The Struggle with Irreverent Time in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

Jamaica Kincaid’s lacunary pseudo-autobiography presents the protagonist’s first year in exile and dissects its stages to such an extent that the story takes the form of a photographic slideshow. The unnamed city (presumably New York) appears as a palimpsest locale, almost obliterated by Lucy’s invasive and strikingly detailed memories. This incursion of “space past” and “time past” in the narrative present forecloses an accurate reading of the space and time of her exile. In the end, Lucy becomes well aware of this existential dilemma that suspends her between the past—an unhealed wound—and the present—an unknown territory. Almost the entire book depicts the narrator’s struggle to reconcile the dichotomous cyclical and linear temporalities, each with their corresponding spatial referent: the native island and the city. The present paper analyzes Lucy’s first year in exile as a time loop which closes with a creative reconciliation with the past and appropriation of the linear present.

The Struggle with Irreverent Time in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy Time is a time bomb for Lucy; past events explode in her everyday life with intensity and crystallize under the coagulating influence of mostly unrelated situations, people, or places until the overall feeling is that the protagonist dwells almost entirely in the past. This paper will explore the protagonist's negotiation with two different temporalities: one cyclical, uneventful, and static (belonging to her rural island), and the other one linear, corrosive, and alienating (which defines the metropolis). We contend that Lucy's first year in exile constitutes the unraveling of circular time, which closes with a creative reconciliation with the past and an appropriation of the linear present.
Lucy is a book that comes full circle as far as the plot and the time of narration are concerned. This coming-of-age story in exile is divided into five chapters, each bearing a significant title in the development of Lucy's persona. Each part unfolds over a season, with winter opening and closing the storyline. The narrated time encompasses Lucy's first year in the city, which is, as Lampel (2003) astutely suggests, only "a temporal loop from one winter to another" (p. 174). Lucy's real exile, one infers, starts when she can claim her name, her place, when she can break with the tormenting cycle of memory. 1 The closure of the book presents a protagonist who, from a naïve youthful tone, has found an articulate, even mordant voice 2 in exile, a protagonist who may eventually claim that "in the beginning was my word and my word became the world as I ordered it to be" (Kincaid, 2001, p. 45). Lucy's struggle is chronotopic, and our analysis, while focusing on the irreverence of time in the novel, cannot overlook the spatial coordinate that is intrinsic to movement, memory, and identity formation.
Time is the defining element for the protagonist's experience in the city. The access to urban cosmopolitanism might seem liberating but the metropolis is a universe in constant movement, a shifting, provisional place of exile which stands as the polar opposite of her native island, governed by an uneventful, cyclical time. 3 In The Culture of Cities, Mumford and Miller (1986) 1 Soto-Crespo (2002) considers that, for Kincaid, memory is a creative force that actively makes the connection between cultures across time. For the protagonist, the act of remembering appears as a connecting line (therefore linear), between places and moments in time. Closely linked to memory, there are several themes of predilection in the novel that will only be touched upon briefly in this paper: personal and communal history, (post)colonialism, and the revolt against the mother.
2 Related to identity-formation, Paravisini-Gebert (1999) invites a reading of Lucy as a sequel of Kincaid's Annie John (1990) and notes that the book accomplishes "the portrait of the artist as a young woman" (p. 177). 3 Kincaid's entire work presents her native island, tainted by colonialism, as a space of hostility, associated with apocalyptic and violent images. On such a small island, the static nature of the temporal element borders on timelessness, with a negative connotation however, and is best described in Mr. Potter (2002): "And the months were August through September, December through February, and April to the end of July; and the years were the same and the weeks were the same as the years and then so too were the days and the minutes and Nathaniel [Potter] was trapped in all of that-years and months and weeks and days and hours and minutes-and then he died, the way all people do, he died" (p. 57).
contend that time is the very essence of the urban environment: "Cities are a product of time. […] In the city, time becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways […] leave an imprint on the minds even of the ignorant or the indifferent" (p. 105).
Coming from the rural environment of her unnamed Caribbean island, Lucy's "temporal maladjustment" (Joseph, 2002, p. 80) is the most noticeable simply because she is "cyclical in a world of linear time" (Griffin, 1995, p. 73). This dysfunctional dynamic increases the predicament of the protagonist generated first by the separation from home and then, by the painful awareness of her alienation and insularity in exile.
Linear time, illustrated by the passage of the seasons, is a crucial factor for Lucy's exilic experience and a catalyst for her subsequent maturation. The protagonist mentions in the opening pages that she only knew about seasons from the books read as part of her colonial education. For her, the seasons were associated with places in which prosperous people lived: As a child in school, I had learned how the earth tilts away from the sun and how that causes the different seasons; even though I was quite young when I learned about this, I had noticed that all the prosperous (and so, certainly, happy) people in the world inhabited the parts of the earth where the year, all three hundred and sixty-five days of it, was divided into four distinct seasons. (Kincaid, 1990, p. 86) And she immediately contrasts this preconceived perception of time and space in the "prosperous world" with life at home, on her tropical island, which is not regulated by the passage of the seasons: I was born and grew up in a place that did not seem influenced by the tilt of the earth at all; it had only one season-sunny, drought-ridden. And what was the effect on me of growing up in such a place? I did not have a sunny disposition, and, as for actual happiness, I had been experiencing a long drought. (Kincaid, 1990, p. 86) In the city, the seasons with their identifiable attributes and unfaltering procession help the protagonist to forge a new and relevant past that can be easily traced and indexed.
Time's passage, its existence for that matter, is registered with considerable detachment, which is emblematic of Lucy's coping strategies in exile: "in all the months that I had lived in this place, snowstorms had come and gone and I never paid any attention, except to feel that snow was an annoyance when I had to make my way through the mounds of it that lay on the sidewalk" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 22, emphasis added). Winter in a foreign environment is the most adverse to the one who comes from a tropical climate, the cold season soon becoming the symbol of exile. As a first season experienced in the city, winter, and by extrapolation exile, constitutes the first real past that Lucy will take as a point of reference for her nascent future and life away from her mother(island): "I could now look back at the winter. It was my past, so to speak, my first real past-a past that was my own and over which I had the final word" (p. 23).
Spring, a new season to be experienced in exile, finds Lucy attempting to understand her immediate surroundings. Yet spring does not let itself be known easily, it is still "sort[ing] itself out in various degrees of coldness" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 20). Rarely will Lucy use second-rate sentimentalisms about the exile's implacable fate or a lost paradise.
Although her story will at times resonate at the encounter with the new environment, this will be among the rare instances when Lucy leaves aside sarcasm and disdain.
Even the despicable and so much hated snow has "a certain kind of beauty; not a beauty you would wish for every day of your life, but a beauty you could appreciate if you had an excess of beauty to begin with" (1990, p. 22). And from the dying winter, from the last throb of the cold season, she unexpectedly derives beauty and nourishment: "the days were longer now, the sun set later, the evening sky seemed lower than usual" (p. 23). In her struggle with the new landscape, a gentle light is conveyed by the use of the comparative in the quotation above, reinforced by the assertion that indeed, "the world seem[ed] soft and lovely and […] to me-nourishing" (p. 23). Having opposed the new setting for an entire season, she is compelled to utter in a conciliatory tone "there it was, and I could not do much about it" (p. 23). This statement could be regarded as Lucy's first acknowledgement of the time and space of her exile.
It is summer-a season she can relate to, especially as it is spent in the countryside and away from the city. Together with the recent past-the last six months away from home-summer brings along a feeling of genuine happiness and the firm realization that a return home, on the island, is no longer possible. The protagonist slowly comes to terms with the idea of movement and change, in short, with time, linear time for that matter: "I had also grown to love the idea of seasons: winter, spring, summer, and autumn.
What wonderful names-and, as far as I could see, appropriate (Kincaid, 1990, p. 51).
Simply the reverberation of the seasons' names is pleasant to the ear of somebody who was only used to a punishing sun that "was always overhead" and a heat "that made everything in its path long for shade […] that bore down on you, first as a warning, then as a punishment, for sins too numerous to count" (1990, p. 52). Irrespective of the season, Lucy's temporal dislocation continues to be reinforced by the constant incursion of time and space past.
A fourth season to be experienced away from home, autumn brings back the cold and with it, Lucy's sharp criticism. The leitmotif of the fourth chapter titled "Cold Heart" is the protagonist's perception of the home-place as a prison and the need to break away from it: "I understood finding the place you are born in as an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 95). Feelings of anger seem to coagulate under the impact of the cold weather and are directed towards the mother(island), so dearly missed for the past four seasons. The weather, "bleak and cold" once more, only reflects the inner dimensions felt by the young exile, as it has since her arrival in the city.
It is winter again, and an entire section of the fifth chapter, evocatively titled "Lucy," is dedicated to reviewing the main points of her first year in exile. "That's how I spent the year just past" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 138) is presented in a long sentence à la Kincaid which starts with a chain of spatial identifiers: the street corner, the stoplight, the lakeshore, the kitchen, the window, almost like a lifeless slideshow. Lucy employs definite articles implying that her little world is known, compared to the very opening of the novel, which was punctuated by a plethora of indefinite articles: "a famous building, an important street, a park, a bridge that when built was thought to be a spectacle" (1990, p. 3, emphasis added). These sites are no longer invisible and silent, and the spatial knowledge accumulated over four seasons now helps Lucy to anchor her nascent past in exile.
In the process, she gradually acquires a better perspective 4 on the self, and on her personal and communal history.
Closely related to space in Lucy's case, memory plays a major part in shaping the protagonist's exilic experience. Kincaid demonstrates in this novel that memory is a pivotal paradigm provided it is "im-placed" (Casey, 1993) or linked to places; memory here is not a function of time as much as it is of place. Pondering on the intersections of exile and memory, Said (2000) considers that "since almost by definition exile and memory go together, it is what one remembers of the past and how one remembers it that determines how one sees the future" (p. xxxv). Italo Calvino's hero muses upon the same theme: "'You advance always with your head turned back?' or 'Is what you see always behind you?' or rather, 'Does your journey take place only in the past?'" (Calvino, 1978, p. 28). 4 Decoding her past has become one of the protagonist's main objectives in exile: "I had realized that the origin of my presence on the island-my ancestral history-was the result of a foul deed" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 135). She also becomes aware of the deeper meanings of two notions which, at the moment of her arrival in the city, were still truncated: race in a multiracial city "my skin and my eyes were the same color, brown" (p. 149) and the implications of her name: "I felt like Lucifer, doomed to build wrong upon wrong" (p. 139).
Eliciting the image of Janus-the Roman God of Time, these rhetorical questions indicate that, at times, the only and most meaningful voyage may be back in time, through memory. Not unlike Calvino's Marco Polo, Lucy advances with her head turned back, a paradoxical stance that allows a better perspective on the past but frustrates all reading of the present.
In exile, Lucy's memories are invasive as much as they are potent. It is so because their evocative quality is derived from their fragmentary nature, Rushdie (1992)

observes
in Imaginary Homelands: "The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities" (p. 12). Indeed, certain images grow stronger with time, some even reach the status of myth. The doubly distanced homeland 5 (in time and space), generator of all memories, is not experienced in the course of narration; it is projected in imagination. This in-between stance can only intensify the temporal dislocation felt by the young protagonist, as evoked by Bachelard (1964): "our past is situated elsewhere, and both time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality. It is as though we sojourned in a limbo of being" (p. 58). It should be noted at this point that Lucy does not face the city directly during this first year, since she has found a "safe-space" or a surrogate mother in exile-a family that plays the role of "a cocoon in which Lucy develops in confidence and strength" (Paravisini-Gebert, 1999, p. 138). One infers that true exile begins once Lucy effects a new separation, this time from the surrogate mother, when she eventually comes to terms with the linear passage of time. Moreover, the narrator safely recounts the first year spent in the elsewhere of the city from an undisclosed spatial and temporal vantage point.
Despite a relative simplicity of expression and theme, the storyline becomes more complicated as the narrative 'I' meanders through unsorted memories from a past linked to home. Events and situations, stories and faces from her past invade Lucy in her new urban environment. In this fictional autobiography, the I/eye turns inward under the power of memory; yet Lucy's memories are far from being arranged in any order, least of all chronologically. It is only the experience of the place of exile that ensures the continuity of her narrative. It would almost be erroneous to call Lucy a story of discovery for so much of the book is a story of re-discovery and re-memory in a new setting. 5 Borrowing from Rushdie's eponymous essay, Lima (2002) analyses Lucy's island as an imaginary place. A veritable site of memory, in Pierre Nora's terms, the multi-faceted mother-island comes to possess numerous attributes, among them colonial oppression and patriarchy-all forming the foundation of the protagonist's personal history, which she is so adamant about erasing. Lucy's memories present a crucial advantage for a subsequent definition of identity-they are "localized," even if the island may seem at times just a pretext for Lucy to situate her collections of memories.
The protagonist's invention of the self is a creative act, accomplished through intuition, "more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 134). Her tools are limited, "I had memory, I had anger, I had despair" (1990, p. 134), but they help Lucy to partially reconstruct a past which calls for its immediate destruction. Lucy's ultimate goal is to fill the void thus created by allowing the most recent past to be constructed in exile and to be used as a viable landmark for the future. Yet, despite her efforts to erase the past, she becomes aware that she is defined by it: "I could see the present take a shape-the shape of my past" (p. 90) which leads to a philosophical meditation on the passage of time and on the haunting loss of childhood "one day I was a child and then I was not" (p. 135). Committed to making exile her "first real past" (p. 23), she claims possession of the time segment linked to the urban experience using, ironically, two spatial tactics: photography and, not at all unrelated, the panoptic view imparted by the window.
The penchant for photography is part of the protagonist's act of mapping the city of her exile-a very personal and creative attempt to represent the texture of a city in constant movement. 6 In the latter part of the fourth chapter, instead of opening an urgent letter from home, Lucy decides to buy a camera which soon becomes an outlet for her artistic impulse, helping her to "captur[e] her own vision of the reality around her" (Paravisini-Gebert, 1999, p. 134). Photography, according to Barthes (1981), transforms the subject to be photographed into an object, a museum object, for that matter. Yet, despite her fascination with books and museums, Lucy is not a collector of objects but a collector of instants. One infers that behind each snapshot she takes, there is a point in time that is more important than both signifier and signified: the city and its photographic representation. She employs her camera mainly as a means of tracing time and sorting memories, or to paraphrase Bachelard (1932), in an effort to learn and re-learn her own chronology.
Through photography, the protagonist also seeks to identify and further objectify the urban referent, which so far was either ignored or eluded all reading. Only after she leaves her employer, does Lucy venture outside trying to capture the geography of the city with her camera. Broadening the referential field, she now takes "pictures of people walking on the street. […] not pictures of individuals, just scenes of people walking about, hurrying to somewhere" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 160). The camera becomes a new filter through which she reads the urban space; it is, in fact, an effective tool that can help Lucy to create a past: "for a reason that was not at all clear to me, the people and the things they were doing looked extraordinary-as if these people and these things had not existed before" (1990, p. 115). In the beginning, the protagonist's space of exile is limited to interiors in a foreign monochrome city (Paravisini-Gebert, 1999) which acquires color and light only at the end of her first year spent away from home.
The photographs are material support for Lucy, visually tracing the passage of time, or what is worth remembering of it, "a material reality that can be controlled" (Ferguson, 1994, p. 121). These veritable chronotopes serve in the re-creation of the self and in establishing a new past that will later be considered as a point of reference. For Barthes (1981), photography is an emanation of the real past, and its testimony bears not on the object but on time. This recent past soon becomes a reliable construction, ironically built under the pressure of the memory of home and projected on the surface of the city of exile. Aware that the only viable liberation is total denial, Lucy needs anchors and proofs in order to render the frail new past credible. While neither necessarily accurate nor chronological, these snapshots are a certificate of presence 7 (Barthes, 1981), of her presence away from her home and from her past.
Even if this visual support allows the protagonist to trace a recent past and carefully study it, the monochrome snapshots are at first as arid as the city itself. It is so, Barthes (1981) explains, because "a photograph may resemble of anything but the object of representation" (p. 160). Indeed, the photographs prove to be deceitful, and for a while, Lucy participates in this simulacrum, trying to "make more beautiful the thing I thought I had seen, that would reveal to me some of the things I had not seen" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 160). Through photography, the protagonist attempts to offset the unfriendly setting of her exile, in a compensatory effort which Said (2000) sums up as follows: "much of the exile's life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule […] the exile's new world, logically enough, is unnatural and its unreality resembles fiction" (p. 181). At the close of her first year in the city, Lucy must acknowledge that her snapshots do not lead to an understanding of the object of representation simply because they only provide limited spatial knowledge and temporal anchoring.
A second spatial tactic, which Lucy paradoxically employs to tame time, is the act of reading her environment from a vantage point. As a threshold par excellence, the window simultaneously connotes the idea of escapism and the in-between-frail and unsuspected gate to and from the city. The role of the urban vantage point is primarily to metamorphose the walker into a voyeur, to allow the gazer to escape the prison of the street or to place a safe distance between the voyeur and the texture of the city (De Certeau, 1984). It may equally serve as an intermediary site, a chronotope which mediates the public and the private spaces. For Lucy, however, the window invites a metronomic movement 8 under the aegis of memory between the usual dichotomous narrative settings (metropolis and native island) but most importantly, between separate moments in time (the narrative time and her individual and communal past).
Scrutinizing the street from her employers' apartment, Lucy seems at first confused by the simulacra of an urban prison: "all the windows […] had outside them iron bars twisted decoratively" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 85). From the window, she watches "the human comedy" in other apartments across the street. The first room that offers itself to Lucy's inquisitive eye is a way station, a room people "were always just passing through" (1990, p. 86), not unlike her first year away from home. The description of another interior, luxurious for having a wall of books and for being always empty, only plunges Lucy back in the past and prompts her to link this image with past assumptions about seasons and prosperity. However, she remains a distant observer whose only goal is to accumulate more memories for and of her nascent past in exile away from home. Lucy's panoptic view on the city has nothing to do with the urban locale which is just a reflecting surface for the developing self over one year.
Toward the end of the book, the protagonist becomes more eager to probe her own chronology. The very first morning in her new apartment, Lucy is at the window reading the street iconography. She has already been presented at windows many times before, only this time she succeeds in performing a panoramic reading of the urbanscape.
Not surprisingly, with thoughts centered on herself as usual, she (re-)discovers the city's foreignness as well as her alienation: I went to stare out the front window. When I looked down, I could see people, not as many as on a weekday, bustling about. I could see the roofs of other buildings far away. I could not see any trees. Everything I could see looked unreal to me; everything I could see made me feel I would never be part of it, never penetrate to the inside, never be taken in. (Kincaid, 1990, p. 154) 8 In an interview with Kincaid, Vorda (1996) underlines the author's somewhat "unusual writing style" (p. 25) in Lucy, that of digressing to a previous experience before having fully completed a paragraph. Kincaid's remark is equally articulate as she claims that for her, "writing is a revelation" (Vorda, 1996, p. 25).
The protagonist's "skin-doesn't-fit-ness" is an echo of her internal exile and foreshadows the prospect of remaining an outsider. Yet, for the first time, her gaze is neither hindered by iron bars nor limited to scrutinizing other apartments. Her attention is captured by a time symbol-a clock from the tower of a building across the street. The clock is broken, and this brings the realization that "my sense of time had changed, and I did not know if the day went by too quickly or too slowly" (1990, p. 154). For Chick (1996, the broken clock is an indicator of Lucy's impaired sense of time, and a symbol of the inescapable past that must be integrated into her present. The constant perception of a disjointed time confirms that the protagonist has not yet adjusted her internal time to the chronological time of the urban world outside. Lucy uses photography and window-gazing to chronicle her daily life, in an attempt to come to terms with the linear temporality of the city. However, the static vision the photographs convey only separates the gazer from reality. 9 They ultimately become a blocking screen between the gazer-photographer and the city. Simmons (1994) notes that "Lucy must confront a different kind of renunciation in acknowledging that photography is not necessarily the medium in which she will express the depth of her own creativity" (p. 137) or the appropriation of chronological time. The freedom and anonymity of being an outsider in the city and the price paid by the young exile are granted one last acknowledgement before she turns to writing: I was living a life I had always wanted to live. I was living apart from my family in a place where no one knew much about me; almost no one knew even my name, and I was free more or less to come and go as pleased me. The feeling of bliss, the feeling of happiness, the feeling of longing fulfilled that I had thought would come with this situation was nowhere to be found inside me. (Kincaid, 1990, p. 158) Lucy eventually directs her creativity to the blank book received as a gift from her former employer. There is a feeling that "flourishing words and phrases" (p. 10) may be better suited to tame time than photography or the contemplation of the cityscape from windows.
The blank pages invite the spelling out of her name, and this "statement of being" (Simmons, 1994, p. 137) is followed by a flood of tears. If a first blurred vision was elicited by the contact with the metropolis five seasons earlier, this time it is related to the encounter with the self. For Salman Rushdie (1992) "writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things-childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves-that we go on slipping, like sand through our fingers" (p. 277); it becomes Lucy's preferred means of expression in exile as well. The book itself is "the written proof that [Lucy] has noticed and repaired her broken clock" (Chick, 1996, p. 103), and the blue blur that the words create on the page might be considered the incipit of this seemingly angry and sour collection of remembrances and longing.
The past that so much haunted Lucy in exile has to be dealt with at the moment of her re-birth. Lucy assumes and demarcates it "as a line," sign that the protagonist has ultimately accepted the western urban perception of time as linear: "I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 137). The past is now seen as "a collection of people you used to be and things you used to do" (1990, p. 137).
It resembles the familiar set of pictures she has already amassed, indexing "the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in" (p. 137). Yet, the photographs, past moments frozen in black-and-white that she can arrange at will, are indicative of a self still bound to the charm of the past.
Lucy's first year in exile is intrinsically circular, best illustrated by the cyclical pattern of the seasons that structure her story. However, once the cycle is completed and temporality is assumed, time in its irreverence stops following its deceptive circular pattern; whether slow or fast, heavy or light, it gradually unravels and becomes 'heavily' linear: "the days went by too slowly and too quickly" (Kincaid, 1990, p. 140), the instant weighed a lot, it "felt like a ball of lead" (1990, p. 140) or "each day felt like a minute" (p. 140). The linear time has followed its unperturbed natural progression, but "it did not bring [her] along with it" (p. 24); the inner cold has become chronic as the closure of the book illustrates. For Lucy, the "beginning of time" (p. 24) is accompanied by a "heavy and hard" feeling, that started earlier in January with the statement: "It was my first day" (p. 3) of her personal history, written away from home.