Arts Entertainments

Jamaica Kincaid Lucy

There are some books that I can think of that had a profound impact on me. Zami by Audre Lorde, I read it when I was in my early thirties when I had strong faith in the power of my manhood, though I wouldn’t admit it. Instead, I’d rather retreat to a humble role and blame love for the shaky orgasms we were producing – wrong things, no idea, but bear with me. Then came the amazing Zami by Audre Lorde, in Zami Audre Lorde reveals what it feels like to be in control and happiness without a penis or the limited definition of manhood.

Sometimes Audre Lorde seems like such a man. I love Zami, it was a change of mind. My penis and I were not so special, we were the substitute for other feelings. Feelings that lead young men and women to seek substitutes, transfers, love. However, as substitutes, the penis was luxurious. He “I love you” he said, and morale was compromised. And I wanted to believe. Everyone is having a good time until the feeling is over. Then the questions come, the blame begins and the unsolved problems appear.

My next epiphany came with “The Blues Eyes” by Toni Morrison. I never believed there was such a high level of self-hatred with some black people. And the depth to which they will descend internalizing that hatred. Pecola’s rape by her father, emotional abuse by her mother. And the joy with which Morrison’s characters internalize it all. This book blew my mind. I came to believe that Toni Morison is a sorceress. A good witch! She is conscious.

Now adding to that list, enter Jamaica Kincaid’s book, Lucy. This novel is the most honest account of a women’s story that I have ever read. It’s like reading the private thoughts in your ex girlfriend’s diary. The thoughts. Not the written events, but the circumstances that led to the fellatio. Or the idea of ​​how you find yourself in a naked room with your boyfriend and his boys. Or, bragging to jealous friends about the time you lost your mind seducing your best friend, brother, son or father. Jamaica Kincaid Lucy is that good.

Our protagonist Lucy tells the story of Myrna while looking at her boyfriend’s hand in a fish tank. She said of Myrna’s mother, “That was so cruel that it was like she had an evil stepmother.” Mothers are a recurring theme in the Kincaid stories. More on mothers later. They were waiting for Mr. Thomas and Mr. Mathew, the fishermen who do business with their mothers.

Mr. Thomas had drowned that day, and he and his fish did not show up. Mr. Mathew came to tell you the story; It was unfortunate, she said, it broke her heart. She was saddened. As they walk home, Lucy notices that Myrna was crying quite a bit. Lucy tries to comfort her with “nonsense about there being a great purpose behind those things.” So Myrna drops this bomb. He said he used to meet Thomas (now he wasn’t calling him “sir”). They were found, under a breadfruit tree near his latrine, near the entrance to the alley at the back of his house. And she would stand in the dark, fully clothed but without her panties, and he would put his middle finger inside her. “Wait, that’s not the bomb. Lucy tells the story that this is the expected behavior of men; they are It is not pleasant, and rather men are dogs. ”Everyone knew that men have no morals, that they do not know how to behave, that they do not know how to treat other people. That is why men like laws so much; so they had to invent such things that they need a guide. When they are not sure what to do, they consult this guide. If the guide gives them advice they don’t like, they change guides. “So much so that what Lucy thinks of men it is another of those paradoxes of life about to reveal itself. Myna was crying because she wasn’t going to get the money anymore: ten cents a bombardment, sometimes just sixpence that Mr. Thomas used to give her for putting his middle finger on her. He needed that money for something he didn’t know yet. However, it was not enough and she was upset that there was no more. And so he wept.

I thought about how far young women would go to get away from an evil mother. Myrna’s story made me wonder about the reasons young girls have sex. It wasn’t because of the penis or because of love, but because of feeling better. To get away from the cruelest oxymoron, bad mother. The more you run away from them, the more influence they will have on your life.

Then on page 105, Lucy said the most surprising thing: Lucy, overcome with jealousy, said. “Why had something so extraordinary happened to her and not to me? Why had Mr. Thomas chosen Myrna as the girl he would secretly meet and placed his middle finger inside her and not me?” Lucy continues. “This would have become the experience of my life, the one that everyone else would have to live.”

Lucy continues to talk more about how she felt about that story. Kincaid is aware of what he was sharing, go on to make that clear. Lucy: “I could have retreated to falsehood and said all the appropriate disapproving things, but I saw that she was beyond conviction.” Lucy wanted to ask, it felt great! -Kind! – What a story, Kincaid made me realize that they are something I thought I knew about young women, but I have no idea. At the same time, I question the depth of my feelings, why and how I define my manhood. What am I looking for? What makes me feel good? I mean, most of it comes from some great loss, like Lucy’s.

It is true that the novel Lucy is constantly struggling with her feelings for her mother that teeter between love and hate. One causes the other. As Lucy tries to guess her feelings and asserts her physical and emotional independence, her mother’s love or lack of love is the anchor or wings that guide her decisions. She constantly seeks her mother’s approval while hating her mother’s judgments and her Christian morals. After all, this is a mother who named her Lucy, the girl’s name for Lucifer. That her mother found, her demon did not surprise Lucy. She said, “I often thought of her as divine, and aren’t they the children of demon gods?”

In my youth, I believed that a strange girl was really interested in you, whatever I told her to do she would. Like Alanis Morissette: “Is she a pervert like me? Would she stalk you in a theater?” I thought it was about my penis or me. We were worship. I didn’t realize that somewhere it was about the unrequited love of a mother or father. It’s not like women don’t give us clues, Carly Simon: “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.” But we never see our needs until those needs are revealed in someone else’s story.

Lucy showed the lengths to which she will go to assert her independence, to distance herself from her mother. But it doesn’t matter how far Lucy came. She was always emotionally anchored to her mother, her efforts always compared to hers. Lucy’s jealousy for Myrna is a direct result of the lack of love she has not given her. Lucy wants someone older to love her, like Mr. Thomas loved Myrna. Lucy longs for loved one.

Jamaica Kincaid emphasizes this analogy more in the novel. Lucy feels the same about her new home in America at the end of the novel as she does when she left her home on the island. Although her body moved across the ocean, in the end, she felt the same, alone. No matter how many times we move or where we go, we are tied to that first refuge.

Her mother’s affection changed when she gave birth to her son. Lucy was no longer the same. She was jealous of a love that belonged to her but denied her. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid details the difficult relationship of maternal love and her daughter’s disappointments. It is true that the novel Kincaid is giving us a detailed blow-by-blow of where Lucy is and how she relates to her mother. And she hints at what got her where she is: “Oh, the injustice of it all. What words did Mr. Thomas use to make this arrangement with her, and why, again, had he not been worth listening to?” “

For me, this largely explains why a partner hates you or you hate him, you remind him of a father. The amazing sex that we were pursuing in the beginning no longer feels like “the experience of a lifetime.” Those encounters began as a substitute for that unrequited love and attention. Know your substitute for hate. Now anger is the security of love. Or, as fourteen-year-old Lucy put it, when she was licking Tanner, her best friend brother’s tongue at home during a piano lesson, she was looking at his hands. “Taste is not what to look for in a language; how it makes you feel, that’s the thing.

Manuel Palacio

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