Xuela’s Character in Jamaica Kincaids Autobiography of My Mother Essay

Many critics of The Autobiography of my Mother have remarked on the unrealistic facets of Xuelas extremist suit. Her lack of remorse, her emotional detachment, her love of the dirty and impure, and her consuming consider for total control over everyone and everything around her give her an almost mythological quality. A more well-rounded, humanistic character would have doubts and failings that Xuela does not look to possess. In light of Xuelas deep-seated resentment of authority, stubborn love of the degenerate and unacceptable, intense rejection of the master-slave relationship, and--most pointedly--her hatred of the British and British culture, many critics have embraced the thought process that Xuela is highly symbolic of the conquered, colonized races whose blood makes up her own. There be many complex parallels surrounded by Xuelas character and the collective psyche and ethnical beliefs of Dominicas conquered races. Yet, instead of sinking in despair, Xuela refuses to gracefully accept her lot in life. Early on, she rejects the imposed cultural perception of herself as inferior. Her description of her elementary schoolteacher is prescient a woman of the African people, that I could see, and she name in this a source of humiliation and self-loathing, and she wore despair like an name of clothing, like a mantle, or a staff on which she leaned constantly, a birthright which she would pass on to us (15). Xuela and then explains the distinction between Africans and Caribs in her Dominica. My mother was a Carib woman, and when they (the class) looked at me this is what they saw. The Carib people had been defeated and then exterminated, thrown away like the weeds in a garden the African people had been defeated but had survived. When... ...den. She understands it, although she does not share it. Xuela likewise possesses a deeply rooted need for control over her individualized realm, possibly brought on by her hatred of the control exerted by the British over Dominica, as well as by her unhappy childhood. above all, Xuela makes it her project in life to love herself, and, as one referee remarks, she does so with a remarkable dedication (Mead 52). Her own body becomes a temple to her, a place in which to feel safe and loved. Xuela says that she loves herself fall out of necessity, for the world she lives in is cruel and has little love to give her. Xuelas character is hard to take, from any standpoint. She is almost inhumanly resilient, and her hatred of all that is Western and etiolated is all-consuming. For these reasons Xuela is sometimes seen as an abstraction, a symbol of an entire peoples suffering.