Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

I started Lucy at about 8 p.m. last night and finished it this morning. I read it quickly, quickly, quickly. No time, not even to re-read passages that my eyes had wandered over while I was thinking about other things. It's been a long time since I read a book like that. When I was little, I used to read two or three books a week. It was a nonstop marathon of words and ideas. I never really read deep books, but I was voracious all the same. So my reading Lucy was an attempt to reconnect with the way I used to read. Gobbling.
Lucy was a difficult book for me because it addresses the subtle ways that white people can oppress, offend, and disgust people of color. Lucy's West Indian heritage is tokenized (by people who have memories of going to "The Islands" on vacations--"I had a good time there!") idealized, and at times just plain trivialized. There's a particularly telling scene where Lucy and Mariah are sitting at a table in a restaurant. Only Lucy notices that all the people serving them are people of color, "possibly my relatives" or something of the sort, and the people who are sitting at the tables are all white--as if they are all Mariah's relatives.
The book I was reading from was a hardcover book. It was nice to hold. The cover was soft and worn about the edges, and I enjoy reading from books like that. The pages were beige from age, and someone had written notes in the margins about feminism. So I started thinking about the book in a feminist way, I guess. Lucy's relationship with her mother is another difficult thing for me. So is her promiscuity, if it can be called that. I suppose it can.
In short, I had a hard time identifying myself with Lucy, because I am close with my mother, I don't condone promiscuity (although I sympathize with her in the way that Kinciad writes the situations), and I'm white. Am I supposed to identify with her because I'm a woman?
I read this book ahead of the rest of my class, Writing Across Differences. So I don't really have a frame that I'm applying to see what our teacher wanted us to get out of this book. Did Professor Wright maybe choose this novel because it depicts a struggle about identity? That's something to think about. I'm trying to remember if Lucy ever comes to terms with her mother. I read it so quickly that I forget how it ended. She gets a new apartment with Peggy (who is Irish? but somehow they identify with each other?)--and then...hang on I have to go reread it.
Right. She sends a load of money to her mother to help her out, then she gets an apartment with Peggy, and she gets a new job working for a photographer. Who really wants to go photograph poor people from around the world. (This was another interesting thing for me--Lucy's indifference/disdain of liberals and hypocritical liberals like Miriah, who want to save the wetlands but also buy expensive vacation homes, who want to live as lightly as they can but Lucy doesn't mind having an extra room, she sees it as something beautiful.) Ok she gets the job, she thinks about her name (Lucy=Lucifer), and then she ends on the quote:
"I wish I could love someone so much that I could die from it."
There's something to think about. The person who read this book ahead of me wrote "All she ever wanted in the world. All WE ever want in the world."
That sounds so damn cliche. Surely there's more to what Lucy, and for that matter, what I want in the world.
Ugh what do I want in the world?
Perhaps part of the trouble that I have with this novel and with identifying with Lucy is also that she is really angry and very distanced/detached from her world and the people in it. She analyzes everything and finds nothing permanent.
She does love Miriam, I think, one of Miriah's children. There's a start.