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Jamaica Kincais's fourth novel, Lucy(1990), shows what it is for a third world migration woman to grow up in the world. The protagonist, Lucy, leaves her home country, Antigua, because she finds nobody and nothing there to support her to grow up as a free agent. Even her mother, who was once an idealistic pre-Oedipal mother, begins to enforce patriarchal and imperial principles on her. As a way to live as a free agent, she chooses to work as an au pair in a New York yuppie household. However, she finds that she has to cope with metropolitan languages there, which are still imperialistic and patriarchal. She is simultaneously fetishized and condescended to in a revamped form of old power relations between the colonizer and the colonized.
The most remarkable feature of Lucy is the protagonist's counter language against the dominant language. Wherever Lucy confronts the signifying mechanism of the dominant language to marginalize and objectify her, she never fails to rewrite the text in her own language. Her language is thoroughly based on her materiality and historicity. The dominant class pretend that the power dynamic between Lucy and them does not exist. They have little sense of the past, present and future, and treat everything casually, as it comes along. This ahistorical attitude is very effective for them to avoid recognizing their roles in this late capitalism system and feeling some kind of responsibility or sense of guilt. However, Lucy herself, alive to minor nuance and moods, adopts a more explicitly counterhegemonic stance. She grounds whatever she sees in an alternative vision of hers. Lucy sees and speaks at a very local position of a third world migration woman laborer. Refusing to assimilate into any strong metropolitan language, she chooses her material position as the only one to build her own subjectivity.