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At the age of fourteen I had exhausted the resources of the tiny school in Massacre, the village between Roseau and Mahaut. I really knew much more than that school could teach me. I could sense from the beginning of my life that I would know things when I needed to know them, and I had known for a long time that I could trust my own instinct about things -- that if I was ever in a difficult situation, if I thought about it long enough, a solution would appear to me. I could not know then that there would be limitations to having such a view of life, but in any case my life was already small and limited in its own way.
I also knew by then the history of an array of people I would never meet, and that in itself should not have kept me from knowing of them; it was only that this history of people that I would never meet -- Romans, Gauls, Saxons, Britons, the British People -- had behind it a malicious intent, which was to make me feel humiliated, humbled, small. And once I had identified and accepted this malice directed at me, I became fascinated with this expression of vanity: the perfume of your own name and your own deeds is so intoxicating that it never causes you to feel weary; it is its own inspiration; it is its own renewal; its demise is caused by factors independent of itself. And I learned, too, that no one can truly judge herself, for to describe your own transgressions is to forgive yourself for them; to give voice, to confess your bad deeds is also at once to forgive yourself, and so silence becomes the only form of self-punishment.
-- Jamaica Kincaid
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