Reading Mindfully: Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”

Reading Mindfully: Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”

Each month, we offer you a chance to read mindfully, using literature to think about your perceptions and reactions to the world in which we live and work. Through these short texts and accompanying questions, we hope to give you a small taste of Books@Work. Please grab a friend or colleague to read, share and discuss – and send us your thoughts.

Born in 1949 in St. John’s, Antigua, Jamaica Kincaid is an award-winning author, essayist and former featured columnist for the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” Her deft and observant prose draws heavily upon her childhood in Antigua and her experience as a woman of color.

Her short story “Girl” appeared in the New Yorker in 1978 and later went on to become one of the most anthologized short stories of all time. Brief and powerful, “Girl” reads as a “how-to” list for living relayed from mother to daughter in a mere 650 words.

As you read “Girl,” consider these questions:

  • In life, how do you decide what advice to follow and what advice to ignore?
  • Do the expectations of parents or family members help or hinder you? Or both?
  • How would the story be different if it were advice from a father to a son? Do you think girls and boys experience the transition from childhood to adulthood differently?

Girl

By Jamaica Kincaid

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 bare-head 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.

Continue reading “Girl” in The New Yorker.

Image: Friedel Dzubas, Antigua, 1971, [Fair Use] via WikiArt.org

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Maredith Sheridan

Maredith Sheridan

Maredith Sheridan is a Development Communications Associate at the Cleveland Orchestra and a part-time member of the Books@Work team. She continues to write posts for our blog.