The autobiography of my mother quotes

My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind.

Xuela, Loc 13 [E-book Edition]

This opening line immediately draws attention to how Xuela regards herself and her life.

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“Her tragedy was greater than mine; her mother did not love her, but her mother was alive, and every day she saw her mother and every day her.

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.

My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak.

To have a mother is to know that she is gone as much as she remains: an obstinate absence, a presence like living flesh.

Without a mother she feels without direction and vulnerable. This immediate lack of a mother figure haunts her entire life, but it is also what grants her the courage to live her life for herself without feeling shackled by the will of others.

In doing so Kincaid also creates allusions between her own life and that of Xuela's, where Kincaid was first able to pursue her own life after leaving her family home behind her.

My teacher was a woman who had been trained by Methodist missionaries; she was of the African people, that I could see, and she found in t