The New Yorker and the World (5)—Fiction: Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl"

One year ago on Round and Square (16 September 2011)—Remonstrance: Rituals of Corporeality
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The New Yorker and the World"

[a] Exoticizing rhetoric RF

Over the next few months, I plan to post a little bit of the "content" from the first-year seminar I am teaching on "The New Yorker and the World." I will introduce several writers—fiction and nonfiction—and will give at least a snippet from the pages of the magazine, along with some of the context that I give while teaching the material. The next few days will feature some of the fiction writers who brought fresh perspective to The New Yorker short story in the 1970s and 1980s.

This one blew me away. This story—Jamaica Kincaid's first in The New Yorker after many dozens of unsigned "Talk of the Town" pieces—made me think that maybe, just maybe, literature and anthropology could be "read together" in ways that went far beyond the occasional post-colonial British ethnographer with a flair for descriptive prose. No, this was different, and my budding interest in writing and ethnography made me zero in on this story in a way that I may have missed in many others at the time. This one riveted me as I sat reading it after my first year of college. I had taken two Shakespeare courses and another in cultural anthropology, and I was seeing connections that I never could have imagined from my high school studies. Strange though it seems, I saw Othello and The Tempest weaving their ways between Kincaid's words, and I could not resist thinking that this is what I wanted to read for the rest of my life.

[b] Essentializing sunset RF

I was perplexed, to be sure. Benna?...and not italicized? Was it a mother talking to a daugher, a daughter's internalized monologue, or something else? Something else got my vote back then, and it does now. I am still trying to figure out what that something else is all about.

Just read it, and then learn more about Kincaid. Even the story behind her name is fascinating.

     Jamaica Kincaid
     Girl (1978) 
     Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash
     the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk 
     barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your 
     little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a 
     nice blouse, be sure that it doesn't have gum in it, because that way it won't hold 
     up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you 
     sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won't 
     turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the 
     slut you are so bent on becoming; don't sing benna in Sunday school; you 
     mustn't speak to wharf-rat boys, even to give directions; don't eat fruit on the 
     streets—flies will follow you; but I don't sing benna on Sundays at all, and never 
     in Sunday school; this is how to sew on a button...[1]
        [Continue on The New Yorker website]

***  ***

And that's it. One page; one sentence. Kincaid's first story ignited my ethnographic imagination, and I have been reading her ever since. Some of her work in the 1980s was as good as I have ever read, and she is a big reason why I insist that writers should do anthropology. I am not saying that Kincaid would make such a claim, and I expect that there would be resistance (the colonial overlay of the discipline is problematic for all of us). My reply would be just to read her, again and again.[2] And again. 

Everything will work out that way.

[c] Again RF

Notes
[1] Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl,” The New Yorker, June 26, 1978, 29 
[2] There are plenty of websites with the full story; just search them.