Jamaica Kincaid Lucy

Jamaica Kincaid Lucy by artist Manuel Palacio

There’re a few books that I can think of that had a profound impact on me. Zami by Audre Lorde,

I read it in my early thirties when I had a strong belief in the power of my manhood, although I would not admit to it. I prefer instead to retreat with my “manhood” to a humble role and blame “love” for the quivering orgasms, we were putting out—misguided, I thought that that would get us more sex, somehow it’s us, not me, clueless stuff but bare with me. Then came Audre Lorde’s amazing Zami. In Zami Audre Lorde reveals how it feels to have control and bliss without a penis or manhood’s limited definition.

At times, Audre Lorde seems like such a man’s man. I love Zami; it was a mind changer. Audre made me realized that penis and I were not that special, and we were no more than a natural substitute for other feelings. Feelings that lead young men and women in search of transference of emotion for the sense of security we call love. Nonetheless, as a substitute, the penis was lavish. Thank God! The “I love you’s,” said, and morals compromised. And I for one believed. Everyone was having a good time until the feelings ended. Then came the questions. Don’t you love me? And the blaming started. Unresolved hate makes its appearance.

My next epiphany came with Toni Morrison’s “The Blues Eyes,” I did not believe that there was such a massive level of self-hate with some black people, never. And the depth to which they will descend internalizing that hate: Pecola‘s rape by her father, the emotional abuse by her mother. The glee in which her community internalizes it all. This book blew my mind. I resided that Toni Morison is a sorceress. A good witch, mindfully aware.

Now to that list, incomes Jamaica Kincaid”s Lucy, this book is the most honest account of a woman’s story I ever read. It’s like reading the private thoughts in your girlfriend diary—the views not the actual events write-down in secret; About the circumstances leading up to that fellatio in a theatre. Or finding herself naked with her boyfriend and his boys, or bragging about seducing her best friend’s brother, son, or father. Jamaica Kincaid Lucy is that good.

Kincaid writes, While looking at her boyfriend’s hand in a fish tank, Lucy, the protagonist, and narrator recount’s a story of her neighbor, a young girl named Myrna, who had a mother that was so cruel it was like if she had a wicked stepmother. Mother is a recurring theme in these stories. More on that later. The young ladies 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 was a no show. Mr. Mathew came to tell them the story; he was pitiful, she said, it broke her heart. She fell sad. As they were walking home, Lucy realizes that Myrna was crying quite hard. Lucy tries to console her with “nonsense about there being a great wise purpose behind such things.” Then Myrna drops this bombshell. She said, “She used to meet Thomas.” (She did not call him “Mr.” now.) Under a breadfruit tree that was near her latrine, near the entrance to the alley that was at the back of her house. And she would stand in the dark, fully clothed but without her panties, and he would put his middle finger up inside her,”- Wait- that’s not the bombshell. Lucy tells the story that this is expected behavior from men; they’re not friendly people; instead, men are dogs. “Everybody knew that men have no morals, that they do not know how to behave, that they do not know how to treat other people. It was why men like laws so much; it was why they had to invent such things 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 the guide.” Myna was crying because she will no longer get the monies: dimes a shelling, sometimes just a sixpence Mr. Thomas use to give her for putting his middle finger in her. She needed that money for something she did not know yet. Nonetheless, it was not enough, and Myna was upset that there was no more. And so she cried.

I thought about how far young women will go to get away from a wicked mother. Myrna’s story made me wonder about the reasons young girls come to sex. It was not for a penis or love but to feel better, to get away from the cruelest oxymoron, mean mother. A mother whos approval you’re always seeking, even when she’s not there, living in her head, rent-free. The more you run away, the more significant is their influence in your life.

Then on page 105, Lucy said the most amazing thing: Lucy overcomes with jealousy, said. “Why had such an extraordinary thing happened to her and not me? Why had Mr. Thomas chosen Myrna as the girl he would meet in secret and place his middle finger up inside her and not me”? Lucy continues, “This would have become the experience of my life, and the one all others would have to live up to.”

Lucy goes on to talk more about how she felt about that story. Kincaid, aware of what she was sharing, goes on to make it clear. Lucy: “I could have retreated into falseness and said all the appropriate disapproving things, but I saw she was beyond condemnation.” Lucy wanted to ask, did it feel great!” -WHAT!(exclamation mine) – What a story, Kincaid made me realize they are something’s I thought I knew about young women but have no clue of the depth of their feelings. At the same time, I question the wisdom of my opinion, why, and how I define my manhood. Was I Lucy? Am I looking for a defining experience of life? What is it? Am I searching? What makes me feel great?

Lucy is constantly battling with her feelings towards her mother, teetering between love and hate. One causes the other. As Lucy tries to figure her feelings and asserts her physical and emotional independence, her mother’s love or lack of respect is the anchor or the wings that guide her decisions. She is always looking for approval from her mom, at the same time hating her mother’s judgments about her Christian morals, A mother who named her Lucy, a girl’s name for Lucifer. That her mother would find, her devil-like did not surprise Lucy. She said, “I often thought of her a god-like, and are not the children of gods devils?”

For it is a god who creates demons that turn into a god. Mother’s do the same undermining children who’ll become mothers. I’m sure there are caring mothers out there, but would she still be a mother? I guess if you believe in a god.

In my youthful days, I believed that a freaky girl was really into you. Ah, the good old days. Anything I told her to do, she would do it. Alanis: “Is she perverted like me. Would she go down on you in a theater.” I thought it was about my penis or me. We were worship. I did not realize somewhere this was about a mother or father’s unrequited love. It is not as if women did not give us clues, Carly: “You’re so vain; you probably think this song is about you.”

Lucy showed the extremes to which she will go to assert her independence, to distance herself from her mother. But no matter how far she’ll go. She was always anchored emotionally to her mother; her efforts always compared to her. Lucy’s jealousy for Myrna is a direct result of the lack of love not given to her. Lucy wants somebody some older person to want her, the way Mr. Thomas wanted Myrna. Lucy craves loved.

Jamaica Kincaid stresses this analogy more in the novel. Lucy feels the same way about her new home in America at the end of the book as she did at the beginning when she was leaving her island home. Although her body moved across the ocean, in the end, she felt the same way, alone. No matter how far we run or where we go, that first haven bounds.

Her mother’s affections 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. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid details the complicated relationship of mother love and daughter’s disappointments. True out the novel Kincaid is giving us a detailed blow by blow of where Lucy is and how it relates to her mother. And she hints at what it is that got her where she is: “OH, the injustice of everything. What words did Mr. Thomas use to make this arrangement with her, and why, again, had I not been worthy of hearing them?”

For me, this explains why a partner hates you; you remind them of a parent. The great sex we graved at the beginning no longer feels like the experience of their life. Those encounters started as a substitute for that unrequited love and attention. Know its the alternative of the hate. Now Anger is love’s reassurance. Or, as fourteen-year-old Lucy said when sucking Tanner’s tongue, her best friend brother in their home during a piano lesson, she was looking at his hands…”Taste is not the thing to seek out in a tongue; how it makes you feel- that is the thing.

Manuel Palacio

Ever wonder why you can’t stand someone, You Can’t stand to be with “them or without them.” The answers are always closer than you think. There is a good reason you don’t want to find out. Maybe you are used to the way things are, or you are now too familiar with the feelings that define’s you. Lucy gives us a big clue, but I’m sure you already knew.