by Jamaica Kincaid (b. 1994)
Mystery
Language: English
Chosen for Diff
And so, Our Mother was before Order and our Mother is now dead and our Mother had been living in Chaos: And when our Mother was dead, the three of us who had survived her being alive, were weighed down with grief and we were beside ourselves with sadness, for how were we to live without her: And her life was without borders, and so there were no boundaries, and she moved from here to there, and made there nowhere and made nowhere memorable, and we were from her and then we were of her and so we were here and there and nowhere. But our Mother was before order and she managed the very winds themselves (or so it seemed to us), dispatch-ing amusing gusts, which affected us as if we were in a storm, a storm that had taken place on another planet governed by rules not at all familiar on earth:
Text Authorship:
- by Jamaica Kincaid (b. 1994) [author's text not yet checked against a primary source]
Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):
- by Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev (1856 - 1915), "Mystery", first performed 2000 [ mezzo-soprano, violin, violoncello, piano ], from Jamaica's Songs, no. 1 [sung text checked 1 time]
Researcher for this page: Joost van der Linden [Guest Editor]
This text was added to the website: 2026-08-13
Line count: 12
Word count: 154