LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (21,033)
  • Text Authors (21,094)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,134)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

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

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2026 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris