Class: Degree 3rd yearSem: Degree 5th SemSubject: English
State: TelanganaUniversity: OU
Year - 2023 SyllabusTopic: 'Girl' Poem by Jamaica Kincaid
State: Telangana
About the Author:-
Jamaica Kincaid was born on 25th May 1949 in St. John's, Antigua. She is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. Jamaica Kincaid is a Caribbean–American writer of fiction and non-fiction and even achieved many awards. The present Poem Girl is taken from Kincaid’s first story “At the Bottom of the River”. The poem 'Girl' is about the instructions, bits of advice, and warnings by a mother to her teenage daughter.
Girl Poem Summary:-
In this poem, the mother gives instructions to her daughter about the household work. The mother gets the daughter to learn the housework.
She even instructs her daughter how to do a few household works like sewing, laundry, ironing, cooking, sweeping or broom the house, and washing utensils, and the mother even tells her daughter about a few more things that will be necessary for her in future like how to catch a fish and how to prepare herbal medicines. These words of the mother say that they are not from the city or an urban area. Because in a city, no one catches a fish or prefers herbal medicines and by this, we can say that they are from a rural village so her mother is explaining to her daughter about all the essential household work.
Along with all these instructions her mother even teaches her daughter how to lead a pleasant and peaceful life. She even talks about her daughter’s relationship with a man someday and warns her that sometimes men and women bully each other and tell her how to treat them or how to behave with them in such situations. She even says that there will be many relationships and many won’t work out. The mother explains to her daughter how to lead a good life without any relationship problems and how to behave with people. Especially, with the people whom she doesn’t like at all.
The mother advises or instructs her daughter with fear in a very arrogant way. Because her daughter was already on the path of becoming a “Slut.” Here, Slut means, a girl having a relationship or any other affairs with different men. As they are from a very rural area or a village kind of place, their children won't play games like football, basketball, etc., Village children play games like marbles, climbing trees, rolling the tire with a stick, and few more games.
Here the mother instructs her daughter not to squat or bend over like boys while playing marbles or any other games. Because she’s not a boy and even tells her how a girl should behave while playing and how a girl should walk around like a lady in society.
As they are from the West Indies all the people from that country follow Christianity. All the Christian organizations or denominations conduct a few programs for children in their respective churches like Vocational Bible Schools during holidays. Christian organizations conduct these all for the students. So here, the mother instructs her daughter not to sing any Antiguan folk songs during Sunday school or any programs conducted by their church organization.
So after all of these instructions, the daughter interrupts her mother by giving some or the other back answers in order to justify herself. In the whole poem, the daughter only speaks up twice during her mother’s instructions.
Then the mother concludes her instructions by saying to her, that she’s not in a stage to check on herself like her behavior or the way she leads her life. After all these instructions, warnings, and bits of advice, the mother wants her daughter to know how to lead a pleasant and peaceful life without any problems in her whole life. The mother told the daughter to lead her life in a dignified way without any collisions.
From this lesson, after reading the Girl poem written by Jamaica Kincaid, the mother instructs and warns her daughter. These words are not only applicable to her daughter but to each and every girl in the society. The words that the mother spoke will be very helpful to each and every girl in society to have a Blissful life and that's why the lesson was titled “Girl”.
