Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 on the Caribbean island of Antigua. She attended school in Antigua and struggled to become independent of her mother and her place. “I was supposed to be full of good manners and good speech,” she has recalled. “Where the hell I was going to go with it I don’t know.” Kincaid took it to New York City, where she went at age seventeen to work as a family helper. She briefly attended Franconia College on a photography scholarship and did odd jobs in New York. She started contributing to The New Yorker, and in 1976 became a staff writer. Soon after, she began writing fiction, producing a collection of stories and five novels—all based to some extent on her life on Antigua and as an immigrant. Her nonfiction books include A Small Place (1988), also about Antigua; My Brother (1997), a National Book Award finalist; and Talk Stories (2000), a collection of her pieces from The New Yorker. An avid gardener, Kincaid has also written My Garden (Book) (1999) and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2004). She is a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.
In this very short story collected in At the Bottom of the River (1983) and read by the author for the Audio Prose Library, Kincaid analyzes the domain of the title female—both the roles she is expected to fill and the relationship with her mother, whose commanding, hectoring voice fills the story.
Download the transcript.
Listen to “Girl,” and respond to the following questions.
What are the CONNOTATIONS of the phrase “wharf-rat boys”? Why is the girl of the title supposed to avoid them?
What do the elements of the mother’s advice add up to? What kind of life does she depict for her daughter?
Toward the end of this story, the mother says, “this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you.” What is the EFFECT of this particular piece of advice? What effect would it have if it were the last line of the story?
OTHER METHODS The many obligations of a girl/woman can be CLASSIFIED into groups of skills and behaviors. What categories do you hear? How do they help organize Kincaid’s story?
The story’s speaker repeatedly and gloomily connects her daughter and a “slut.” Write an essay analyzing Kincaid’s use of slut. How does the mother seem to be defining this word? Why does she repeat it so often? Should we ASSUME that the daughter actually is a “slut”? What might be the effect of this repetition on the daughter? What is the effect on you, the reader?
CONNECTIONS Kellie Young, in “The Undercurrent” (Chap. 6), and Kincaid both analyze a mother’s nagging advice to a daughter, although they have different perspectives. How are the roles and relationships they describe similar? How are they different? What do the speakers’ TONES convey about their attitudes toward the advice they are given? Write an essay explaining how Young and Kincaid use word choice, sentence structure, repetition, and other elements of tone to clarify their speakers’ values and feelings.