Kincaid Conventions

The transition from childhood to adolescence is a difficult process with many obstacles. In Doris Lessing’s short

In the poem “The Writer” by Richard Wilbur and the short story “Saturday Climbing” by W.D. Valgardson, both of them describe children’s growth in parent’s point of view. Somehow, parents realize children always meet difficulty along with their growth, and parents sometimes are unable to help them, whereas both parents and children have to struggle for themselves.

Kincaid, Jamaica.“Girl”. In The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 541-542. Print.

Falling down while growing up has been part of everyone’s life before. It is usual that we face obstacles and sometimes we lost the battle between us and the obstacles. We often interpret mistakes as bad or as a failure, but we don’t realize that mistake or failure are what helps us learn. In the short essay named “Falling Down is Part Of Growing” by Henry Petroski, Petroski’s uses of examples from stages of our life successfully conveys the message that failure does not define who we are or what we are; instead, it is a way for us to learn, to try again and finally achieve success.

Elaine Potter Richardson, more famously known as Jamaica Kincaid, is recognized for her writings that suggest depictions of relationships between families, mainly between a mother and daughter, and her birth place, Antigua, an island located in the West Indies. She is also familiarized with Afrocentrism and feminist point of views. Kincaid’s work is filled heavily with visual imagery that produces a mental picture in readers that helps them connect stronger to the reading. An example of this really shines through in her short story piece, “Girl.” This short story describes the life of a lower class woman living in the West Indies, and also incorporates thick detailing between the relationship between her and her mother. Jamaica Kincaid structures the story as if her mother is speaking to her. She writes broad, but straight to the point, allowing readers to imagine to picture her experience. Kincaid uses visual imagery and repetition consistently throughout “Girl” to reveal the theme and tone of the story; conflictual affair between a mother and daughter.

The mother-daughter relationship is a common topic throughout many of Jamaica Kincaid's novels. It is particularly prominent in Annie John, Lucy, and Autobiography of my Mother. This essay however will explore the mother-daughter relationship in Lucy. Lucy tells the story of a young woman who escapes a West Indian island to North America to work as an au pair for Mariah and Lewis, a young couple, and their four girls. As in her other books—especially Annie John—Kincaid uses the mother-daughter relationship as a means to expose some of her underlying themes.

In Annie John the author, Jamaica Kincaid, transforms the novel from a piece of fiction to a lucid, convincing story of a young girl all can relate to. The main character Annie is depicted as fiery, free-spirit being torn apart by both ambiguous love from her mother and the constraining expectations surrounding her. Kincaid’s work addresses the wrenching, communal struggles shared by a large demographic. The novel Annie John explores the prevalent themes of the double standard of Antiguan gender roles and a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship through the life of the protagonist.

Jamaica Kincaid’s story of “Girl,” is a mind blowing experience between mother and daughter. “This Essay presents a plot summary of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” as well as providing historical, societal, religious, scientific and biographical context for the short story. Kincaid’s unusual land difficult to classify piece of short fiction consists of a brief monologue by an Antiguan mother to her adolescent daughter” (Kim Bencel, 2) This is a story, not in verse or order that will remind you of days gone by. The mother is hell- bent on making a respectful young lady.

Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy is a Bildungsroman centering on the self-invention of the title-character, who is a young immigrant woman from Antigua. As part of this process, Lucy, as a character, struggles against the various forces of her mother, her past and her even her femininity at a very personal level, thereby setting up a series of conflicts seen throughout the novel. Lucy as a text, however, adds another layer to these conflicts. By grounding these widely different conflicts in Lucy’s overarching struggle to assert her individuality by differentiating herself from the masses, the text sets up these conflicts as a struggle

The standardization of European scholarship places limitations on how the marginal subject can articulate its existence. Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” asks “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?” Davies would respond to this query by stating that current scholarship is written to and for the center. Based

“’Is it true…that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up,’” (Rhys, ) says Antoinette to her English husband. For Antoinette, the fathomable world stretches does not stretch beyond the Caribbean, for she was raised in Jamaica and, during the course of the novel, finds herself on honeymoon in Dominica. The homeland of her husband is a distant myth, and the canvas onto which she can paint her most vivid refuge. With a dead and forgotten father, a mother driven to cold insanity, and the slaves-turned-servants as her only companions, haunting memories are the islands’ prime commodity for Antoinette.

Many denounce Kincaid’s latest book as an over attack, her gaze too penetrating and intimidating. The tone of voice continuously shifts throughout the memoir, starting from sardonic, manifesting into anger, to slowly conclude in melancholy. Though particular accusations, such as when the narrator cruelly rejects “you” as “an ugly thing”, may upset the readers, Kincaid purposely provokes reactions of defensiveness and guilt to challenge us

Yet an explicit affirmation of this hatred is not necessary; the reader is quick to appreciate the irony and utter absurdity of her situation and that of Antigua. Kincaid makes us want to condemn the imperialistic attitudes which fostered this indoctrination of English values and also the supposition that this culture was somehow inherently superior to any other. By putting her readers in her own position, and by appealing to their sense of the absurd, Kincaid is very effectively able to elicit sympathy.

“The hardest part about growing up is letting go of what you were used to, and moving on with something you’re not.” Growing up can be fantastic. Growing up can also be scary. Many people do it on their own time. Others must do it quickly. Some have a nurturing family and a wonderful environment in which to do this. Others still are not as fortunate. The point is that everyone’s situation is different, unique. No matter how similar one situation may seem from another there are countless other things that affect how a child might grow up. One’s own life may seem perfect to those on the outside looking in when in reality, there could be a constant struggle that is known to few or even none. For myself, growing up was something that had to

Arianna Dagnino in her essay Transcultural Literature and Contemporary World Literature points out that “with the denationalizing wave of globalization, even national literatures are under pressure to find new arrangements of form and content to adapt to a changed cultural and social paradigm. In other words, a mutation is under way within the global acumen of letters where new notions of belonging, as well as definitions of selfhood and identity are externalized through new creative artistic and literary processes. Within this emerging social, cultural, and literary scenario, scholars feel the urge to identify new relevant literary paradigms, especially when dealing with the so-called "New Literatures in English" represented by the works of, say, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, Kamila Shamsie, Michael Ondaatje, or Joy Nozomi Kogawa” or recently through Anime with its heavy borrowing of motifs from western canonised literature and its gradual popularity as an emerging form of literary creativity.