Manumission

Are We Community?

The girl in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is born into a litany—a breathless recitation of instruction that feels less like love and more like preparation for survival. Each command she receives is a seed of expectation; each silence, a lesson in restraint. “This is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all.”¹ What begins as the shaping of manners becomes the shaping of being. The mother’s voice is the voice of community disguised as care, her teachings intended to protect her daughter from the scrutiny that greets every woman who stands out of rhythm. Yet beneath this pedagogy of protection lies something corrosive: the quiet transaction in which individuality is surrendered for belonging.

Her mother’s instructions are not cruel, only conditioned. “This is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child.”² The mother teaches survival as inheritance. She is not the oppressor but the messenger, carrying the code of endurance passed down through generations. Her daughter’s silence, then, is not rebellion but reception. In this exchange, affection becomes indistinguishable from control. “You mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?”³ The daughter’s body is spoken for before she can speak of it. To be seen as good is to be untouched; to be untouched is to belong. The paradox of community begins here. The girl’s silence is not submission. It is an early form of inferiority.

Years later, she returns in another story, another body. In Gothataone Moeng’s “Bodies,” she has a name, perhaps even a face, but the residue of her training remains. “Despite my mother’s warnings in my teens, despite her speaking of the city as though it were a live, snarling thing lying in wait for girls like me, I boarded the bus from Serowe as soon as I wrote my Cambridge exams.”⁴ The woman narrating “Bodies” inherits the same defiance that pulsed silently in Kincaid’s “Girl”. The instructions that once confined her now propel her forward. The mother’s warnings have become prophecy, but the daughter no longer resists the devouring world—she enters it, determined to reshape it through experience.

In the city, belonging takes on a new architecture: