Girl

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1978

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Background

Authorial Context: Jamaica Kincaid

Afro-Caribbean author Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean, in 1949. Her given name was Elaine Potter Richardson, though she would officially change her name in 1972 to provide herself with anonymity while she published her work. As a child, Kincaid excelled at her studies and attended a British secondary school. However, when Kincaid’s third brother was born (she had a total of three other siblings, all brothers), her mother took her out of school to help with the family and the house (“Jamaica Kincaid.” BBC World Service). Kincaid’s family was poor, and their small home in St. John had no electricity, running water, or bathroom.

In 1965, Kincaid left Antigua when she was barely 17 and moved to New York City. Her mother sent her there to work, though Kincaid did not send money home as her mother wished and cut off communication with her family. She worked as an au pair and studied photography on scholarship before she started working for The New Yorker in 1976. In addition to writing for The New Yorker, Kincaid also sent her work to other publications as well. She worked with The New Yorker until 1996 and currently works at Harvard University teaching in the English and African-American Studies departments. She married Allen Shawn, the son of her editor, and they have two children together.

Kincaid’s published her first book, a short story collection titled At the Bottom of the River, in 1983. The titular story was originally published in The New Yorker in 1982. Her experimental collection of poetic vignettes won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Kincaid also won the PEN/Faulkner Award for At the Bottom of the River in 1984 and for The Autobiography of My Mother in 1997. These works, like many of Kincaid’s publications, address mother-daughter relationships:

The characters in Kincaid’s novels are constantly trying to emancipate themselves from their mothers and, by extension, from their motherland, an oppressive environment that hinders their cultural, psychological and sexual development. In Kincaid’s fiction, the mother-daughter relationship often becomes a mirror image for the hegemonic relationship between the mother country (England) and the daughter island (Antigua) (“Jamaica Kincaid.” British Council, 2022).

This theme of maternal oppression is particularly evident in “Girl” as the mother and daughter converse with one another about domestic life and proper conduct. While Kincaid felt like her mother neglected her after her brothers were born, was pulled from school to help at home, and then refused to send money home to her family while in New York, some of this same animosity and tension exists in “Girl.”

In a 1985 interview with the New York Times, Kincaid explained: “Clearly the way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me. I can’t help but think that it made me interested in the idea of myself as an object” (O’Connor, Patricia. “My Mother Wrote My Life.” New York Times Book Review, 1985). This objectification of daughters is prevalent in “Girl.”

The mother calls her daughter a “slut” while the daughter questions her mother’s authority. The Caribbean influence of Kincaid’s upbringing is also evident in her cultural references to “benna” (Lines 14 and 17), “dasheen” (Line 28), and “doukona” (Line 45). Born and raised in Antigua for the first 16 years of her life, Kincaid “critically examines her Antiguan past with its colonial legacy, and her American present” (“Jamaica Kincaid.” British Council, 2022). The cultural references made in “Girl” help to set the text firmly in its Caribbean context.

Socio-Historical Context: Postcolonialism and the British West Indies

The British colonized and ruled Antigua for 350 years until the small island achieved complete independence in 1981. Kincaid’s native country was a British colony during her childhood, and her community assimilated to British ideals. Consequently, Kincaid received a British education and was raised Christian (although she later converted to Judaism). However, she rejected British dominance and was set on developing her own cultural identity, a theme that emerges in several of her works: “I was always being told I should be something, and then my whole upbringing was something I was not: it was English” (Cudjoe, Selwyn R., ed. Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Wellesley: Calaloux Publications, 1990.) Kincaid shares her views on the British colonization of Antigua in A Small Place, an autobiographical work published in 1988:

Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by 12 miles long. It was settled by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa […] to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty—a European disease (Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1988, pp. 80).

British colonization changed the cultural and social norms of the West Indies in many ways. The specific gender and social dynamics Kincaid would have experienced growing up in the British West Indies in the 1950s and 1960s influences the context of Kincaid’s work, including “Girl.” In an anthropological article, Dr. Sharla Blank of Washburn University discusses these gender roles and social dynamics:

The Caribbean has a long history of female-headed households. West Indian women have been economically contributing to their households since the slavery period and male unemployment in the region is widespread and recurring. Women head between 30 and 50 percent of all Caribbean households (Blank, Sharla. “An Historical and Contemporary Overview of Gendered Caribbean Relations.” Journal of Arts & Humanities, Vol. 2, No. 4, May 2013).

The article goes on to explain how the “the maternal role is more valued than the marital role.” The significance of the mother figure comes across in “Girl” with the unwavering, demanding, and strict characterization of the mother character. Dr. Blank describes how daughters in Caribbean cultures are typically treated more strictly than sons, and how the domestic demands on women are obviously higher for the female gender as opposed to the male gender. The instructive tone with which the mother addresses the daughter, the addressee of the text, shows how the mother is preparing her daughter for her future domestic and wifely duties. While Dr. Blank references studies from the 1990s and 1980s, the historical context of these studies coincides with Kincaid’s work and her representation of Caribbean society under British rule.

Much of Kincaid’s work criticizes colonialism and highlights the experience of Caribbean diaspora. Because of this, many readers examine Kincaid’s work through a postcolonial lens:

Postcolonial theory also looks at the broader interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized by dealing with issues such as identity (including gender, race, and class), language, representation, and history. Because native languages and culture were replaced or superseded by European traditions in colonial societies, part of the postcolonialist project is reclamation. Acknowledging the effect of colonialism’s aftermath—its language, discourse, and cultural institutions—has led to an emphasis on hybridity, or the mingling of cultural signs and practices between colonizer and colonized (“Glossary of Poetic Terms: Postcolonial Theory.” Poetry Foundation, 2022).

Themes of identity and gender—particularly of the displaced Black woman struggling to maintain independence from an overbearing mother—are prevalent in Kincaid’s works.