This poem by Ms. Kincaid was published for the first time in a 1978 issue of The New Yorker. It is a very short story that does not take much to read. In reality, it just takes a few minutes to get through it, but you will be amazed by the richness of contents that Ms. Kinkaid included with it.
It is an intriguing 650 words, one sentence dialogue, written in a list form, a to-do-list form, where the mother tells her daughter what to do and not to do according with the society rules at the time and the customs and traditions of the region where they lived. It is a list recited in only one sentence, and everybody can tell, in just on breath, where the girl only appears two times during the whole time, where she looks like she is defending or explaining herself from things or manners her mother tells her not to do in certain circumstances.
I can relate the text in certain way to the life of the author herself. She left the Antigua, the country she was born very early in life, on her adolescence, to go and try to strive in the United States, a larger and more developed country, where she was sent to work, starting as a house …show more content…
Kinkaid set the pace, in a way that made me “glued” to the text until it was done read. I had to read it two more times to start to figure out what she was possibly trying to symbolize. My idea of the poem was that she probably got advices from her mother when she left Antigua, but sure it was not at this pace and in the last minute before boarding to leave. She got a to-do-list in how to behave and what to do and not to do in order to be accepted in the new society, sure her mother gave instructions to survive in the new country, but I also can see that she wrote instructions she was supposed to have received before. She probably encountered so many problems by living in New York, that she wished her mother have told her or advised her in advance. It would probably have made her life a little easier at the
It is an intriguing 650 words, one sentence dialogue, written in a list form, a to-do-list form, where the mother tells her daughter what to do and not to do according with the society rules at the time and the customs and traditions of the region where they lived. It is a list recited in only one sentence, and everybody can tell, in just on breath, where the girl only appears two times during the whole time, where she looks like she is defending or explaining herself from things or manners her mother tells her not to do in certain circumstances.
I can relate the text in certain way to the life of the author herself. She left the Antigua, the country she was born very early in life, on her adolescence, to go and try to strive in the United States, a larger and more developed country, where she was sent to work, starting as a house …show more content…
Kinkaid set the pace, in a way that made me “glued” to the text until it was done read. I had to read it two more times to start to figure out what she was possibly trying to symbolize. My idea of the poem was that she probably got advices from her mother when she left Antigua, but sure it was not at this pace and in the last minute before boarding to leave. She got a to-do-list in how to behave and what to do and not to do in order to be accepted in the new society, sure her mother gave instructions to survive in the new country, but I also can see that she wrote instructions she was supposed to have received before. She probably encountered so many problems by living in New York, that she wished her mother have told her or advised her in advance. It would probably have made her life a little easier at the