My Brother

My Brother Summary | Detailed Summary

My Brother opens with Jamaica Kincaid seeing her brother lying in a bed in the Holberton Hospital in the Gweneth O'Reilly ward on the island of Antigua, where he is said to be dying of AIDS. Jamaica recalls his birth at their family home when she is thirteen years old. The family has just eaten their evening meal of boiled fish, bread, and butter, and her mother sends her to fetch the midwife, a large woman whose buttocks roll up and down while she walks, and who says that she will attend once she has finished eating.

The arrival of the new child disrupts the family life, and the other children are sent to sleep at neighbor's houses. The new baby has a reddish-yellow skin, and the author hears his first cry, and listens to a discussion taking place about how they should dispose of the afterbirth. A small piece of this is pinned to the child's chemise as a talisman to ward off evil spirits. When he is two days old, the new baby is attacked by red ants, which would probably have killed him had he not been found in time. During his illness, when he is dying of AIDS, the author reminds her mother of this, comparing the attack of the red ants to the attack of the AIDS virus within his body.

The news of her brother's condition comes from a friend, who telephones Kincaid. Jamaica Kincaid is reading a gardening book at the time the call comes, and urges her to speak to her mother to discuss her brother's illness. However, the author and her mother are going through one of their frequent periods of not talking to each other. Kincaid's friend is reluctant to tell her that her brother is infected with the AIDS virus, but Kincaid guesses, and asks the friend directly, who confirms that this is the case. The author is not surprised to learn that her brother has AIDS, because his lifestyle is one of promiscuity and drug-usage.

When she visits her brother at the hospital in Antigua, he is very frail. Kincaid's brother is in a bad hospital, one where people go who cannot afford to go somewhere better. Kincaid looks at him in the hospital bed and notices the deep blackness of his skin and the golden-coated blisters on his scarlet lips. Kincaid sits beside him, reading the same gardening book that she was reading when she learned of his illness, and reflects that she and her brother have both inherited their love of gardening from their mother. Kincaid is shocked when she learns that her mother has cut down a lemon tree that her brother had planted, because it is one of the few things that would have remained behind after his death.

Kincaid feels this action by her mother is very heartless, and yet, at the same time, she recounts her mother's devoted care of her sick son, whom she visits each day, setting out early in the morning before the heat rises, and climbing up a long steep hill to take food and drink for him, helping him to eat, bathing him, and changing his clothes and bed linen.

Because his throat and gullet are infected with thrush and he has a sore on his tonsils, Kincaid's brother finds great difficulty eating. His mother has to encourage him to swallow. The author recalls how, when she was a small child who tired of chewing her food, her mother chewed it up and regurgitated it for her. It is because her son is ill and helpless that his mother loves caring for him; it is only when her children are totally dependent upon her that she is capable of loving them.

The author is generally unable to cope with the needs of her family, and so she distances herself from them, but when she learns of her brother's illness, she is obsessed with the fear that she might not see him again. Kincaid is surprised to realize she loves him, having not seen him since he was three years old, and therefore, not knowing him well at all. When she sees him in hospital, she thanks him for making her realize she loves him.

The isolation hospital room, in which AIDS victims like her brother are kept, is sparsely furnished, with no table lamp, and a broken television set in one corner that serves as a seat for visitors. The room and the furniture in it are dirty and dusty, which is harmful for somebody with breathing difficulties. The author wants to run away screaming from the place.

When her brother is first told that he is suffering from the AIDS virus, he tells his mother that he has cancer, and he tells somebody else he has bronchial pneumonia. Everybody knows what he has, because he has been put in the isolation room in the hospital, which is where people with AIDS are put.

When Kincaid returns from visiting at the hospital, she takes a hired car to her hotel and passes the place where the old mortuary used to be, before it grew rotten and the smells of the bodies escaped. Kincaid passes the traffic lights that are broken. The author writes that she also passes her old school and the school where her mother says her brother first started getting into trouble and became involved in a robbery and murder. Kincaid's brother has spent a short time in prison for this offence, although he is not believed to have pulled the trigger. Their mother does not allow any discussion of this event.

The car passes the funeral home, the home where the author's godmother used to live, the home of the Englishman who sold tomatoes to her mother, and it passes the place where the Happy Acres Hotel used to stand. Finally, the car arrives at the hotel where the author is staying. Kincaid's mother is annoyed she is staying in a hotel, but she does not wish to stay with her mother who only cares for her children when they are sick or in jail. Kincaid's mother believes everything she has done for her children has been in their best interests. She does not recognize that she has done them any damage and refuses to apologize for the pain she has caused the author, saying that she always has good reason for anything she does. The author's mother believes Kincaid does not like her, because she has brought her up very strictly, to prevent her from having ten children by ten different fathers.

The author's dying brother tells another brother that he feels his life has been worthless, and he wishes he had listened to his mother when she told him how to behave. The dying brother used to believe the things she said were just the sayings of an old woman, and now he cannot believe he is dying of AIDS, which he calls "the stupidness."

After she has seen her brother for the first time since he has started to die, Kincaid drinks five rum and cokes, and confides about her dying brother to the manageress of the hotel where she is staying. Kincaid says that her brother has AIDS; she needs to hear herself say these words so that she can accept what is happening to him. The manageress tells her of a Doctor Ramsay in Antigua who is an authority on the disease, and Kincaid looks up the doctor's telephone number in the directory and telephones him to make an appointment with him.

In Antigua, people who are diagnosed with the HIV virus are regarded as dying of AIDS and beyond help, and since the outcome is inevitable, and because resources are limited, and because there is no point on wasting money and drugs on people who cannot be cured, there is no medicine in the hospital to help control her brother's illness. The only medication that can help, AZT, is not available on the island, because it is too expensive to buy and stock.

Dr. Ramsay arrives punctually for his meeting with the author, something which is unusual in Antigua where, the author believes, people are generally unreliable. The doctor examines the sick man carefully, talks to him in his own language, and makes him laugh. The doctor tells Kincaid that her brother could certainly benefit from AZT, and she manages to gets a prescription for it, and for the more powerful drugs he needs for treating pneumonia and thrush. Dr. Ramsay says that he believes in keeping people who are HIV-positive, or suffering from AIDS, alive, because you never know when a cure might be discovered. The author attends a lecture given by Dr. Ramsay, where she meets a couple whose daughter has died of AIDS, and who are seeking to comfort other people in similar situations. This is an unusual concept for the author, who believes that Antiguans are generally callous people who are cruel to others who are suffering.

Dr. Ramsay shows photographs of the horrible effects of the virus on people suffering from AIDS. Because it is a disease that is caused by sex, Kincaid feels that she will never again wish to have sex with anybody, even herself. Dr. Ramsay had started a campaign to make women in Antigua aware of birth control methods, and it has been a success. When he first starts trying to teach the men about sexually transmitted diseases, however, they believe that he is trying to frighten them away from the women so he that can have them all for himself.

The author wonders how her brother has become HIV-positive. Kincaid does not think it is as a result of intravenous drug injection, because he would not like to hurt himself by sticking a needle into himself. Kincaid believes he was infected with the disease through having sex, and she believes it would be heterosexual sex, because as far as she knows, he is not a homosexual, although he could be, without having advertised the fact. Kincaid likes to know the details of other people's sex lives, because her own is boringly conventional.

When her brother was well, he had many friends, but now that he is ill nobody comes to see him any more. His friends come and stand in the doorway to look at him, and then they go away and never come back. When he sees an attractive woman, he says he would like to have sex with her, and the author is amazed that a man who is so ill and unattractive could imagine that anybody would want to have sex with them.

Kincaid recalls a day, many years before, when she was in her brother's room. The walls were covered with posters of successful, black Americans. Her brother had wanted to be a singer, and had made a tape recording of himself singing, which he had given to his sister. Kincaid regrets having lost the tape when she moved to a new house.

The day she leaves Antigua to return home, her brother is weighed at the hospital, and has gained one pound in weight, and his temperature has dropped. Kincaid is proud she has bought the AZT for him, which has led to an improvement in his condition.

When she returns home, she wonders whether her brother is now sitting in the sun, and whether he is well enough to read the book she has given him. Kincaid remembers a woman, whom she had met some time previously, who had suggested that she should take her brother to the United States for the treatment he cannot get in Antigua. Kincaid is angry the woman should have suggested this without being aware of her circumstances, that she was not rich, and that she had her own family to consider, her children and husband.

Once the author is back in her home, she misses her brother, but she does not think she loves him the way she did when she was with him watching his suffering. Kincaid's brother begins to get better, and to grow stronger. Her brother becomes well enough to sit in the sun with the other patients at the hospital, who no longer avoid him. The hospital wonders what to do with him, because he seems to be recovering, which is something they have never seen before in a person with AIDS.

Kincaid's brother is discharged from the hospital, and having nowhere else to go, because one of his brothers has occupied the place that was previously his home, he goes to live with his mother, and to sleep in her bed with her.

Dr. Ramsay telephones Kincaid to ask if she has heard how her brother is behaving. The doctor is concerned, because the sick man has asked one of his nurses for a date, and has denied to her that he is infected with the AIDS virus. Kincaid's brother has asked to be tested again, because he does not believe he has the virus. Dr. Ramsay believes, from the way he is talking, that her brother is taking drugs again, but the author thinks that her brother's voice is simply a reflection of his happiness at being alive and feeling better. Kincaid feels her brother has had the potential to have been an important and successful person, but he himself had not believed it.

When he runs out of the AZT medication, he telephones his sister, who panics in case even one day without the drug might harm him. Kincaid does not understand why he, or his mother, had not let her know in good time to send more, and she wonders why she had not thought of it herself. Kincaid orders more and has it delivered to him by courier. Her brother's health continues to improve.

When the author goes to visit her brother the next time, she takes her children with her. They love their grandmother, and they eat all the food that she cooks, which surprises the author, because normally her children do not have large appetites. Kincaid's mother says the children love her, and that they might love her more than their mother. Kincaid's brother asks if she has brought the children so they can see him before he dies. Kincaid's brother is looking very well and feeling very well. Kincaid thinks that at least the medication she is buying is keeping him alive longer. She telephones and thanks all those people who have been kind and helped her brother.

A social worker, whom she speaks to, tells her that the tonic her brother is taking is mainly alcohol, and that he is having unprotected sex and not telling his partners that he has the AIDS virus. The social worker is angry that the man is drinking alcohol, after she has asked him not to, and asks him how he would feel if somebody who knew they were infected with HIV had unprotected sex with him, without telling him that they were infected, or how he would feel if such a person had unprotected sex with his sister. The social worker supplies him with a hundred condoms, and he promises he will use them in future, when she tells him that if he has sex with people who have the virus and don't tell him, his illness will develop more quickly.

In a meeting with Dr. Ramsay, Kincaid tells him about her brother's behavior, but he replies that unless he has sex at least every two weeks, he feels funny, and in any case he does not believe he has the virus. Kincaid's brother demands to have a new test. Dr. Ramsay reminds him that he has recently had a test which had given positive results.

When he hears that Dr. Ramsay is also a producer of calypso singers, Kincaid's brother is very excited and says that, when he sings, girls take off their clothes for him. The author wonders what kind of man her brother is, who cannot make anything or do anything useful, but is solely interested in getting girls to take off their clothes when he sings.

At the beach, Kincaid watches her mother and brother swimming together, and she thinks what a beautiful face he has, even though his body is too thin. She recalls that it was the birth of this brother that caused her mother to change, to lose her beauty and her good nature. Kincaid watches him approach some white women and flirt with them, and understands that he is entirely driven by his attempts to have sex with women.

Kincaid's mother tells her that God will bless her for having bought the AZT for her brother, but she thinks that God would have been better employed preventing him from contracting the disease in the first place. Kincaid remarks to herself that if her mother had her way, she would have prevented Kincaid from becoming a successful and educated person, and she would not today be in a position of being able to afford expensive medicine for her brother. Kincaid's mother and brother talk about a plant, a fern that was special to the mother, and which he had taken and sold in order to get money to buy drugs. The author's brother is embarrassed, which is what his mother had intended.

Before she returns home, Kincaid's brother asks her to go for a walk alone with him. Kincaid expects he will ask her to give him something. That is why he usually wants to be alone with her. Kincaid tells him one thing he should do is to make his own life, away from his mother, to find a job and a home of his own. The brother replies that this is something about which he is thinking. They walk through the botanical gardens, discussing the trees there, and past the jail, but he does not mention he has been in it. They walk past his old school and find the fruit of a mahogany tree, which neither of them has ever seen before. They walk past the recreational grounds, where he shows his sister a pavilion, where he used to take girls for sex.

When she has returned home, the author often speaks on the telephone to her mother and sick brother. Kincaid does not speak to her oldest brother, for a reason she does not mention. The author learns her brother's health is continuing to improve, and that he has managed to find a job, until his employer runs out of money. Kincaid's brother is drinking beer and seeing a lot of girls. The brother and their mother have frequent quarrels and say unforgivable things to each other, but once the quarrels are over, they disregard the things they have said.

One day, during a telephone conversation with an old friend about some books that have been stolen, the author asks if she has seen her brother, and the woman replies that he always has a bottle of beer and a girl with him, and that his hair has become very thin and his lips very red.

Kincaid's brother dies.

Kincaid visits him two months before his death, when he is lying in a bed she has bought for him, which is a child's bed, sufficiently large for his body. Because his body is so small, his head seems disproportionately large, and he is lying motionless upon the bed, covered by a sheet, with his eyes and mouth opened wide. He looks the same way when she goes to the undertaker to see him after he is dead.

In a photograph album Kincaid's husband has collected, there is a photograph of her brother when he was a young and healthy man, and beautiful. However, when he was that beautiful, healthy, young man, he did unspeakable things, and he was a liar and a thief.

When she visits him before his death, Kincaid watches him through a louvred window, and thinks that if she had not left home when she did, she would have probably died at his age, or have become insane. Kincaid wishes he would hurry up and die, because she does not like the emotions his condition arouses in her. The house smells strange, as though her mother is not cleaning it properly, but she realizes that it is the smell of her dying brother. Kincaid's brother shows her his penis, in panic and fear, because it is horribly diseased. She does not want to see it.

When the author returns home from a visit to Miami, she carries two large rhododendrons in five-gallon containers. People help her to get on and off the airplane carrying the two plants. When she arrives home in Vermont, she finds her two children sleeping, and when she kisses them, they awaken, and ask her to come into bed with them. Kincaid falls asleep in their bed and is awoken by her husband at the first light of morning. Her husband tells her he has to talk to her, and when she goes into the hall, he tells her that her brother, Devon, has died. When she hears the news, she is glad for her husband that it is not one of his relatives who has died, so he will not have to grieve. Kincaid would rather be sad, herself, than have her husband be sad.

When the children have gone to school, she makes arrangements to travel to Antigua for the funeral, and then she is interviewed at great length by a newspaper reporter. Kincaid does not tell the reporter about her brother's death. The author telephones all the doctors who have looked after her brother to tell them he has died, and then she telephones the pharmacist to tell him her brother has died. Kincaid also tells the village grocer her brother has died. Everybody she tells that her brother has died expresses their sympathy, although had they known her brother personally, they would not have liked him, even though he was charming and well-mannered. Although the author did not love or even like her brother, now that he is dead, she is comforted to hear people say they are sorry.

The last time she saw her dying brother, she was buying medicines for him that she could not afford to pay for; she got them on credit. At the time, he was very near death, but still breathing, in a fashion, and his heart was still beating, somehow. Kincaid was tired of his illness and his demands, and she did not care whether he recovered or whether he died, as long as he left her alone. When she leaves him, she only says, "Goodbye." She does not hug or kiss him.

Two months before her visit, there has been a powerful hurricane on the island, and people talk of the noise caused by the wind and rain. While the trees crashed around the houses and the electricity pylons fell, her brother could only lie helplessly in his bed, listening to the noise outside.

The author remembers a time when she saw her brother, after twenty years, when he was smoking marijuana with a friend, and they were planning a career together in music. When she subsequently meets the same friend and tells him of her brother's illness, he is not interested, and although he says he will visit him, he never does.

Kincaid recalls lying on her brother's bed in 1986, looking up at the beams that were rotting away, and hearing her mother moving about outside, preparing food. In that climate the people mostly spent their time outside, except when they are doing foreign things, like learning European table manners, which they do indoors. Two of her brothers refuse to eat the food their mother cooks, and only speak to her when they have to, and then address her as Mrs. Drew. The author decides, at that time, she will stop eating the food her mother prepares, as a sign of distancing herself from her mother.

Remembering her father's death (although he was not her biological father, whom she never knew), she did not learn of his death for three months, because she and her mother were not speaking to each other. Kincaid learned of his death in a letter from her mother, who wrote that the family is impoverished by his death, and that his burial was afforded by the charity of friends. When the author returns to her family, ten years after her step-father's death, she wants to visit his grave, but nobody wants to take her there, because her mother says that somebody else probably will have been buried in the plot by now, because they had not paid for the plot within the seven years necessary to keep it, and there was no gravestone. While Kincaid is visiting her dying brother she insists on going with her mother to the cemetery, because she has a sentimental hope that her brother, when he dies, can be buried near his father. Kincaid's mother cannot remember where her husband had been buried; only that it was not where the Anglicans, Methodists, Moravians, or Catholics are buried, so they do not find his grave.

Kincaid notices a tree is missing from her mother's land, and asks what has happened to it. Kincaid's mother tells her she burned the tree down, because it was infested with parasites, which invaded the house, and as she was unable to kill the insects with chemicals. Therefore, she set the tree alight with kerosene and burned it. The author is reminded of her childhood, after the birth of her brother who has died, and how it was at the time of his birth that her mother had changed, because her husband was frail and unable to support the growing family that he had fathered. Consequently, the young girl is expected to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of her family. Kincaid resents this, and does not like her family, because all she wants to do is read books, and instead, she has to run errands or look after her younger brother. Instead of looking after him, she reads all day, so that when her mother returns in the evening, the baby is wearing a soiled and unchanged nappy. In her anger, the author's mother collects all her stolen books, or books paid for with stolen money, and burns them.

On her final visit to her brother before he dies, she finds him in great pain, and she goes to try to find Dr. Ramsay. Kincaid learns the doctor is at the funeral of a four-year-old child, and so she goes to the church where the funeral is taking place, but the doctor is not there. The dead child, who has been adopted from the United States, is in a coffin covered with white velvet and designed to look like a jewel box, but instead it looks cheap. Kincaid observes the mourners, and watches while the child's coffin is lowered into the ground. The mother vomits at the sight. The other mourners do not watch this, because it is impolite to do so, and because public displays of emotion are not acceptable in Antigua.

Each time the author remembers her brother is dead, it is as though he has just died. Kincaid remembers the vivid colors associated with him: the whiteness of his mouth, infected with thrush; the redness of his lips; and the accentuated blackness of his skin. After his funeral, she returns to the United States, and while at a literary function in Chicago, she sees a woman whom she recognizes from somewhere. Kincaid remembers they had met at an AIDS support meeting in Antigua, and she tells this woman that her brother has died. Kincaid is surprised when the woman replies that she knows, and she explains that she is a lesbian, living in Antigua, who used her house as a meeting place for homosexual people who had nowhere else to go to socialize with each other. This is when the author learns for the first time that her dead brother was a homosexual, and that all the flirting that he did with women was just to disguise his homosexuality, and that he lived his life in secret. She feels a great sadness for her dead brother that his life had been like a ripening bud that had withered and dropped before it could flower.

When her brother dies, he calls out to his mother, and to his brothers, but he does not call his sister's name. He dies without having anybody of his own, except his mother and siblings, and with no home of his own, nor any furniture of his own. His sister does not mind that he does not call her name, because she has only known him for the first three years of his life, and the last three years, while he is dying, and so she accepts that she was not a true part of her brother's life or family

Once he has died and been taken from his mother's house, together with the smell of him, his sister visits the undertaker's, because she wants to see what her brother looks like now that he is dead. Her brother is zipped up in a plastic bag, the type of bag used to protect expensive clothes, and when the bag is unzipped and she sees her brother, he does not like her brother, with his mouth and eyes wide open, and his hair untidy, and his face unshaven. Later though, when she next sees him, he is in his coffin, looking like an advertisement for the dead, with his hair died black, his lips clamped together, and his eyes sewn shut. Kincaid keeps repeating that his eyes are sewn shut. His mother, his brothers, his mother's friends, and his old school friends all come to the undertaker's to look at the dead man's body. The author has paid with traveler's cheques for her brother's coffin, which is made of pitch pine, darkly varnished, and in which the dead man's emaciated body has to be packed with bed linen to stop it shaking around inside.

There are few mourners at the funeral, because firstly there is shame attached to people who have died as a result of sexual activity, and also, the dead man is not well-known. Kincaid's mother remarks that the dead man does not look like himself, and the author thinks of him in many ways: as the newborn child attacked by ants; as the two-year-old, left in her care, with a soiled nappy; as a criminal, or a cricket-player, or a smoker of marijuana; a sick man told that he was dying from the HIV virus; or as the man who believed he was getting better and was having sex with women, and maybe men. Kincaid wonders which of these people her brother had enjoyed being the most. Another man who has died from AIDS is being buried at the same time, in the same cemetery, but the two families do not speak to each other. When the preacher speaks about resurrection at a future date, the author does not want to think that she would want to meet any of the people present at the funeral again, because she has had enough of them and their ways. The dead man's brother, who lives in the same house as his mother, but who will not speak to her, (and who is not the brother who broke his mother's neck when she threw stones at him) weeps when he speaks about his brother, and this makes the author weep too, although she does not really know why.

The books closes with the author reflecting that she began writing in order to save herself, and that she has written of her brother's death in order to try and understand it.