Girl by Jamaica Kincaid
"Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid is a short story that captures the complexities of a West Indian mother-daughter relationship through a series of commands and advice imparted from mother to daughter. The narrative unfolds as a list of expectations and instructions concerning domestic tasks, personal hygiene, and social conduct, emphasizing traditional roles and responsibilities assigned to women. Kincaid’s portrayal reflects the cultural norms and values of Caribbean society, particularly the insistence on proper behavior and respectability for young women.
As the mother shares practical tips alongside more serious topics like sexuality and abortion, the relationship is marked by a mix of nurturing and authoritarian tones. The daughter's minimal verbal responses highlight her internal struggle with the heavy expectations placed upon her, illustrating a poignant tension between adherence to tradition and the desire for autonomy. The story poignantly explores themes of coming of age, gender roles, and the generational transmission of cultural values, ultimately raising questions about identity and self-acceptance in a prescriptive world. With its rich cultural context and layered emotional dynamics, "Girl" invites readers to reflect on the complexities of womanhood and the often unspoken challenges that accompany it.
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Girl by Jamaica Kincaid
First published: 1983
Type of plot: Coming of age
Time of work: The early 1960's
Locale: Antigua, West Indies
Principal Characters:
The mother , a West Indian obsessed with notions of middle-class respectabilityHer daughter , the adolescent protagonist
The Story
A West Indian mother orders her daughter to learn how to perform mundane domestic chores (such as washing white clothes and putting them on the stone heap on Monday and washing the colored clothes and putting them on a clothesline to dry on Tuesday). She also offers her daughter advice ranging from commonsensical health precautions about walking bareheaded in the hot sun and practical tips on cooking pumpkin fritters and soaking salt fish overnight to more intimate advice on personal hygiene.
From what appears to be relaxed lessons on blouse making and cooking, the girl's initiation to "womanhood" escalates to more serious matters of etiquette and female respectability ("you mustn't speak to wharf-rat boys"). These matters include practical abortion instructions ("to throw away a child before it even becomes a child") and ominous chants.
The mother soberly hands down the baton of womanly attributes and duties, tested and sanctified for generations, to her daughter, arguably in the very same way her own mother had received and handed them down to her. The mother accomplishes a generational and gender mandate, as it were, in the wake of the inevitable mother-daughter separation and distancing usually marked by creeping adolescence.
In the absence of conventional dialogue, only two lines in the story reveal the daughter's response to her mother's sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh, sometimes distant, sometimes accusatory, "do's," "don't's" and "how to's." However, there is nothing against which the daughter can protest in the female initiation process circumscribed by her mother's list—particularly not its prohibitions. False assumptions that all-knowing adults make too quickly about youthful behavior and blatant accusations by one's own (domineering), too often suspicious mother are difficult to accept or even comprehend. To an earlier interrogation ("is it true that you sing benna at Sunday school?") and its accompanying admonition ("don't sing benna at Sunday school"), the daughter intimates inaudibly, as she only can ("but I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school"). To the mother's overwhelming, browbeating warnings against becoming a slut, the daughter's exasperated, again inaudible, "but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?" speaks her confusion at her predetermined destiny.
Bibliography
Als, Hilton. "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Review of Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid. The Nation 252 (February 18, 1991): 207-209.
Broeck, Sabine. "When Light Becomes White: Reading Enlightenment Through Jamica Kincaid's Writing." Callaloo 25 (Summer, 2002): 821-844.
Garis, Leslie. "Through West Indian Eyes." The New York Times Magazine 140 (October 7, 1990): 42-44.
Jaggi, Maya. "A Struggle for Independence." The Times Literary Supplement, April 26, 1991, 20.
Matos, Nicole C., and Kimberly S. Holcomb. "'The Differences Between Two Bundles': Body and Cloth in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid." Callaloo 25 (Summer, 2002): 844-857.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Snell, Marilyn. "Jamaica Kincaid Hates Happy Endings." Mother Jones 22, no. 5 (September/October, 1997): 28.
Valens, Keja. "Obvious and Ordinary: Desire Between Girls in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John." Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 25 (June, 2004): 123-150.