Lucy

"I must have read Kincaid’s short story “Girl” when I was in college. Soon after, I read Lucy . After I finished writing How To Love a Jamaican , I started asking myself who, or what, my influences had been, and Lucy was at the top of that list. “When a person takes up so much space it’s almost inevitable that there will be conflict” Like Jamaica Kincaid, I am really interested in mother-daughter relationships. It’s my experience that Caribbean mothers and their daughters can have really intense relationships. I believe that one of reasons for this is because our households are so female-centric, which causes mothers and other maternal figures to take up a lot of space. Even though I was until the age of 12 raised with a father, when I think of my childhood, I see my mother. She was the centre of our home. If something had to be done, she would do it. Obviously, there’s a lot of beauty in mother-daughter relationships, but when a person takes up so much space it’s almost inevitable that there will be conflict. The protagonist Lucy moves from a small island to the US and becomes an au pair for a white family. Throughout the book she evolves as a person, especially as a sexual person. A lot of Lucy’s self-interrogation revolves around her relationship with her mother. Lucy’s crisis is that her mother had three sons who were born after Lucy. It soon became evident to Lucy that her mother and father had high expectations for their male offspring. There’s this really moving line, which I’m going to misquote, where Lucy explains that she could understand why her father wouldn’t think highly of her because she’s female, but she could never forgive her mother for thinking that same way. For a long time, Lucy saw herself as identical to her mother, so the process of the novel is one of moving away from that, developing a sense of self beyond what was exemplified by her mother. It represents her past and that difficult relationship with her mother. It is, literally, the motherland. One of the things I really appreciate about this novel is that while other books like this, about immigration, tend to want to make really tight comparisons between the place that the protagonist has left and the place that he or she has come to, Lucy doesn’t do that. The narrator isn’t as interested in that comparison—to my mind, it’s a story about a person who is evolving personally, as an individual, and place is of course a part of that, but it’s much more subtle than is often the case. Where she lives feels a little disengaged, somehow, from the way she is evolving as a young person. It’s more about distance—distance from familial and societal expectations. Yes, that’s true. For example, where she’s from is a small place where traditional gender roles are the social norm, so as a young woman wanting to explore her sexuality, the US offers her more possibilities in that sense. But throughout the book, there aren’t these overt comparisons between where she’s from and where she’s currently living—there isn’t a better-than and less-than narrative wherein the two countries are held in opposition to each other. The differences are processed more organically in the experiences and relationships she has, with people back home or with people in the US. That’s a great moment—it reveals so much. When I read it, it felt really true to my own experience of growing up in Jamaica, surrounded by all of these American and British references that were held in high regard but didn’t feel true to my experiences. When I was a child, I was discouraged from speaking patois, which was considered low class. I was to speak the “Queen’s English,” not the patois my parents spoke. As a child, this confused me. There’s something really raw about Lucy. She is constantly looking to do the thing that her culture says that she shouldn’t do or shouldn’t want—it’s like she’s defining herself by way of opposition. She’s always thinking about what she wants in relation to what her mother wants for her—and so her sexual experiences are about attending to her body, as her artistic coming of age is attending to her spirit."