Kincaid's Girl

Girl, by Jamaica Kincaid, struck me as a very interesting piece of work. For one thing, it reads more like a list of instructions about trivial things in the beginning of it, but then moves on to more abstract ideas. I can’t really make much of a comment on the story, because there is no real story to it. Instead, she tends to say something and then move on with the idea, but in an almost completely different direction. The story itself isn’t so much a story as the way a person’s thought seems to move from one idea to the next. In this sense, Girl is a piece of ‘stream of consciousness’ literature because it runs in this sense. The general idea – or what I got from it – was that it seemed like a list of things one would tell a little girl to keep her well-behaved. In fact, I identified with this a lot because I grew up playing with the neighborhood boys because there were no girls my own age in our neighborhood. So, what it meant to me was the things my parents told me as I got older and had to start ‘acting my gender’. I think that’s what Kincaid’s Girl really meant.