Jamaica Kincaid's Girl

What defines being a “girl”? Is it what you do and how you dress? Is it how you’re supposed to act and what you’re supposed to say? How would you feel if your mother was the one strictly answering these questions? Jamaica Kincaid was a girl who lived in the colonized Caribbean island of Antigua, but she moved away at the age of 17 to New York and started writing. Her first piece published in 1978 is named “Girl”. This piece is very interesting because of its rhythmic prose. The short story is a series of voices from a mother commanding her daughter on what she should do, and how she should act. Now, why would the mother be instructing the patriarchy instead of letting the daughter run free from it? Could it be resentment of her relationships

with men, with the way she was raised, because of simple life bitterness, or could it be tough love? The mother-daughter dynamic reflects the negative effects of an ingrained patriarchy and how the woman role has been treated to be thought of a certain type of stereotype.
Start asking yourself, how would you raise your children?

Some people would say that they would like to raise them how they were raised. Others argue that they would raise them completely different in a better way, and then there are people who are so caught up in saying that they don’t want to raise them one way and that’s exactly what they end up doing. How do you go from a girl to a woman? Your mother teaches you step by step on how to become one. One issue in this story is that it seems that the mother has been passing down to her daughter what happened to her. It seems like the mother had been raised in a way to please the house. She’s been teaching her daughter to sweep, clean, cook, set the table, iron her father’s clothes, and take care of the house itself. While the mother thought she was teaching her daughter how to be a woman, she was actually teaching her to become the backbone of the house which is exactly what her family could’ve taught

her.
“This is how to love a man” (48). Can you be taught to love somebody? Was the mother taught to love her husband, and is she teaching the daughter to do the same? How do you make someone love you? “[…] try to walk like a lady and not like the slut I know you’re so bent on becoming” (47). A woman’s husband can be such a great influence in her life, but one never knows if it is for the better or for the worse. Could it be that the mother feels such type of resentment because of the mistreatment she’s received from her husband that she’s trying to give it to her daughter as well? Her husband could’ve also impregnated her at an early age and that could be the reason why she’s been teaching her daughter on “how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child.” (48).
Could it be that the mother’s past experiences have made her so bitter that out of her own pure bitterness is the reason why she’s proceeding to repeat it to her daughter? Is it that the mother’s acrimony and suffering is so far gone that she doesn’t want to feel alone in it anymore? She could be passing it down to her daughter only so her daughter could relate to her, and then they’d both share the pain. The constrictions of existing as a woman have made the mother bare, alone, and by giving her daughter her pain she could be relieving some from herself.

Within the poetry of Kincaid’s words we find contradictions of femininity in the mother’s voice.

Could it be that instead of passing this patriarchy lifestyle to her daughter out of pure bitterness she’s trying to secretly save her? By reflecting on comments like “this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well […]” (47) and “this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you” (48) we can observe the contractions that could mean either warning signs or signs of detriment. The mother might be commanding her daughter in such a way because of her tough love with the matter. She could be teaching her after all how to do all of that in order to be successful in surviving it or learning a way to break out of

it.
Kincaid ended the story with “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?” (48). both voices are at the finale, the daughter is complaining and the mother is questioning if everything she has been saying has been for nothing. From the beginning until the end, the story reveals the subconscious subjugation of the entrenched patriarchy and how it affects the role of the woman itself. The voices are an emblem that represents the consequences of an oppressed gender. Even if the mother was giving her daughter a tough time or just tough love, it displays the world of a girl becoming a woman and a woman acting like a girl in such circumstances. What’s most interesting about this story is that at the end of it, you end up questioning yourself. Who is really the girl in the story?