Manumission
Are We Community?
Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” and Gothataone Moeng’s “Bodies” operate as two points on a continuum. In Kincaid’s text, the girl receives instruction; in Moeng’s, a woman attempts to negotiate what those instructions promised versus what reality delivered.
“Girl” is structured around silence. The mother speaks—breathless, relentless instruction positioned as love but functioning as survival preparation. Each command represents an expectation the girl must fulfill: “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 The mother's voice becomes the voice of the community because she speaks not from personal preference but from collective knowledge about how women must behave to survive scrutiny. What presents as protection (teaching the daughter to smile correctly, to move correctly, to exist correctly) functions as control because it demands the daughter surrender individual expression for communal approval. 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 knowledge is practical, born from generations navigating impossibility; practicality becomes prison when survival strategies replace selfhood. The mother loves by preparing her daughter to be needed.
