My Brother (15 page)

The coffin lid was put in place and the sounds of the screws securing it did not cause us to cry or vomit or pass out. My mother said it did not look like Devon at all, and that was true, but I did not know which Devon she meant: Was it the baby a day old almost eaten alive by red ants, or was it the two-year-old boy who was left in my charge and whose diaper I neglected to change as it became filled with his still-baby feces because I had become absorbed in a book; or was it the Devon who was involved in the homicide of a gas-station attendant; or the one who played cricket so well and learned to swim at Country Pond; or the one who smoked the Weed, the way she referred to his marijuana addiction; or the one who changed from a vibrant young man who had come down with a very bad case of pneumonia and then was told in an open hospital ward by a doctor accompanied by two nurses that he had the HIV virus and that shortly he would be dead; or the one who was well enough shortly after that to begin having unprotected sex with women and sex with other people who were not women but who we—that is, his family—did not know about? Which Devon was he? All of them, I suppose; and which did he like best, and which one of his selves made him happiest? I cannot tell this, and perhaps neither could he.

And that day that he was buried was not at all unlike the day on which I first saw him lying almost dead in a bed in the Gweneth O'Reilly ward of the Holberton Hospital. All days in Antigua must be the same, people count on it, it is for this reason they go there, it is for this reason they leave there; the days are the same, the sun shines, no rain will fall, the sun rises at around six in the morning, the sun sets at around six in the evening; if this does not remain so, it is a catastrophe; a hurricane can change this, or the coming-awake of a volcano, but Antigua does not have such a thing as a volcano. He died on a sunny day, he was buried on a sunny day. At the funeral parlor there were people milling around outside and I did not know them, but that made sense when I realized that there was another young man being buried, a young man with a family and not many friends; he, too, had died of AIDS. His grave was not more than twenty yards away from my brother's, and their graveside ceremonies coincided; the families and friends of the two dead men did not speak to one another; the two men were buried at the margins of the cemetery, far away from the entrance, and this was so not because of the thing that had caused their death but because of something that long ago perhaps had the same social stigma as AIDS: they or their families were not members of respectable churches. The other man was buried in the place reserved for Seventh-Day Adventists, my brother was buried in the place reserved for the Church of the Nazarene. Nothing about their death ceremonies made communication between their families occur; not sharing the same funeral parlor, not sharing the margin of the burial ground. The other dead man's family did not say a sympathetic word to us and we did not say a sympathetic word to them. The Church of the Nazarene was our mother's church, she attended services there regularly, her fellow church members came often to pray with my brother, though he did not believe in anything himself, except if he thought, just at the moment he needed to, that faith in the thing in front of him might serve him well. But he died, and on the way to the church part of the service, we passed some men who were in a yard, sitting under a tree making coffins, and they looked up as we passed by, perhaps to see their handiwork, for his coffin had been made by them, they worked for Mr. Straffee, and also out of curiosity, for it must be true for them, too, even as they make these houses for the dead that are in constant demand, the wondering if it is something real, will it happen to them; if it is so certain, death, why is it such a surprise, why is everybody who is left behind, who is not dead, in a state of such shock, as if this thing, death, this losing forever of someone who means something to you, has never happened before. Why is it so new, why is this worn-out thing, death, someone dying, so new, so new?

And yet when the minister preached a sermon about us all being reunited at some later date, I did not like that at all, I wanted to tell him that I did not want to see these people with whom I had shared so much—a womb in the case of my brother, blood and breath in the case of my mother—I did not want to be with any of these people again in another world. I had had enough of them in this one; they mean everything to me and they mean nothing, and even so, I do not really know what I mean when I say this. My brother, the one who lives in the same house as my mother but who does not speak to her and will not make a reply to her no matter what she says to him, and says he would not make a reply to her even if she asked him to save her life, especially if she asked him to save her life (and he is not the one who threw her down and broke her neck, a break that should have left her dead or crippled from the waist down and instead she made a complete recovery and has buried one of her children so far), this brother said a few words about his dead sibling, the one he had named “Patches,” but he did not mention that, the part about the name Patches, he only recalled that Devon loved to play cricket, how close they had been when they were schoolboys together; he did not say how afraid they were when their father (Mr. Drew) died and they did not want to attend his funeral and hid from our mother, who had to beat them (in one case) or threaten to beat them (in another case) to attend; he did not say how his dead brother's carelessness with his own life might have led to such an early death and was a contrast to his own caution and industriousness (he held three jobs: an accountant, a peddler of imported foods in the market, and a bass-steel-drum player in the most prominent steel band in Antigua). His voice broke as he spoke of his brother; I cried when I heard him speak of his brother, but why did he and I do that, for so many times we used to say that if by some miracle Devon could be cured of his disease he would not change his ways; he would not become industrious, holding three jobs at once to make ends meet; he would not become faithful to one woman or one man. But this was the end and he was lying in the coffin, the least expensive coffin in Mr. Straffee's display of coffins for adults; he was thin, so diminished that his bedclothes and bed linen, freshly cleaned by his mother, had to be packed inside the coffin to keep his body from rattling around (though really he would not have been able to hear it and he certainly would not have been able to feel it).

I became a writer out of desperation, so when I first heard my brother was dying I was familiar with the act of saving myself: I would write about him. I would write about his dying. When I was young, younger than I am now, I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life. When I heard about my brother's illness and his dying, I knew, instinctively, that to understand it, or to make an attempt at understanding his dying, and not to die with him, I would write about it.

For many years I wrote for a man named William Shawn. Whenever I thought of something to write, I immediately thought of him reading it, and the thought of this man, William Shawn, reading something I had written only made me want to write it more; I could see him sitting (not in any particular place) and reading what I had written and telling me if he liked it, or never mentioning it again if he didn't, and the point wasn't to hear him say that he liked it (though that was better than anything in the whole world) but only to know that he had read it, and why that should have been so is beyond words to me right now, or just to put it into words now (and it was only through words that I knew him) would make it either not true, or incomplete, like love, I suppose: why do I love you, why do you love me? Almost all of my life as a writer, everything I wrote I expected Mr. Shawn to read, and so when I first heard of my brother dying and immediately knew I would write about him, I thought of Mr. Shawn, but Mr. Shawn had just died, too, and I had seen Mr. Shawn when he was dead, and even then I wanted to tell him what it was like when he had died, and he would not have liked to hear that in any way, but I was used to telling him things I knew he didn't like, I couldn't help telling him everything whether he liked it or not. And so I wrote about the dead for the dead, and all along as I was writing I thought, When I am done with this I shall never write for Mr. Shawn again, this will be the end of anything I shall write for Mr. Shawn; but now I don't suppose that will be so. It was because I had neglected my brother when he was two years old and instead read a book that my mother gathered up all the books I owned and put them on a pile on her stone heap, sprinkling them with kerosene and then setting them alight; I cannot remember the titles of these books, I cannot remember what they were about (they would have been novels, at fifteen I read only novels), but it would not be so strange if I spent the rest of my life trying to bring those books back to my life by writing them again and again until they were perfect, unscathed by fire of any kind. For a very long time I had the perfect reader for what I would write and place in the unscathed books; the source of the books has not died, it only comes alive again and again in different forms and other segments. The perfect reader has died, but I cannot see any reason not to write for him anyway, for I can sooner get used to never hearing from him—the perfect reader—than to not being able to write for him at all.

 

When my brother was dying

these people were kind to him:

Dr. Nancy Scattergood, Dr. Eric Pillemer,

Dr. Catherine Hart, Edward Molloy of The Pharmacy

in Bennington, Vermont.

They did not know him.

 

Again, when my brother was dying

these people were kind to him:

Dr. Prince Harold Ramsey, Bud and Connie Rabinowitz,

his mother's friend Sister Lee.

These people did know him.

 

He died. On his behalf I would like to express gratitude

to all of them. To all of them I would like to say,

Thank you.

Also by Jamaica Kincaid

At the Bottom of the River

Annie John

A Small Place

Lucy

The Autobiography of My Mother

 

Praise for
MY BROTHER

“Kincaid's haunting memoir of her brother's death from AIDS recounts his troubled life as a Rastafarian involved in the drug culture. Through the larger story of her family's life on Antigua, with emphasis on her mother's powerful personality, Kincaid again illuminates the complex nature of family and intimacy.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle
Best Books of the Year

“
My Brother
approaches perfection in its controlled prose and detached elegance, with new layers of detail revealed with each recounting of a memory.”

—
GISELLE ANATOL
,
Philadelphia Inquirer

“Kincaid blends the medical with the magical in this riveting memoir of her younger brother Devon, who died of AIDS at age 33. Kincaid's own, accented narration palpably evokes the atmosphere of the island of Antigua, which was her birthplace and the scene of her brother's grueling and strangely instructive death.”

—
CAROLYN ALESSIO
,
Chicago Tribune

“Sober and direct, Ms. Kincaid is unsparing whether looking at others or herself … Her unflinching account is all the more poignant for its utter lack of false emotion.”

—
MERLE RUBIN
,
The Wall Street Journal

“Brilliant writing and thinking …
My Brother
 … is about life and death. It's about how economic and emotional poverty corrode the body and the soul. It's about the sticky tentacles that tie brothers to sisters, mothers to daughters, adults to their childhoods, people to where they come from—no matter how far they stray, no matter how desperately they try to escape.”

—
MEREDITH MARAN
,
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“To read Jamaica Kincaid's memoir,
My Brother,
is to re-experience her unforgettable narrative voice, revisiting Antigua over the three years that Devon is dying of AIDS, and re-characterizing the island, her mother and the child/adolescent self chronicled in her earlier books …
My Brother
is a memoir of a voice.”

—
GAY WACHMAN
,
The Nation

“Kincaid's prose is, as always, meticulous—the emotions scalding, the declarations harsh. But she triumphs here by transforming tortured memory into emancipating elegy.”

—
NICK CHARLES,
People

“A poetic, unapologetic chronicle.”

—
Marie Claire

“If it is impossible to go home again, it is equally impossible for most of us to stay away … Kincaid renders that ambivalence (the tension between revulsion and attachment) so precisely, she makes it seem almost bearable.”

—
JOAN SMITH
,
San Francisco Examiner

“A narrative of raw, unmediated emotion, this story settles over the reader like a storm. After
My Brother,
everything looks different.”

—
JULIE HALE
,
The Virginian-Pilot

“Kincaid's prose is so direct, so honest, so searing, so searching that these concise 198 pages demand to be read in one breathtaking sitting.”

—
JOCELYN MCCLURG
,
The Burlington Free Press

“More than a memoir,
My Brother
is the story of a journey … This is another chapter in Kincaid's quest to come to terms with the way politics and history, those two generalities, shape human assumptions in the most specific and idiosyncratic manner.”