AAnnie and Vernice (or Niecy, as Annie calls her) are “foster friends” raised in their hometown of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, in 1950s America. The heroes are defined by their motherlessness and their individual tragedies and their individual drives to escape pre-written destinies. In this haunting novel of motherhood and sisterhood, Tayari Jones writes about unknowability – how far we can ever really know another person, or ourselves.
The pair, who speak in alternating chapters, are “not the same, but still the same”. Each is cared for by mother-like figures – grandmothers, aunts – and give meaning to each other’s lonely, questioning existence: “When you don’t have your mother, you don’t really know who you are.” Annie’s mother has abandoned her but is apparently alive in Memphis, and she makes it her obsession to be reunited with her; Niecy, on the other hand, is lost forever, murdered by Niecy’s father. While the former has hope, the latter has no hope; And this is where the thorn in their future lies. While Niecy chooses sensible, stable life paths – college, a traditional marriage – Annie moves from tragedy to tragedy, haunted by thoughts of her missing mother. Call it destiny or a kind of sadness.
Jones’s idiomatic, hypnotic prose draws you in, and she playfully weaves the tropes of twinning, doubling, and foiling throughout the novel, accentuating the gloom and brightening the plot. “Some truths are too bitter to bear”, we are told; Merciless violence and melodrama are kept off the page as the pair cross the fault lines of racism and classism (there’s an incident on a bus, and one in a laundromat, where Jones shows remarkable restraint). She reuses the epistolary device in her Women’s Award-winning novel, An American Marriage, to link women together through words as the years tear them apart in different directions. When they finally meet again, will they recognize who they have become, now with a new set of secrets? “I struggled to decide whether Secrets and Lies were twins, regular sisters, or just cousins.”
Ultimately, the novel analyzes what happens when you love selflessly, endlessly, one-sidedly; When maternal love, or the lack thereof, becomes poisonous and parasitic; And when a mother’s love, which should nourish and support your soul, instead drains it (“Everything needs water to live. But not too much. That’s the paradox of water. You need it, but it can kill you”). Swiftly and profoundly, Kin is a cautionary tale about the limits of love, both presented and received: “Love, I learned, was the responsibility of the loved one. The other person didn’t necessarily have to contribute to the stew.” And “So you have to be careful who you give it to. They may keep your love in their back pocket and never give it back.”
Is there a more fundamental loss, a more profound rupture, than the loss of the one who gave you life? “Grief is a kind of magic”, and with Beloved, Jones has made an impact on his readers, leaving us certain that – quietly, almost unconsciously – there has been a stirring within our souls.
