Jamaica without concessions

I was really there to hear Jamaica Kincaid.  Her prose awes me.  So powerful and fluid.  While there are few dialogues, her texts have a cliffhanger quality to them. Yet not a trace of sentimentality.  How does she do it?  From the moment she made her way up the stairs on the side of the stage, her whole person exuded pain.  That grand old dame, bent over by pain.  That interior pain that flows in her texts, is it the price paid to escape sentimentality? To produce such powerful prose?  She takes the microphone and tells of being up a lot of mischief when she was in school and always getting punished.  At the age of 7, she had to copy down books 1 and 2 of Milton's Paridise Lost.  "It ended up not being a punishment at all, I fell in love with its character, Lucy.  And later named a novel after her.  I'm going to read from book 2."

In the exchange of love between the reading performer and the audience, that's all she was prepared to give.  She came fully prepared to disappoint her lover's expectations.  If she had given us a reading of her work, we would have loved her all the more for it.  But she didn't come for our love. Her reading had a deep, beautiful stance to it.  It's a hard text to listen to, and the audience was fretting.  She left, standing straighter in her raw loneliness.