I'm always trying to put my own self into words—who am I? - Jamaica Kincaid

You know how they say a man’s house is his castle? I think for a woman, it’s her body. I feel so strongly about a woman’s right to choose. This is my Zionism. It’s not a “right” any more than it’s a right to breathe, to take in oxygen. I think a woman is powerless if she cannot freely claim the right to her reproductive capacity. Society can talk about anything it likes, except a woman’s reproductive existence. I think I write out of that feeling.

(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.

Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.