The Importance Of Love In Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother

To many a mother’s love is an unconditional and an irreplaceable act of kindness. This love is seen to be a guide to growth and a love that helps to shape young children into well rounded adults. Throughout Jamaica Kincaid’s memoir, My Brother, her mom tends to show affection only in times of need when someone is down and does not really provide the leadership most mothers give. Most of the memoir is about intimacy, but a lot it deals with the relationships between mother and her children. Kincaid claims that the love her mother would give would not always be the best for them and we see how it has shaped Devon, her brother, into becoming completely overtaken by AIDS and how she has not spent much time with her family in Antigua and to better …show more content…
The mother has three boys, but they have a different father than the one she had. These boys have a much closer relationship to the mother and it seems to be like the mother loves the brothers more than she loves Jamaica. The relationship that shows the mother’s “babyish” like love with the most is towards her youngest son Devon. Devon has become infected with AIDS and his mom will do anything to try to help him overcome this disease. Throughout his time at the hospital his mother would do everything for him. Some of the chores she would do was to clean his clothes, make his bed, and even make him food and feed it to him, “she helped him to eat his food, the food she had prepared and brought to him” (Kincaid 15). Even though his brother was in the hospital with a terminal disease this love his mother gave him led to his demise. At this point in the hospital it was too late to change what she had already done. To have prevented or helped the situation she should have been more of a leader with her kids and not have just shown them love when they were in a tough situation. They were babied so intensely that this is the only thing that they know how to do. She talks about one time she how she was assigned by her mother to watch Devon and forget to change his diaper the whole day because she was preoccupied reading a book. As a consequence, for doing so her mother went on to burn all of her books “she gathered all the books she could find…, she doused them with kerosene and then set fire to them” (Kincaid 134). The result of this action sets her on the path to becoming an author and in a way can be thankful that her mother did this. Although Jamaica was able to change this misfortune later on in her life, her and her siblings still had a hard time dealing with the effects from their mother’s