The Angry Other

Jamaica Kincaid is hailed as one of the most important writers in the contemporary West Indies, and her works are the typical representatives of the writing strategies of "writing back from the edge to the center" in the postcolonial Literature. The Autobiography of My Mother, published in1996. is the masterpiece of Kincaid, which is depicted as a novel expressing the "the rage toward the colonial domination" in its fresh and moving language in the contemporary literature.The present study builds on the postcolonial feminism, especially on Spivak’s "Subaltern’s subaltern" theory, Said’s orientalism and Bhabha’s "Mimicry" theory. It focused on analyzing the double identity of the Other, the protagonist, Xuela, who suffered the bitterness and the double oppressions from the imperialism and patriarchy. As the Subaltern’s subaltern, Xuela, the representative of all the subaltern women, was deprived of autonomy, the right to speak and right to be herself. She aimed her agony and anger at all the men by her refusal of motherhood. Her revolt was found in her rejection to be a loving daughter of her father, a surrogate mother for a white colonist, a devoted lover, or a loving wife of her loving white husband. Xuela used her inhuman way to express her rage and fight for her right to speak and to be heard. Her history of fighting against the colonial patriarchal society was her subversion of the history of the Self and her writing of her history, history of the Subaltern and the colonized.By conducting a postcolonial feminist reading of The Autobiography of My Mother, the author of the present paper exposed another story of the colonial history. The female Other, subaltern, was capable of subverting the patriarchal society and the colonial history. It was highly suggestive of Kincaid’s sympathy for the double Other and her anger toward the Western colonial rule and their patriarchal system in her native land, the Caribbean areas.