On the story that
exemplifies the creation of a thoroughly engaging voice.
Even if her
fiction were only good, Jamaica Kincaid’s
late 20th and 21st century life story—an Antiguan immigrant
who began
her American experiences as a New York City au pair, briefly attended but
dropped out of college, and then forged her own hugely successful and ongoing path
as a journalist, novelist, and creative
writing and literature professor—would merit our attention. But Kincaid’s
fiction is way more than good, combining passion and humor with razor-sharp
precision, communal
and cultural stories and frames with deeply personal
and intimate ones. Exemplifying all those elements is the first story in
her first published collection (1983’s At
the Bottom of the River), the super short “Girl.”
Again, check it out, and come back and share your thoughts if you would!
Welcome back! If
you didn’t laugh at least once while reading “Girl”—well, all responses are
welcome here, so feel free to tell me why, if that’s the case. But I bet you
did—Kincaid’s creation of her narrator/speaker is rich with telling and wry
humor, while at the same time capturing so many themes—multi-generational
family relationships, gender identities and roles, sex and sexuality, culture
and place, social customs and codes, and more—pitch-perfectly. But I think
perhaps her greatest feat has to do with reader-response: I taught the story
for the first time to a class of undergrads
at Temple University, and they sympathized almost entirely with the story’s
youthful title character and addressee; and then I taught it recently to an ALFA
class of adult learners here at FSU, and they mostly connected with the
speaker’s perspective. And I think Kincaid’s story not only allows for those
distinct responses, it includes and captures them within the space of its one rambling,
run-on, remarkable sentence.
So what do you
think? This paragraph for rent!
Final short short
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this story, or others you’d share?
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