Girl By Jamaica Kincaid

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Useful Advice for a Daughter or No? You Decide.
“Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid is a poem with a universal theme that speaks to the relationships between mothers and daughters. This poem reflects the author’s own childhood and the culture in which she was raised. The mother imparts advice and wisdom to her young daughter about growing up and becoming a woman. Although, the advice the mother gives to her daughter could be applicable, some may perceive it to be very generalized and judgemental. In the poem “Girl” Kincaid writes about a mother giving life advice to her daughter throughout the whole poem; a poem of which relates to Kincaid’s life. “The way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me”( SUNY PRESS). “Girl” starts off when the mother tells her daughter how to wash the clothes and according to the clothes colors; which is pretty useful to know when growing up.
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However, that is just one piece of useful advice that the mother gives her daughter in the poem. The mother is passing down the wisdom of women before her and is teaching her daughter was she believes is useful in life.
Which is what every mother wants to teach their daughter or daughters. Some of the key advice the mother tells her daughter is useful, to help her succeed later in life. The first piece of advice the mother gives her daughter is on how to accomplish the chores she has to finish. For example, ironing her dad’s khaki pants and learning how to catch a fish and knowing if the fish is worth keeping. The next very strong piece of advice the mother gives to her daughter is when she says “This is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child”(Kincaid, 321). This quote talks about how the daughter reached the age where she can actually have a child of her own, so the best thing to do is know how to make a medicine so that you do not have to deal with a child at a young age. Another piece of wisdom that one may believe is strong, is the traditions of the folklore and how they are strongly represented in the poem. The mother mentions to her daughter “don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all”(Kincaid, 321). This quote shows the spirituality of this culture. It suggests that you do not know if you are throwing a stone at a bird or a spirit. If it happens to be a spirit , that you hit with the stone, you may be haunted and have bad luck. The mother’s last piece of advice is to teach her daughter the different types of smiles and their meanings behind them.The mother exclaims that “this is how you smile to someone you don’t like very much…”(Kincaid, 320-321). The mother is explaining to her daughter how to read people and send messages with just a broken smile. Even to the people who you do not like that much. The mother is also showing that it is all about reading body language when talking to someone. Despite the fact that I’am not a mother, I truly believe that mothers would want to teach the same advice to their daughters like how the mother in the poem did to her daughter. Although some of the advice the mother gives is useful towards her daughter, they are also a few pieces of advice that the mother should not teach. In the poem the word “slut” is repeated in a couple of the stanzas. For example, “on Sundays try to walk like a day and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming…”(Kincaid, 320). Why would a mother ever consider calling her daughter which is in her teens a slut? The mother could have just said “Sunday try to walk like a lady” is it that hard? Could it be that if the mother scolds her daughter by saying slut, that the daughter will follow rules and move away from being a slut? However, what if the daughter gets so furiated from her mother that she disobeys her mother’s advice and

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