文學與人生 Dream sees the invisible, feels the intangible and achieves the impossible.

Girl by Jamaica Kincaid

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 barehead 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 on 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 wharb-rat boys,not even to give directions;don't eat fruits on the street,flies will follow you; 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 button-hole 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 okrbafar 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; 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-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; 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?

Worksheet 

Jamaica Kincaid-Girl

Try to discuss the following questions:

1. Did you feel love from your family? Why or why not?

2. Did you and your parents spend a lot of time together?

3. What are the cultural practices and moral principles that your mother passes along to you?

4. Do you think a woman should live her life from a male’s point of view? Why or why not?

5. Do you agree that a girl can often develop some of her mother’s characteristics? Why or why not?

6. Should men help women with their chores? Why or why not?

7. What do you think are darker side to women’s lives?

Introduction

First published in the June 26, 1978, issue of The New Yorker, "Girl" was the first of what would become more than a dozen short stories Jamaica Kincaid published in that magazine. Five years later, "Girl" appeared as the opening story in Kincaid's collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983), her first book. "Girl" is a one-sentence, 650-word dialogue between a mother and daughter. The mother does most of the talking; she delivers a long series of instructions and warnings to the daughter, who twice responds but whose responses go unnoticed by the mother. There is no introduction of the characters, no action, and no description of setting. The mother's voice simply begins speaking, "Wash the white clothes on Monday," and continues through to the end. Like all of Kincaid's fiction, "Girl" is based on Kincaid's own life and her relationship with her mother. Although the setting is not speci- fied in the story, Kincaid has revealed in interviews that it takes place in Antigua, her island birthplace. When At the Bottom of the River was reviewed in major publications, reviewers praised the rhythm and beauty of the language and found the motherdaughter relationship fascinating, especially as it changes and develops throughout the volume. But a few, including the novelist Anne Tyler, found them too opaque. Tyler called the stories "almost insultingly obscure," but still encouraged readers to read the volume and to follow the career of "a writer who will soon, I firmly believe, put those magical tools of hers to work on something more solid." Author Biography Raised in Antigua, a small and beautiful island nation in the Caribbean, Kincaid experienced firsthand the colonialism that affects so many of her characters. Antigua was a colony of Great Britain, when Kincaid was born on May 25, 1949, and given the name Elaine Potter Richardson. Elaine's mother, Annie Richardson Drew, was a believer in obeah, a West Indian religion incorporating magic and ritual. For nine years Elaine was an only child, and felt happy and loved. She began school when she was four, the same year her mother taught her to read. She was a bright student. When her three brothers were born, she felt that her mother turned away from her; a longing for a reconciliation with a distant mother is a recurring theme in Kincaid's work.

Plot Summary

The story begins abruptly with words spoken by an unidentified voice. "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 barehead in the hot sun. . . ." The voice continues offering instructions about how a woman should do her chores, and then about how she should behave: "on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are bent on becoming." At the end of the first third of the story, another voice, signaled by italics, responds, "but I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school." This speaker is presumably the daughter of the main speaker.

Characters

Daughter

The daughter is an adolescent or pre-adolescent girl in Antigua, learning from her mother how to be a proper woman. She speaks only twice in the story, voicing impulsive objections to her mother's accusations and warnings.

Mother

The mother is a woman in Antigua who understands a woman's "place." She lives in a culture that looks to both Christianity and obeah, an African- based religion.

Themes

Mothers and Daughters Like much of Kincaid's fiction, "Girl" is an examination of the relationship between the "girl" of the title and her mother. The mother's instruction to "soak your little cloths right after you take them off" refers to the cloths woman in many parts of the world use to absorb their menstrual flow and indicate that the girl is a young adolescent. Kincaid has said that all of her fiction is based on autobiography, and that her own relationship with her mother has been difficult since Kincaid was nine years old. In an interview with Selwyn R. Cudjoe she explains, "the fertile soil of my creative life is my mother. When I write, in some things I use my mother's voice, because I like my mother's voice.

Style

Point of View

 "Girl" does not have a narrator in the conventional sense, because it does not have action in the conventional sense. There is no event, or series of events, acted out or told about by the characters or by a third-person narrator outside the action. Instead, the story is for the most part one speech delivered by the mother. The mother speaks in the first person referring to herself as "I" when she mentions "the slut I know you are so bent on becoming" and "the slut I have warned you against becoming." Far more important than the pronoun "I," however, is the pronoun "you." The mother directs her speech to her daughter, the "girl" of the title, and every instruction contains either the word "you"

Historical Context

Antigua: British Colony "Girl" was first published in The New Yorker magazine twelve years after Kincaid left Antigua for New York City. Even at that distance of time and space, Kincaid drew on her experiences growing up in Antigua for the setting and themes of "Girl," as she has done for the rest of her fiction. From the time Kincaid was born in 1949 until she left in 1966, Antigua was a colony of Great Britain. England had gained control of the island in 1667, after thirty years of fighting with the Carib Indians, who inhabited the island, and the Dutch and French, who wished to own it. In 1674 the first great sugarcane plantations were established, and slaves were brought in from Africa to do the work on them.

Critical Overview

Because "Girl" and several other Kincaid stories had first been published in the influential magazine The New Yorker, when Kincaid's collection At the Bottom of the River came out in 1983 it attracted more critical attention than volumes of short stories usually do, particularly for a writer's first book. Early reviewers were drawn to the language of the stories, though some were put off by the overall obscurity. Anne Tyler, writing for The New Republic, praised the stories for Kincaid's "care for language, joy in the sheer sound of words, and evocative power." Edith Milton, in The New York Times Book Review, also cited the language, "which is often beautifully simple, [and] also adopts a gospel-like seriousness, reverberating with biblical echoes and echoes of biblical echoes."

Critical Essay #1

Bily teaches English at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. In the following essay, she discusses expectations and opportunities in "Girl." In her 1984 New York Times Book Review piece about Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River, Edith Milton singles out "Girl" as " the most elegant and lucid piece of the collection," and observed that the mother's exhortations "define in a few paragraphs the expectations, the limitations, and the contents of an entire life." If this is an accurate assessment and I believe it is, what kind of life does it describe? What will the future hold for the girl is she follows her mother's suggestions? Many of the instructions give purely practical advice for doing daily chores in a developing nation where running water and electricity are not common.

Critical Essay #2

 Jamaica Kincaid's short story "Girl" is the opening piece in a collection entitled At the Bottom of the River. Critics have noted that the use of language in "Girl," as well as in the other stories of this collection, is one of its most notable features. "Girl" is unusual in that it is a short story written in the "second person" voice, meaning that the narrator addresses the reader as "you." The narrator here is a mother giving advice to her daughter, who is the "you" in the story. Kincaid's use of language in this story is key to understanding the nature of the mother/daughter relationship which it conveys. Grammatically, the entire story is a single sentence, which reads like a list or string of statements made by the mother to her daughter.

Critical Essay #3

A good portion of the "chant of information" the mother passes onto the daughter is made up of specific directions on how to carry out the domestic work for which the girl is clearly being trained. The mother's advice concerns such "woman's work" as washing clothes ("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"); sewing ("this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a button-hole for the button you have sewed on"); and cleaning house ("this is how to sweep the house; this is how to sweep the yard"), as well as setting the table, ironing and buying fabric.

Critical Essay #4

The mother's litany of advice, warning, and condemnation in "Girl" also contains a string of confusing and contradictory messages about the daughter's relationship to her African heritage and culture. On the one hand, the mother insists on warning the daughter against integrating African folk culture into her Christian education. "Is it true you sing benna songs in Church?" the mother asks. As benna songs are African folk songs, the mother's question is designed to warn the daughter against maintaining cultural practices derived from her African heritage. Yet, on the other hand, the mother's list of advice contains rich elements of this African heritage, which she clearly intends to pass on to her daughter.

Critical Essay #5

 In the following excerpt, Simmons discusses the mother's voice in "Girl," which she likens to a manipulative "chant." Kincaid's "Girl" may be read as a kind of primer in the manipulative art of rhythm and repetition. The story begins with the mother's voice giving such simple, benevolent, and appropriately maternal advice as "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." Like the girl to whom the mother speaks, the reader is lulled and drawn in by the chant of motherly admonitions, which go on to advise about how to dress for the hot sun, how to cook pumpkin fritters, how to buy cloth for a blouse, and how to prepare fish.

 Critical Essay #6

 In the following excerpt, Abruna discusses Kincaid's use of dream visions and metaphor in her exploration of family life and social structure in the West Indies. Some of the finest fiction from the West Indies has been written by Jamaica Kincaid. Her fiction, specifically her collection of short stories At the Bottom of the River, makes interesting use of dream visions and metaphor as the imaginative projections of family life and social structure in her West Indian society. In the short stories Kincaid explores the strong identification and rupture in the daughtermother relationship between the narrator and her mother. The process is mediated through metaphor and, when it is threatening, through surrealistic dream visions.

Compare & Contrast

1978: Antigua is a semi-independent "Associated State" under British domain, no longer a full colony, but not an independent nation.

1990s: Antigua, Barbuda, and the uninhabited island of Redonda make up the independent nation of Antigua and Barbuda.

1970s: The economy of Antigua is largely based on farming, particularly fruits, vegetables, cotton and livestock. Its former reliance on sugar production has ended abruptly and catastrophically in the 1960s.

1990s: The economy of Antigua is based on services, particularly tourism and off-shore banking.

1970: Approximately 41 percent of Antigua's population is fourteen years old or younger. Many adults leave the country.