Jamaica Kincaid returns to Antigua to find out her brother is dying of AIDS. While there she is dealing with her mother who she has hatred towards her all her life. Jamaica gets connections into getting her brother medicine in order for him to get live longer. Her brother takes the medication and starts to feel better and does all his old things that he used to do. While commuting back and forth to her home in Chicago and her carribbean home Antigua, Jamaica reflects back on her past life of when she was a child to when her brother came to be. She talks about how her mother dislike the memory she had and the books she read to her brother committing crimes, having unprotected sex, and drugs.
When Jamaica returns home to go to her brother's funeral she doesn't feel any kind of love for him but just sympathy as if he was somebody else. She talks about the death of a previous young boy who died and how his funeral was much different from her brother's and her relationship with her brother's father. She saw her brother's body and thought he looked nothing like himself but just a figure. Later when she returns back to Chicago getting her book together, she finds out from a woman whom she met in an AIDS group that her brother was gay and he was living a secret life to what other people thought about him.
1.)I felt i hated my mother, and even worse, i felt she hated me, too; my brother Devon, the one dying just then at that moment, was one year old and i did not wish him dead; i only wished that he had never been born. (Pg.141)
The author i think felt like her brother messed up her whole life because of his existant. He was the reason for all the trouble that she had been having and will continue to have with her family especially her mother.
2.)My friend Bud said to me her found it strange the way people in Antigua regard illness, that when a person is ill no one mentions it, no one pays a visit; but if the person should die, there is a big outpouring of people at the funeral. (Pg.146)
When i read this i thought the same thing why is it that when the person is dying noboyd cares and ingores the person knowing they are going to die but when they pass away already thousands of people quickly go to see the dead person as if they sort of cared about them.
3.)And my brother died, for he kept dying; each time i remebered that he had died it was as if he had just at that moment died, and the whole experience of it would begin again; my brother had died and i didn't love him; or, at any rate, i didn't love him in the way that i had come to understand love. (Pg.148)
She never loved her brother. I think she has confused feelings about her brother and she doesn't know if she should love for him or just feel sympathetic. I find that weird because you should love your siblings family in general.You should always have their back.
I think that if your family is dying or really sick you should always be supportive of them no matter the circumstances that they are in and to put the issues you have with others to the side. I don't think that she should blame her brother for the things that happened in her life because everything happens for a reason and i don' think it's cause her brother was born. Its just something that happen. Overall in the book if you had AIDS you were immediately cut out of everyone's life until you are physically died which is pretty harsh in my opinion. I think the book was pretty good.
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