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Volume 1, Number 2 - Fall 2002
“Girl” Offers
Insight About Class, Power
by Anndee Hochman
I
like to begin with “Girl.”
Twice
in the past year, I’ve launched a People and Stories series with this
sharply crafted, lyrical story by Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid. A
near-monologue in the voice of a mother, or perhaps a grandmother, it is
written in the imperative, a second-person command that nags us to sit up
and take notice.
“Wash
the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap,” the mother
begins, and I immediately glimpse another world, one where laundry is a
day-long project done by hand, where domestic chores parse the week into
an inflexible routine. I am there, in that world, and I am here, squarely
in mine, with the automatic washer I take for granted. Already I am
feeling a bit superior: I have better things to do than spend Monday
mornings beating clothes over a rock.
I
loved this story a long time before I used it with People and Stories, and
I’ve always read it as a bitter recollection by a writer liberated from
the confinements of her island girlhood—not only her mother’s tedious
counsel, but he colonial boot of the British, who ruled Antigua until
1981.
Although
I am a mother, I read this piece with a daughter’s sensitivity. I roll
my eyes at the mother’s repetitions (“this is how you sweep a whole
house; this is how you sweep a yard”), flinch at her harshness (“try
to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming”)
and feel my own confusion rising in the girl’s final question (“but
what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?”) For me, the story
makes plain that imperialism, sexism and racism are cruel cousins, and
details the tragedy of how the powerless teach their children to
acquiesce.
That’s
what I thought, until I brought this story to two very different groups of
readers: women at Interim House, an inpatient treatment program for former
drug addicts; and kids at The Attic, a center for lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgendered teens in downtown Philadelphia.
I
thought the women at Interim House—daughters all, mothers some—would
squirm, as I did, under the story’s litany of stultifying advice. I was
wrong. Instead, most identified with the mother, justifying even her
harshest comments. “She doesn’t want the girl to make the same
mistakes she made,” said Ramona. “Maybe the mother was a slut, and she
don’t want her daughter to be one,” added Angie.
Where
I’d heard the mother’s words as a broken record of conformity, the
women at Interim House found glimmers of subversive counsel. Dawn pointed
out lines such as “this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like
it,” and Linda found mischievous freedom in the words, “this is how
you smile to someone you don’t like at all.”
“She’s
teaching her daughter how to ‘get over,’” said Ramona, and the whole
roomful of women began making faces, trying on the smirk we all use to
placate people we disdain. For a moment, we lost ourselves in laughter.
But
when the laughter dissolved, I was left thinking about power and
privilege—my privilege to wear a wrinkled dress because I can rely on my
education, my vocabulary, my family, my safety net and my skin color to
earn respect and save the day. If you’re black, uneducated, homeless,
drug-addicted, with a couple of kids and a court record, and you want to
be treated halfway decently, maybe Jamaica Kincaid’s mother was right:
you’d better have your hem neatly sewn and pressed.
That
privilege, that ease of passage through the world, extends even to how I
read; it is what led me to identify only with the grown-up “girl,” the
tart-tongued expatriate, and not with the weary woman stuck on the island,
trying her best to raise a
girl the world would consider “good.”
Still,
I was inclined to cast my lot with the daughter. And I felt sure that
readers at The Attic would as well. After all, these were young men and
women whose lives were flamboyantly non-conformist. Some had been kicked
out of their homes for flouting gender rules. I thought they’d read
“Girl” and bristle at the blatant sexism (“don’t squat down to
play marbles—you are not a boy, you know”) and nagging tone.
“What
a bitch!” Derek blurted as soon as I’d finished reading. “Rules,
rules, rules. I don’t want anyone telling me what to do.”
Other
kids began to argue. Kim read the mother’s words as guides for
“getting by,” a blend of useful practicalities and important social
contracts. She and others noted strategies of independence in the story:
advice on how to catch a fish, grow okra, avoid being conned by salesmen
and concoct home remedies for abortion and the common cold.
“But
look at that smiling business. Isn’t she teaching her daughter to be a
phony?” I asked.
“No!”
They were emphatic. “You can’t just go around calling your boss a
mother f----r,” said Kim. “You’ve got to smile, be courteous.”
Jess pointed out that in a colonialist society, those at the bottom need
to be the most sensitive to the dynamics of power; you can’t afford to
alienate your oppressor. And Justice found comfort in the story’s clear
codes of behavior. “Back in the day, they were ruled by their heads,”
he said. “I think it was better. Now we’re ruled by our hearts.”
At
Interim House and The Attic, readers stepped willingly into the skin of
both characters, crossing borders of gender, age, geography and culture,
whereas I had held myself apart, reading the story through the scrim of my
own middle-class life. Their reading, in the end, changed mine.
When
I read “Girl” now, I still feel the grip of colonial rule, the choke
of maternal advice. But there is something else; I hear Justice’s
sincere longing for guidance; I hear Angie’s desire for advice that
might have kept her from becoming a mother at age fourteen; I hear
Dawn’s recognition of the mother’s quietly subversive subtext. I hear
all the voices—haranguing and encouraging, oppressive and liberating,
personal and cultural—that shape my own behavior.
And
I hear the voice of the writer enriched by those with whom I’ve shared
this story. Perhaps “Girl” is not all cynical gladness at having grown
up and left. Maybe it’s more complicated, a perspective that includes a
daughter’s resentment and admiration of her mother, sorrow and longing
for her beautiful, colonized homeland.
At
Interim House, as the session neared its end, I asked one final question.
“The story’s just called, ‘Girl.’ Why don’t these two characters
have names?” Andrea answered without hesitation. “I don’t need them.
They could be anybody. They could be us.”