamaica Kincaid tells the story of her ill brother and his encounters with the virus HIV. The story has the title of My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid. The story is essentially written to save Jamaica's own life. Whenever there is a tragic happening in her family, she writes about to let her feelings out and she also tries to exclude herself from her family. She moves away from Antigua once she became old enough to do so. Jamaica goes through sever years without connection to her mother and her siblings. Jamaica struggles to find feelings for her sick and dying brother as he spends his last days in an old run down hospital in Antigua. Jamaica is only able to let her own feelings out in a comfortable manner to Dr. Prince Ramsey. Jamaica is unable to communicate with her own mother. This is due to Jamaica's feeling that her mother was only a mother at certain times. Jamaica is driven on the idea that her mother only wants to care for her children if they were sick or in need of caring. Any time other than that, Jamaica thinks she had a poor mother. Jamaica is pleased however with few things her mother did. When Jamaica was only fifteen years old, she was forced to look after her younger brother who was only age two. She decided to read her books all day long and decided that looking after her younger brother was not a number one priority. Jamaica realized at the end of her reading that her mother would be home soon so she tried to clean up the things she thought her mother would realize first. One of these things was her brothers diaper but Jamaica did not have enough time to change so once her mother found this out, she took all of Jamaica's books, took them outside, doused them with kerosene, and burned them all, every last book. Jamaica recalls this event as driving her to become a written to make up for all for all of the books that she had lost at a young age. Throughout the book Jamaica conveys her struggle to find love for her dying brother, Devon Drew. She never was close at all to her younger brother and as her brother became more sick, Jamaica knew she need to do something to redeem her self for all of the years she was absent in the presence of her brother. On page 72, Jamaica and her mother have a conversation about bringing her brother the medicine that prolonged his life several months more. Her mother said to her that god would bless her richly for providing her brother with the medicine, AZT. Jamaica was not sure if what her mother said was true but she was really not concerned with gods or being richly blessed. Jamaica was constantly thinking about how her brother was sick and how much Antiguan society shunned HIV positive people. Even though her brother was feeling better from the AZT, Jamaica knew that eventually her brother would die. On January 19th, 1996, at the age of thirty-three, Devon Drew died. At certain times throughout the story, Jamaica thinks that it is perhaps better if her brother would just die, but when Devon was

Minimalist Masterpiece

I read this book a few years ago and I still think about it daily. With My Brother, Ms. Kincaid has taken a very personal matter, the death of her brother, and sliced it down to it's essentials. Lean, just like Hemingway.

Kincaid is amazing!

I have read Annie John, and The Autobiography of My Mother. This is deffinetly Kincaids best novel yet. She offers herself in her book. This is what makes her writting so wonderful. Her hatered for her mother is caputered in all her writing and is especialy in this true to life accont of her brothers trajic death.

<p>Even Entertainment Weekly Liked It

Every week I flip through the book section of Entertainment Weekly mostly to see what's new. Those reviews are vicious they rarely have a good thing to say. In the past they have given terrible marks to some of my favorite books. So I was amazed to see they had rated this book an A-. I immediately put down the magazine and picked up a copy of MY BROTHER. I was not disappointed. Kincaid is a brilliant writer. Her prose is tight, short, succinct, clear and to the point. In less than 200 pages she says what other writers might have taken twice that much space to convey. Her writing is enjoyable to read even when she is writing about unpleasant subject matter. She has a keen insight into the events in her life and her relationships with other people. To dismiss this as merely an "aids memoir" is to overlook the main theme in the book which primarily deals with the relationship of the author and her biological family and the life she's left behind in another country along with them. Along the way Kincaid asks many intriguing questions, (although she does not always answer them). Why do parents do and say such cruel things to their children? Why do parents sometimes see these acts and statements as loving acts for the child's benefit? Why does one child from the same household grow up to be "good" and the other "bad"? Why do the parents sometimes love the "bad" child more than the "good" child? Why do we as adults continue to have contact with our parents and siblings even though we despise some of their past acts and continuing "bad" behaviors? If you have relatives that you love and hate at the same time (and perhaps think you're unique in this aspect) you owe it to yourself to read this book. The aids aspect is only a backdrop for a mesmerizing look at family relationships and what makes people tick and act the way they do in those relationships.