Story Review: "Girl" is a brilliant story. Wonderfully, it's often taught in schools. The story accomplishes so much by doing very little. Everything is done through indirection, between the lines. Superficially, it's simply a single sentence: a mother's guidance, a long series of instructions, suggestions, directions, household hints and tips (the daughter gets in only two short responses). Rules. "Soak salt fish overnight," "wash the color clothes on Tuesday," "this is how you set a table for dinner," "this is how you sweep a corner." Some of the instructions are good, "don't walk barehead in the hot sun," "this is how you smile to someone you don't like too much," "don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all." Within those instructions is a powerful and insidious critique of women's place in society. The reader reaches every conclusion about "Girl" alone, as though the thoughts sprung fully formed within her own synapses. Which, of course, is the best way to present a diatribe: without the diatribe. The story is hard and fast, like a bullet to the brain. At first the mother's guidance seems helpful and clever, how to perform various household chores. But two different themes soon arise. First, that the daughter's life will wholly consumed with cooking, cleaning, sewing, and serving. The daughter's only future is woman's work, the same as her mother's life. There is nothing about reading, learning, thinking, growing, aspiring. It's too easy to see the mother as the villain of the piece, but she's not. Her guidance stems from all she's ever known, and if it seems harsh it's only because she's learned, she knows how to survive in a small, traditional community. The mother is only teaching what she's known, she is not trying to limit her daughter, only teach her the rules of society. But then there are lines that belie the traditional guidance, moving from how to iron her father's clothes to "this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all," "this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child," "this is how to bully a man," "this is how to love a man ... and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up." These survival skills are a bit more revolutionary. Jamaica Kincaid is a good enough writer to introduce complexity into the mother: yes she's preparing her daughter for a traditional life, but she may also be giving her some tools to circumvent the rules. The second theme, like a slap in the face, is that the daughter should become and behave as a proper lady ("not like the slut you are so bent on becoming"), but then also teaches her "how to spit up in the air if you feel like it." While I read that as being only if no one is looking, who knows? That this is an Antiguan story creates one layer of meaning here, but it's also a universal story about the future of any girl in any society: will I be limited to a certain kind of life or can there be more? This story is contained in Kincaid's collection At the Bottom of the River. "Girl" is one of the great stories of our time, or any time. [5★]
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