'Stepping Out of the Kumbla,1-Kincaid's Aids Narrative, 'My Brother'

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'Stepping Out of the Kumbla,1-Kincaid's Aids Narrative, 'My Brother'

Kincaid's narrative of her brother's life and death breaks new ground in the literature of the Caribbean region. It steps out of the kumbla of protective silence around AIDS and its victims. Despite its high prevalence in the Caribbean region (Kelly and Bain 33), HIV/AIDS has not been addressed by many Caribbean 'creative' writers. In fact, Kincaid's narrative, published ten years ago, is still one of only two major Caribbean literary works to do so - the other is Patricia Powell's 'A Small Gathering of Bones', though the disease is unnamed in the latter work. (More recently, there has been the autobiographical "No Stone Unturned'by Rosemarie Stone). This is in marked contrast to North America, where AIDS since 1985 has become 'a widely acknowledged literary subject' (Cady 3).

In charting the literature treating the subject of AIDS, which spans different genres - the realistic novel, science-fiction, and most recently detective fiction - Cady notes that there are two main approaches to writing about AIDS. There are authors' whose priority is to 'expose readers as closely as possible to the emergency of the epidemic and the suffering of the affected individual' (Cady 2) and others who treat the subject using a distancing device. Such a distancing device 'ultimately shields the audience from too jarring a confrontation with AIDS' (Cady 2). He further argues that that approach cooperates with the 'larger cultural denial of AIDS since it does nothing to dislodge readers from it' (Cady 2). Kincaid's narrative does not, strictly speaking, fall into either category as it both exposes its readers to the suffering of the affected individual as well as distances them from the situation by various structural devices.

Further distinctions about the production of AIDS narratives have been made by other critics including Pear...

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