You can probably tell from my writing that I’m obsessed with notions of justice and injustice—those things that are wrong that can never be made righ… - Jamaica Kincaid

(Were there black writers you read as a young person?) I didn’t know there were black writers. When I met Derek Walcott, after I had written my first novel, he was so appalled that I had not ever been exposed to a West Indian writer that he sent me an anthology. All the writers in it were men, of course. When I came to America, I did start to read black writers, but they were political writers—Eldridge Cleaver, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). The first book I got from a library in the U.S. was An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by Gunnar Myrdal. I didn’t understand race in America at all.

I didn’t really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn’t see how it was possible not to like me!

I've come to think that the traditional way of writing is the artificial way that that's not the way things work at all. It's not the way thinking works.