Respond to a Reading: Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”
Read the short story “Girl” below and respond to the questions in the margin. When you are done, “submit” your response.
Jamaica Kincaid
(b. 1949)
Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson and educated on the island of Antigua in the West Indies. Her mother and stepfather, by whom she was raised, doted on her as the only child. Kincaid left Antigua to study in the United States, but she found college “a dismal failure,” so she educated herself. She began writing and published her stories in Rolling Stone, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker, where she became a staff writer in 1978. Six years later, she published her first book, At the Bottom of the River, a collection of stories that won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1985, Annie John, her book of interrelated stories about a girl’s coming of age in the West Indies, was also much praised. In her autobiographical writing, Kincaid often explores the idea that her deep affection for her family and her native country developed into a conflicting need for separation and independence as she grew up.
Typically, Kincaid writes in a deliberately precise rhythmic style about intense emotions, as in her story “Girl” (1978). Her fiction is free from conventional plots, characters, and dialogue. The critic Suzanne Freeman has recognized that “what Kincaid has to tell me, she tells, with her singsong style, in a series of images that are as sweet and mysterious as the secrets that children whisper in your ear.” Although Kincaid is married to an American and lives in Vermont, she feels that the British West Indies will continue to be the source of her fiction. “What I really feel about America is that it’s given me a place to be myself—but myself as I was formed somewhere else.” A Small Place (1988), another book about the West Indies, was described by the novelist Salman Rushdie as “a jeremiad of great clarity and a force that one might have called torrential were the language not so finely controlled.” Kincaid’s recent works include The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Mr. Potter (2000), and My Favorite Tool (2005).
The daughter responds to her mother’s question about singing benna on Sundays, but her response is not immediate. What’s the effect of delaying this response?
What does the mother’s advice about smiling at different types of people suggest about how women should behave in relation to other people? What does the insistence on smiling, even if different, suggest about how women should best operate in the world?
Why does the mother remind the daughter that she is not a boy? In the context of the advice around this statement, what does this reminder suggest about the early emergence of gender roles?
The advice the mother gives about the fish can be taken quite literally, but given the proximity of the advice about men, how might it operate as a metaphor?
Girl
Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum in it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you;1 but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard;2 this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely;] this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don’t squat down to play marbles—3 you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers—you might catch something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child;4 this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up;] 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; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?
Jamaica Kincaid. "Girl" from At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid. Copyright © 1983 by Jamaica Kincaid. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. CAUTION: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.