Jamaica Kincaid- Girl

Jamaica Kincaid- Girl

The poem "Girl" by author Jamaica Kincaid shows love and family togetherness by creating microcosmic images of the way mothers raise their children in order to survive. Upon closer examination, the reader sees that the text is a string of images in Westerner Caribbean family practices.

Jamaica Kincaid has taken common advice that daughters are constantly hearing from their mothers and tied them into a series of commands that a mother uses to prevent her daughter from turning into "the slut that she is so bent on becoming" (380). But they are more than commands; the phrases are a mother's way of ensuring that her daughter has the tools that she needs to survive as an adult. The fact that the mother takes the time to train the daughter in the proper ways for a lady to act in their time is indicative of their family love. The fact that there are so many rules and moral principles that are being passed to the daughter indicates that mother and daughter spend a lot of time together.

The reader gets the impression that the advice that the mother gives her daughter has been passed down from many generations of women. The advice of the ages has enabled their daughters to endure hardships and to avoid making the same mistakes that they had made, such as planting okra far from the house because it attracts red ants. There were some women in the past that learned this lesson the hard way, and included it in the litany of advice for future generations. But "Girl" also shows the hostility and family dissension that the females suffer.

The world of the women is not comprised solely of setting the table for tea or determining which day to wash the white clothes or the colored clothes; there is a darker side to their lives. The mother gives the daughter advice on how to handle men and how to make an abortion-inducing drug, indicating that there are times in their lives when they must resort to unprincipled means to deal with the problems in their lives.

There is an undertone of fatigue that may be a result of the endless list of tasks that the women must perform. The story does not give evidence that men help the women with their chores, and this may also give women cause for dissension and hostility. One of the major points of dissension in the story is the daughter's two interjections into her mother's recitation. At both points, she tries to gain advantage over her mother's advice by offering objections to her mother's words. Both times, the mother merely continues her barrage of words without validating the girl's interjections. The mother, too, constantly hints that the girl is intent upon becoming a slut, which creates even more dissension and hostility between the two. At times in the story it seems as if the mother does not like the daughter and is only giving her advice because it is her duty. It is hard to determine from the dialogue anything other then the fact that the mother has placed intense demands on her daughter, but that she does not feel that the daughter will become anything more than a slut.

As far back as bible times women and their daughters were taught to submit to the head of the family for the rest of their lives. Ephesians 5:22-23 states:

"Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior."

The bible emphasizes the equality of wives to husbands but did not advise the overthrowing of the head of the family. Still today in many other religions the wife is submissive to her husband.

The citizens in other countries still have these every day grueling tasks. For example, Jamaica Kincaid was born in the West Indies in 1970. The ideas that she uses are probably