A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

JAMAICA KINCAID'S WRENCHING, INCANTATORY STORY OF HER BROTHER DEVON

Author: By Renee Graham, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, November 2, 1997

Page: N1

Section: Books

Visceral and wrenching, this is a memoir of mourning, at its core the death of Kincaid's brother Devon Drew from complications of AIDS in January 1996. Yet her sorrow is not reserved for her brother alone, nor is her anger directed solely at the disease that ended his life at 33. His death provides a pathway for Kincaid's exploration of themes that have permeated most of her books, primarily the poison of familial acrimony.

By the time Kincaid learned of her youngest brother's illness, he was already dying in a squalid hospital in her native Antigua. That she heard the news from a family friend instead of her mother typifies the caustic relationship between them. At the time, mother and daughter were in the midst of what Kincaid calls ``a period of not speaking to each other.''

``This not speaking to each other has a life of its own, it is like a strange organism, the rules by which it survives no one can yet decipher; my mother and I never know when we will stop speaking to each other and we never know when we will begin again,'' Kincaid writes.

Kincaid's mother is more than strong-willed or domineering; she is a force of nature. When Kincaid was 15 and minding Devon, her mother returned home to find the 2-year-old in a soiled diaper. Kincaid, who had spent the day reading, watched in horror as her mother gathered all her daughter's books, drenched them with kerosene, and set them afire in the yard. Kincaid would leave home a year later.

The mother's relationship with her three sons was equally fractious. Devon died before finding peace with her; his middle brother had not spoken to her for several years, though he was living in the same house. Still, Kincaid says, her mother was unfailing in her attention to her dying son.

``Her love for her children when they are children is spectacular, unequaled I am sure in the history of a mother's love. It is when her children are trying to be grown-up people -- adults -- that her mechanism for loving them falls apart,'' Kincaid writes. ``All the same, her love if we are dying, or if we are in jail, is so wonderful, a great fortune, and we are lucky to have it. My brother was dying; he needed her just then.''

Devon's was a life ill-spent. At 14, he took part in a gas station robbery that left someone dead, and cost him a stint in jail. Though intelligent, he had no taste for employment. He preferred to spend his days blasted on drugs or chasing the fast affections of countless women (and, Kincaid would discover after his death, some men as well).

He ignored his sister's warnings about HIV; even on his deathbed, unable to eat or move without great discomfort, Devon refused to utter the word AIDS. Instead he would curse ``dis chupidness,'' meaning ``the stupidness'' that had come to occupy his body and gnaw at his life.

The friends who filled his life deserted him as he neared death. They would come to the hospital, but none would enter his room. His mother believed they came only to see if in fact he had AIDS, and when their curiosity was satisfied, they returned no more. But during this time Devon was often comforted by his sister, who came to know her brother for the first time when she visited him during his illness. He had been 3 when she left home, and by her own admission she has never been particularly close to any of the brothers.

But it was, at best, a fitful stay. Kincaid and her mother continued to grate on each other's nerves. Kincaid missed her husband, her children, and the comfort of her life in Vermont. And there remained much within her unresolved about Antigua, the island homeland she escaped and often viewed as archaic. In this place, her brother could not even get AZT: The government refused to spend money on medications that could only slow the disease's progress.

Through a doctor friend in the United States, Kincaid was able to get AZT for Devon, and for a time his condition improved enough so that he could leave the hospital. But his health would again slide. When he died, he called aloud the names of his mother and his brothers; he never mentioned Kincaid, who observes she was ``neither sad nor glad about this.''

``I knew him in the first three years of his life, I came to know him again in the last three years of his life. . . . I can see that in the effort of dying, to make sense of me and all that had happened to me between the years he was three and thirty was not only beyond him, but also of no particular interest to him,'' she writes. ``I had never been part of the tapestry, so to speak.''

Kincaid's book, a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction, is not an AIDS memoir in the elegiac spirit of the late Paul Monette's ``Borrowed Time''; nor is it a darkly humorous rant, like the late David B. Feinberg's ``Queer and Loathing.'' She offers neither epiphany nor resolution; there is no closure. Her incantory prose flows like an internal conversation heard aloud with all of its disquieting observations left intact.

While perhaps too bleak for some, the sheer nakedness of Kincaid's revelations are both intoxicating and redeeming. And in rubbing her hands over the sharp, unchecked edges of her life and her family, she has fashioned a memoir of unsparing honesty.