One of our essay-contest winners, graduate student Amanda González Moreno, writes about her grand prize...
Dinner with Jamaica Kincaid
By Amanda González Moreno
Have you read anything written by Jamaica Kincaid? If you haven’t yet, you should, she has an incredibly powerful voice. The Wilmington community had the fortune to listen to her read and speak last Monday, February 11 at the Kenan Hall, as part of the Leadership Lecture Series by UNCW Presents, in a conference titled “Coming of age in a Small Place.” She was surprised and pleased by all the people that gathered there to see her.
Ms. Kincaid was very personal in the way she addressed the crowded audience, almost as if sitting right besides each one of us and telling us a story she thought each of us specifically might want to hear. She shared her experiences as a professor at Harvard, as well as fragments of one of her novels, Annie John, and a short story.
As part of the celebration of Ms. Kincaid’s presence, UNCW Presents held an essay contest to offer the winning students to attend the dinner held in honor of Ms. Kincaid, and fortunately, I was one of the lucky selected ones. At the restaurant, I sat next to Ms. Kincaid. I greatly enjoyed her deep interest in politics; specifically her knowledge about the diverse aspects related to the democrats’ primaries. Ms. Kincaid was also interested in getting to know more about her companions’ views; it was a very colloquial conversation. She also mentioned how, in 1992, she became an American citizen in order to have a voice in the ballots, and she expressed how much she encourages active participation when it comes to facing a Presidential election.
Ms. Kincaid talked about her natal Antigua, an island in the Caribbean, and about how she still travels there every year, in fact, she continued, she had just come back from there just days before her visit to Wilmington. When she is in Antigua, she said, the beauty of the place keeps surprising her each time she goes back; she emphasized how each time she travels there, she is amazed by the different colors of the ocean and the landscape of palm trees.
Among Ms. Kincaid’s prolific work, there are a broad array of essays and novels, in which she is known to have portrayed her own experiences as a woman growing up in a post-colonized nation. She expressed during the dinner how now she feels increasingly compelled to write about subjects related to traveling and nature. She was particularly enthusiastic about one of her latest projects, “Among flowers: A walk in the Himalaya,” a book that relates her search for strange plant specimens at the foot of the mountains. What Ms. Kincaid enjoys greatly these days, she assured, was the time spent caring for her garden in Vermont, where she lives.
