Mein Bruder

I'm sorry. These are the words that Jamaica Kincaid hears over and over again after her younger brother Devon died of AIDS in 1996. She tells of his death, only to hear these words. Yet, she barely knew him. Devon was only three years old when Kincaid left her home in Antigua to build a new life in the USA. That was twenty years ago. When she learns that her brother is seriously ill, she travels back to him, to Antigua, to her own past, to a life filled with hopelessness and poverty—and confronts her demons, the entanglements of her family, the destructive relationship with her mother, for whom Kincaid could only feel disdain all those years. Full of anger, she left twenty years ago, wanting to leave everything behind. But can one ever truly do that? Now she gradually finds her peace, reconciling the present with the past. One day something may happen, and then I will understand that everything I feel today, which does not seem to be love, is in truth love; that I loved my brother and the others from whom I descend. Poetically, movingly, and with great clarity and impressive sincerity, Kincaid tells of loss and farewell, of hatred and love, closeness and distance, and the illusions that shape all our lives. From despair comes hope, and from reckoning, the moving story of liberation, of self-discovery.