Does inherited pain justify the harm caused?

With Mr. Potter –translated into Catalan by Carme Geronès–, the writer Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua, Caribbean, 1949) constructs a powerful novel, a piece of incisive prose that makes lack—of affection, of words, of recognition—its creative engine. The book presents itself as the portrait of a seemingly irrelevant man, Roderick Potter, an illiterate taxi driver from Antigua, while simultaneously offering an impeccable dissection of the colonial, patriarchal, and affective structures that make this irrelevance possible. Kincaid doesn't rescue his character: he looks him straight in the eye, with a lucidity that is unsettling.

The novel adopts a unique perspective: the narrator is the daughter Mr. Potter abandoned, a daughter who speaks from a place of wounds but also from a mastery of language. This asymmetry—he is illiterate; she is the one who writes—is not only autobiographical but also political. Language becomes power, and writing, an ambiguous tool. It serves to understand, but also to judge. In this sense, Kincaid offers no easy reconciliation. The daughter narrates simply to exist, but also to demarcate an irreparable distance from her father.

A perfect product of the colonial system

Mr. Potter is a character defined by negation: he was not a father, not a husband, not master of his own destiny. The author presents him as the perfect product of a colonial system that manufactures incomplete, flawed individuals, men without a recognized inner life, reduced to silence. However, the novel avoids any temptation to exonerate him. Inherited pain does not justify the harm inflicted. Herein lies one of the book's most powerful tensions: the ability to portray the victim without turning him into a moral heroine.

Kincaid's style is simple at first glance, because its precision is almost cruel. His clean, repetitive sentences employ a cadence reminiscent of a litany or a sustained accusation. This repetition is not ornamental; it is a way of insisting, of preventing oblivion. Every detail of Mr. Potter's life—the taxi rides, the failed relationships, his inability to understand the world—accumulates until it paints an opaque figure, with hardly any cracks through which redemption might enter.

The mother, a recurring and powerful figure in Kincaid's work, appears in this story as a silent yet decisive counterpoint. If Mr. Potter represents irresponsible absence, the mother embodies a wounded but resilient presence. The novel, without explicit pronouncements, articulates a profound critique of gender imbalance: women sustain, men disappear; women remember, men forget. But the author does not idealize this female resilience either. Survival comes at a very high emotional cost, and memory can be a form of condemnation.

Mr. Potter It is neither a gentle nor a conciliatory novel. Rather, it exposes a body, a life, under an unforgiving light. To write about an absent father not to forgive him, but to understand what made that absence possible, is a radical act. Kincaid transforms a man's minimal biography into a larger question about responsibility, history, and the right to speak. Ultimately, the novel asserts that there are lives that only fully exist when someone tells their story. But that explanation is not a gift, but a critical act, a power grab. The daughter writes because she can and knows how, because the world has given her the tools her father denied her. And in this gesture, both literary and political, Mr. Potter It reads like a heartbreaking work about what writing can – and cannot – repair.