Girl

02/01/2025

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The succinct story, 'Girl', can usefully be read alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s longer A Small Place, a long essay or a short book depending on perspective, just as 'Girl' can be read as a very short story or a very long sentence. The story is around 650 words; which makes for the briefest of tales, but when the average English sentence is 15-30 words, this can seem a long wait for a full stop - which actually never comes since the story ends on a question mark. 

   'Girl' doesn’t have a categorical setting, though it does have a few reference points that mark it as a Caribbean tale: singing West Indian calypso, eating okra and Doukona; growing dasheen and making pumpkin fritters. Not all of these are exclusive to the region, but combined they suggest a clear sense of locale. It gives a hint of specificity to a title that proposes the universal but also plays up place as a site of obligations over expectations, inevitably perhaps when the familial past is stronger than the individually present. Kincaid, born and brought up in Antigua, and sent to the US to work, says “...it used to be a tradition in agricultural families that you'd sacrifice the eldest child. I remember the darkness of being sent away - sheer misery of a kind that I didn't know existed.” Kincaid adds, “I would have gotten a scholarship. It seemed cruel even to other people because I was known as a bright child.” (Paris Review) 

    'Girl' emphasises chiefly the received behaviour expected of a young woman: the various things she must do, and no less the things she mustn’t. “This is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make Doukona; this is how to make a pepper pot; this is how to make good medicine for a cold…” “Don’t squat down to play marbles…don’t pick people’s flowers, don’t throw stones at blackbirds…” It isn't that there is no good advice here but more that the do’s and dont's suggest a restrictive world far more than a practical one. There is nothing wrong with learning how to make bread pudding, or a pepper pot, but these would be things she should learn as a girl, not as a person. It seems good practice not to throw stones at blackbirds, but not so much if the suggestion to treat animals well is predicated on your gender. When such advice comes in the form of dictates and its logic moves far beyond the practical, how can one not wish to resist?  

   Though the story remains mainly within the abstractions that are evident in the title if we are right to see details that make it clear this is a Caribbean environment, then we note the story is cultured as well as gendered. The imperatives are not only those of a young woman, demands men would escape, these are also those of a female living in a particular part of the world. Move to another part of it and the demands placed upon someone aren’t gender universal but culturally specific. If men have relative freedom in the Caribbean, and women have relative freedom in, say, the US, then the worst of all possible worlds is to be a woman on this island in the Caribbean. That doesn’t mean it is okay to be a man, and perhaps especially a black man in the United States, nor would it necessarily be great being a white woman, but Kincaid can say that as a black woman in the United States she could emancipate herself as she couldn’t in Antigua. She may have been sent away to send money home, but she instead started spending it on herself, which might sound selfish from one point of view but must have seemed liberating from another. When your traditional family sends you to the US to make money, and you instead decide to use the country to make yourself, the line between self-absorption and self-emancipation can seem blurry.

    In 'Girl', we can see why someone might wish to escape being a good girl, to doing one’s duty, with the long sentence a potential pun: Kincaid offers not only 650 words with semi-colons, commas and the occasional dash but a sentence that suggests servitude. “…On Sundays try and walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming….”, “…this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so prevent yourself from looking like the slut 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.” Kincaid we see uses repetition, a risk in so short a story but a technique that adds to the drudgery. If there is little variety to the life, why should there be much variety to the language? 

    Yet there are also hints of rebellion and opportunities potentially to manoeuvre around the oppression. “…this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you…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 hardly the same though as seeking a life on one’s own terms and, while we don’t want to reduce the story to the autobiographical, even if Kincaid is an often auto and biographical writer, it can seem like the life she just managed to escape. It is the life she would have been expected to lead but one she managed to transform, even though we might wonder if, in the description, there is a traditional way of living that isn’t all bad as she indicates an oppressive life but not necessarily an oppressively colonial one. When she says in Paris Review “the people who designed the colonial curriculum went to Eton. All the things we learned about at school - the monarchs of England, the Battle of Hastings, Wordsworth” this is only half the story. It might be these English values that sit behind the tale, but even the traditional values it expresses are themselves hardly traditional, in the sense of indigenous. To be from the West Indies is to have been forcibly moved from somewhere else centuries earlier. As Derek Walcott says: “there is no West Indian who is black, or even one who is not black, who is not aware of the existence of Africa in all of us.” (Contemporary Literature) 

   This must add to the confusion; there one is growing into a woman who isn’t quite sure what she is supposed to be emulating. Is it the potential Englishness of the Sunday school mentioned three times and which seems to provide the moral structure to people’s lives? But what of other traditions or advice? When she is told “...this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child even before it becomes a child”, this is unlikely to be part of the religious lessons in Sunday school. Is all the advice she receives from her mother or offered by various people who never quite become characters in the story but are represented by the advice they give, a sort of moral ''polyphony, to invoke Bakhtin’s term? This is where, according to Andrew Robinson “it is thus as if the books were written by multiple characters, not a single author’s standpoint. Instead of a single objective world, held together by the author’s voice, there is a plurality of consciousnesses, each with its own world. The reader does not see a single reality presented by the author, but rather, how reality appears to each character.” (Ceasefire Magazine) If we are to read the story as about an oppressive upbringing, we should perhaps also pay attention to the different voices that seem to be at work in the tale. Would her mother be likely to tell her how to spit; how to bully a man? 

   Most takes on the story assume all the advice comes from the mother but nothing in it indicates this need necessarily be so. That Kincaid says this is a story about a mum offering advice to her daughter is all very well, but unless the story makes such a claim clear, there is no reason why we should make that assumption ourselves. “The girl is powerless”, Kincaid says, “and the mother is powerful. The mother shows her how to be in the world, but at the back of her mind she thinks she never will get it.” (Mississippi Review) If a writer offers a story that removes speech marks and clear characterisation, it can offer an indeterminacy that demands a polyphonic unpicking. When we’re told “...this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease” we would assume with some confidence this would be the words of the mother, but would we say with the same surety “...this is how to catch a fish; that this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like” (which might suggest the father’s voice, or perhaps a brother’s)? And would a mother be inclined to tell her daughter how to have an abortion if she weren’t already pregnant? Wouldn’t we be more inclined to assume this is a friend’s remark? Sure, her mother wasn’t so conformist: “I can only think that I absorbed that skepticism from my mother, who was always quarrelling with someone or other in her head." Kincaid adds that her "mother didn't have the language to describe herself as an anti-colonialist, but she...thought the English were uncivilized.” (Paris Review) Yet the story is read chiefly as an act of oppression, and few see the mother as a liberating figure within it. “Undoubtedly, the speaker in 'Girl' locates herself within this larger patriarchal structure” Carol Bailey says, “with the presentation of a list of clearly defined roles and markers of respectability based on the standards of the dominant culture.” (Meridians)

   It might be bad enough to over-interpret a text at the best of times but for many, the worst of them would be when it runs contrary to the author’s expressed intentions. However, we don’t have intentional fallacies and the death of the author for nothing. As the intentional fallacy, warns us, we must be wary of “the error of criticising and judging a work of literature by attempting to assess what the writer’s intention was and whether or not he has fulfilled it rather than concentrating on the work itself.” (Dictionary of International Terms and Literary Theory) When interviewer Allan Vorda says ”It’s almost most like she's Mother England, Kincaid concurs, saying “I was just going to say that. I've come to see that I’ve worked through the relationship of the mother and the girl to a relationship between Europe and the place that I'm from, which is to say, a relationship between the powerful and the powerless." (Mississippi Review) Yet while we have noted the presence of Sunday schools, much of the story doesn’t propose an all-powerful English colonialism. If there is little reason why we should accept Kincaid’s symbolic reading, equally there is no reason why we should accept too her literal one if the evidence doesn’t categorically support it.

   In many ways, the difference between 'Girl' and 'A Small Place' rests on this question of voice and the interpretations we can make as a consequence of it. We have a clear first-person, essayistic account of growing up in the longer piece. That is fine and well, and we don’t want to propose that 'Girl' is a better work than the short book or vice versa: that 'Girl' is great because of ambiguities even the writer doesn’t appear to recognise and that A Small Place is impressively clear and 'Girl' muddy. No, they are just doing different things well. When in A Small Place, Kincaid (it seems absurd to talk of the narrator) says, “in the Antigua I knew, we lived on a street named after an English maritime criminal, Horatio Nelson, and all the other streets around is were named after some other English maritime criminals”, there is no ambiguity here as she goes on to mention Hood, Hawkins and Drake. Mother England isn’t metaphorically present but polemically insisted upon. 

    It is a fine, short book about growing up in, getting away from and returning to Antigua, and all the anger the place invokes. What Kincaid has to say about it is there on the page, but what she has to say in 'Girl' appears to us more interpretatively available and thus seems counter-productive for reviewers, interviewers and the author herself to claim more clearly what it is doing than the story itself offers. The narrower reading might make it easier to fit into a colonial discourse about a mother having absorbed colonialist ideas and parroting them back to her daughter, but that would be only a dimension of the story. This isn’t to claim Kincaid shouldn’t be attacking British imperialism just that she does a much better job of that in A Small Place than in Girl, which works surely more as a tale closer to modernist experiments with voice, rather than an essayistic account of oppression.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Girl

The succinct story, 'Girl', can usefully be read alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s longer A Small Place, a long essay or a short book depending on perspective, just as 'Girl' can be read as a very short story or a very long sentence. The story is around 650 words; which makes for the briefest of tales, but when the average English sentence is 15-30 words, this can seem a long wait for a full stop - which actually never comes since the story ends on a question mark. 

   'Girl' doesn’t have a categorical setting, though it does have a few reference points that mark it as a Caribbean tale: singing West Indian calypso, eating okra and Doukona; growing dasheen and making pumpkin fritters. Not all of these are exclusive to the region, but combined they suggest a clear sense of locale. It gives a hint of specificity to a title that proposes the universal but also plays up place as a site of obligations over expectations, inevitably perhaps when the familial past is stronger than the individually present. Kincaid, born and brought up in Antigua, and sent to the US to work, says “...it used to be a tradition in agricultural families that you'd sacrifice the eldest child. I remember the darkness of being sent away - sheer misery of a kind that I didn't know existed.” Kincaid adds, “I would have gotten a scholarship. It seemed cruel even to other people because I was known as a bright child.” (Paris Review) 

    'Girl' emphasises chiefly the received behaviour expected of a young woman: the various things she must do, and no less the things she mustn’t. “This is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make Doukona; this is how to make a pepper pot; this is how to make good medicine for a cold…” “Don’t squat down to play marbles…don’t pick people’s flowers, don’t throw stones at blackbirds…” It isn't that there is no good advice here but more that the do’s and dont's suggest a restrictive world far more than a practical one. There is nothing wrong with learning how to make bread pudding, or a pepper pot, but these would be things she should learn as a girl, not as a person. It seems good practice not to throw stones at blackbirds, but not so much if the suggestion to treat animals well is predicated on your gender. When such advice comes in the form of dictates and its logic moves far beyond the practical, how can one not wish to resist?  

   Though the story remains mainly within the abstractions that are evident in the title if we are right to see details that make it clear this is a Caribbean environment, then we note the story is cultured as well as gendered. The imperatives are not only those of a young woman, demands men would escape, these are also those of a female living in a particular part of the world. Move to another part of it and the demands placed upon someone aren’t gender universal but culturally specific. If men have relative freedom in the Caribbean, and women have relative freedom in, say, the US, then the worst of all possible worlds is to be a woman on this island in the Caribbean. That doesn’t mean it is okay to be a man, and perhaps especially a black man in the United States, nor would it necessarily be great being a white woman, but Kincaid can say that as a black woman in the United States she could emancipate herself as she couldn’t in Antigua. She may have been sent away to send money home, but she instead started spending it on herself, which might sound selfish from one point of view but must have seemed liberating from another. When your traditional family sends you to the US to make money, and you instead decide to use the country to make yourself, the line between self-absorption and self-emancipation can seem blurry.

    In 'Girl', we can see why someone might wish to escape being a good girl, to doing one’s duty, with the long sentence a potential pun: Kincaid offers not only 650 words with semi-colons, commas and the occasional dash but a sentence that suggests servitude. “…On Sundays try and walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming….”, “…this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so prevent yourself from looking like the slut 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.” Kincaid we see uses repetition, a risk in so short a story but a technique that adds to the drudgery. If there is little variety to the life, why should there be much variety to the language? 

    Yet there are also hints of rebellion and opportunities potentially to manoeuvre around the oppression. “…this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you…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 hardly the same though as seeking a life on one’s own terms and, while we don’t want to reduce the story to the autobiographical, even if Kincaid is an often auto and biographical writer, it can seem like the life she just managed to escape. It is the life she would have been expected to lead but one she managed to transform, even though we might wonder if, in the description, there is a traditional way of living that isn’t all bad as she indicates an oppressive life but not necessarily an oppressively colonial one. When she says in Paris Review “the people who designed the colonial curriculum went to Eton. All the things we learned about at school - the monarchs of England, the Battle of Hastings, Wordsworth” this is only half the story. It might be these English values that sit behind the tale, but even the traditional values it expresses are themselves hardly traditional, in the sense of indigenous. To be from the West Indies is to have been forcibly moved from somewhere else centuries earlier. As Derek Walcott says: “there is no West Indian who is black, or even one who is not black, who is not aware of the existence of Africa in all of us.” (Contemporary Literature) 

   This must add to the confusion; there one is growing into a woman who isn’t quite sure what she is supposed to be emulating. Is it the potential Englishness of the Sunday school mentioned three times and which seems to provide the moral structure to people’s lives? But what of other traditions or advice? When she is told “...this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child even before it becomes a child”, this is unlikely to be part of the religious lessons in Sunday school. Is all the advice she receives from her mother or offered by various people who never quite become characters in the story but are represented by the advice they give, a sort of moral ''polyphony, to invoke Bakhtin’s term? This is where, according to Andrew Robinson “it is thus as if the books were written by multiple characters, not a single author’s standpoint. Instead of a single objective world, held together by the author’s voice, there is a plurality of consciousnesses, each with its own world. The reader does not see a single reality presented by the author, but rather, how reality appears to each character.” (Ceasefire Magazine) If we are to read the story as about an oppressive upbringing, we should perhaps also pay attention to the different voices that seem to be at work in the tale. Would her mother be likely to tell her how to spit; how to bully a man? 

   Most takes on the story assume all the advice comes from the mother but nothing in it indicates this need necessarily be so. That Kincaid says this is a story about a mum offering advice to her daughter is all very well, but unless the story makes such a claim clear, there is no reason why we should make that assumption ourselves. “The girl is powerless”, Kincaid says, “and the mother is powerful. The mother shows her how to be in the world, but at the back of her mind she thinks she never will get it.” (Mississippi Review) If a writer offers a story that removes speech marks and clear characterisation, it can offer an indeterminacy that demands a polyphonic unpicking. When we’re told “...this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease” we would assume with some confidence this would be the words of the mother, but would we say with the same surety “...this is how to catch a fish; that this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like” (which might suggest the father’s voice, or perhaps a brother’s)? And would a mother be inclined to tell her daughter how to have an abortion if she weren’t already pregnant? Wouldn’t we be more inclined to assume this is a friend’s remark? Sure, her mother wasn’t so conformist: “I can only think that I absorbed that skepticism from my mother, who was always quarrelling with someone or other in her head." Kincaid adds that her "mother didn't have the language to describe herself as an anti-colonialist, but she...thought the English were uncivilized.” (Paris Review) Yet the story is read chiefly as an act of oppression, and few see the mother as a liberating figure within it. “Undoubtedly, the speaker in 'Girl' locates herself within this larger patriarchal structure” Carol Bailey says, “with the presentation of a list of clearly defined roles and markers of respectability based on the standards of the dominant culture.” (Meridians)

   It might be bad enough to over-interpret a text at the best of times but for many, the worst of them would be when it runs contrary to the author’s expressed intentions. However, we don’t have intentional fallacies and the death of the author for nothing. As the intentional fallacy, warns us, we must be wary of “the error of criticising and judging a work of literature by attempting to assess what the writer’s intention was and whether or not he has fulfilled it rather than concentrating on the work itself.” (Dictionary of International Terms and Literary Theory) When interviewer Allan Vorda says ”It’s almost most like she's Mother England, Kincaid concurs, saying “I was just going to say that. I've come to see that I’ve worked through the relationship of the mother and the girl to a relationship between Europe and the place that I'm from, which is to say, a relationship between the powerful and the powerless." (Mississippi Review) Yet while we have noted the presence of Sunday schools, much of the story doesn’t propose an all-powerful English colonialism. If there is little reason why we should accept Kincaid’s symbolic reading, equally there is no reason why we should accept too her literal one if the evidence doesn’t categorically support it.

   In many ways, the difference between 'Girl' and 'A Small Place' rests on this question of voice and the interpretations we can make as a consequence of it. We have a clear first-person, essayistic account of growing up in the longer piece. That is fine and well, and we don’t want to propose that 'Girl' is a better work than the short book or vice versa: that 'Girl' is great because of ambiguities even the writer doesn’t appear to recognise and that A Small Place is impressively clear and 'Girl' muddy. No, they are just doing different things well. When in A Small Place, Kincaid (it seems absurd to talk of the narrator) says, “in the Antigua I knew, we lived on a street named after an English maritime criminal, Horatio Nelson, and all the other streets around is were named after some other English maritime criminals”, there is no ambiguity here as she goes on to mention Hood, Hawkins and Drake. Mother England isn’t metaphorically present but polemically insisted upon. 

    It is a fine, short book about growing up in, getting away from and returning to Antigua, and all the anger the place invokes. What Kincaid has to say about it is there on the page, but what she has to say in 'Girl' appears to us more interpretatively available and thus seems counter-productive for reviewers, interviewers and the author herself to claim more clearly what it is doing than the story itself offers. The narrower reading might make it easier to fit into a colonial discourse about a mother having absorbed colonialist ideas and parroting them back to her daughter, but that would be only a dimension of the story. This isn’t to claim Kincaid shouldn’t be attacking British imperialism just that she does a much better job of that in A Small Place than in Girl, which works surely more as a tale closer to modernist experiments with voice, rather than an essayistic account of oppression.  


© Tony McKibbin