Angels in Antigua: The diasporic of melancholy in Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother

This essay endeavors to clarify the paradoxes of Jamaica Kincaid's grief in her AIDS memoir, My Brother (1997). By analyzing two related motifs - the memoir's pattern of botanical metaphors and the descriptions of her brother Devon's dying and of his corpse - the essay explores how Kincaid's melancholic commitment to Devon complicates her approach to biographical and autobiographical writing. Weighed down and consumed by her brother's …