You've Got to Read This (63 page)

return at once to the first sentence and begin to read it aloud, so that I can experience the story on my tongue and in the resonant cavities of my body. I find that it is best to stand up when you read this story aloud, and to take a breath from the deepest region of your belly. When your lungs are full, when your shoulders are back, you begin to speak the story, and then you find that you are singing.

G i r l

Jamaica Kincaid

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn't have gum on it, because that way it won't hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don't sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn't speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don't eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you;
but I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and
never in Sunday school;
this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father's khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a crease; this is how you iron your father's khaki pants so that they don't have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this how you smile to someone you don't like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don't squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don't pick people's flowers—you might catch something; don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; 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
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JAMAICA KINCAID • 347

child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn't fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it's fresh,
but what if the baker
won't let me feel the bread?;
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?

The Smallest W o m a n

i n t h e W o r l d

by Clarice Lispector

Introduced by Julia Alvarez

349

STORIES THAT HOLD ME SPELLBOUND REMIND ME OF THE TALE THE

Ancient Mariner has to tell. He finds just the person whom he knows has to hear his story, and then he holds his listener with the glittering eye of his narrative. The listener might resist at first, but when the tale is told, he feels the deep
ah yes
of having heard just the thing he needed to hear.

There are stories I admire, ones I adore, ones I wish I had written. But the story that holds me spellbound is the one I feel was written because someone like me had to read it.

I first read Clarice Lispector's story "The Smallest Woman in the World"

about sixteen-seventeen years ago, before the great push in anthologies, colleges, curriculum to include "minority voices." I had been trained back in those days when you read only
the
great books—Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer—and you went to anthropology, or in my case home to the Island, to learn about
the other.
Literature, for me, was definitely the colony of the powerful, and I was fully identified with them. When I read
The Tempest,
I too held Caliban at arm's length, never giving a thought to what his rights were to the island Prospero had conquered. When I heard the lover's plaint in the Sonnets about his dark lady's looks, I understood how a fair one would have made him feel better. In other words, I looked at
the other
with a cold, dominant Yeatsian eye, though my own personal experience, of course, negated my literary one. All the women authors I did finally read, and all the "minority" women authors that saved my work and psyche from total divorce from my own roots and culture and b;eing, I read long after graduate school, on my own.

When I picked up the Lispector story, I was just beginning this process of reading on my own. The Ancient Mariner story is obviously compelling because the listener is ripe for the telling. Encountering that first paragraph I was all set, with my training, for Joseph Conrad and the trek into deepest Africa to encounter horror, the horror. "Imagine my surprise" when I came upon the seventeen and three-quarter inch, full-grown, black, silent, and very pregnant smallest woman in the world! I burst out laughing.

It was a heady, gleeful, refreshing laughter—aimed at myself mostly.

How could I have missed her in all my reading? The answer came almost at once: of course, she is
so
small—and silent and black and pregnant—that I and, it seemed, most of western tradition had overlooked her.

It is hard to know who she really is. We are first introduced to her through the point of view of the explorer. Instantly upon meeting her, he names her, giving her a ridiculous, prettifying name, reminiscent of her obvious opposite, Saint Teresa, the Little Flower. But the explorer himself is being transformed by the encounter: as he studies her before naming her, he
INTRODUCTION BY JULIA ALVAREZ « 351

feels "a delicacy of feeling" of which his wife would never have thought him capable. To this sweet, deeply moving biblical moment of Adam naming in the garden, the newly baptized Little Flower responds by scratching her crotch. The explorer looks away, embarrassed, I suppose.

The story, too, looks away for a long while; instead of staying in Africa, we head back for "civilization." (Part of the transforming effect of this story is that the reader starts saying all these words with a sense of irony.) Now we hear reaction after reaction to Little Flower—all having more to do with the readers of the Sunday Papers than they do with the oblivious little woman still, we assume, in deepest Africa, scratching where it itches.

I do wonder why almost all of the responders are women—except for one little boy and an absent, uneasy father, coughing behind his paper. Is it because, as the wife of the uneasy father accuses, "You're the insensitive one"? We women are the responders. It's the next best thing if we can't go on the adventures. After all, the world might not be our apple, but it can be our Rorschach, goddammit! Then, too, Little Flower is pregnant, a condition that binds her to other females. But this sense of resemblance makes the women uneasy. One woman at her mirror rolling her hair draws away from this black, crude face, placing a distance of "insuperable millenniums"

between the creature and herself. "It isn't human," another mother reminds her daughter. I can understand their reluctance—they are fully identified with their dominant status as the refined and beautiful wives and daughters of the powerful.

By moving away from Little Flower into the drawing room, the story charts a common impulse: always we want to come back to what we know.

To bring back the strange into the cozy safety of our living room and
respond.
To theorize and coopt it with our love and misinformed understanding, p.c.-ing her to death. And at the same time to distance ourselves from it—to respond to it but not identify with it.

The story has wandered far from the original creature herself—just as I had in my own training when I first came upon the story. As I said, it is difficult to encounter the unadulterated rare thing herself and not interpose our selves, our faces, our prejudices upon it. But finally the narrator returns us to the source. Now, we will get "the secret of her own secret": what we've wanted to know all along, Who is Little Flower? What does she mean? In other words, the story raises in the reader the same curiosity about Little Flower as symbol that the explorer and his civilized ladies felt toward the little figure herself.

But wait, Little Flower is laughing! At us? No, not really. For if she were laughing at us, we would be speaking the same language. Unlike the sad women we met in the drawing rooms who have learned—or are beginning to intuit—the wisdom that "sorrow is endless," Little Flower posits joy with her laughter. She is still close to her irreducible being, and she is joyous because she has not been eaten, and she is in love with the explorer because she likes his boots and his shiny ring. She responds to these feel-352 • THE SMALLEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD

ings in a frankly sexual way. Little Flower is free of the cruel refinements of these feelings that must be making the other women in their little golden cages so unhappy.

Or so we understand from our author, who must be intuiting what Little Flower is feeling, for the smallest woman doesn't speak. She does finally say one word, one quoted word in the whole story, "Yes." All we hear of her is her wonderful laughter, which serves, at least for me, the same function as the Ancient Mariner's glittering eye. That laughter holds me and echoes in my head long after the story is over. And then, I realize—and I remember the shock of that first reading—that the laughter was coming from deep inside me.

Yes!

What I suddenly understood that first time I read the story—and my laughter each time I reread the story confirms it—was that I was Little Flower.
Yes.
I am really—in the hiddenmost parts of the deepest Africa in me—the smallest woman in the world. I've learned English perfectly without an accent. Due to vitamins and good nutrition, I have grown to a sizable small size and weight. I know how to throw this small weight and American voice around. I have the degrees, the training on how to respond to literature, I have a car, a house, a closet full of pretty clothes, because it is good to own, good to own.

But it's not just me who is Little Flower. Everyone who reads the story knows he or she is Little Flower, and he or she is also the overlay of responses and note-taking that keeps the little being invisible and minuscule inside us: our little pregnancy, the first atom of our being, the creature who has not been eaten. But cruel refinements interfere. And we forget the visceral first and truest response of our being to the world Sometimes I know I forget who I am under the overlay of Sunday papers, of work, of clothes, of the feminine, of the American girl, of netted hats, of words, words, words.

But this little story always reminds me and that is why it holds me, spellbound.

T h e Smallest W o m a n in the W o r l d

Clarice Lispector

Translated by Elizabeth Bishop

In the depths of Equatorial Africa the French explorer, Marcel Pretre, hunter and man of the world, came across a tribe of surprisingly small pygmies. Therefore he was even more surprised when he was informed that a still smaller people existed, beyond forests and distances. So he plunged farther on.

In the Eastern Congo, near Lake Kivu, he really did discover the smallest pygmies in the world. And—like a box within a box within a box—obedient, perhaps, to the necessity nature sometimes feels of outdoing herself—

among the smallest pygmies in the world there was the smallest of the smallest pygmies in the world.

Among mosquitoes and lukewarm trees, among leaves of the most rich and lazy green, Marcel Pretre found himself facing a woman seventeen and three-quarter inches high, full-grown, black, silent—"Black as a monkey," he informed the press—who lived in a treetop with her little spouse. In the tepid miasma of the jungle, that swells the fruits so early and gives them an almost intolerable sweetness, she was pregnant.

So there she stood, the smallest woman in the world. For an instant, in the buzzing heat, it seemed as if the Frenchman had unexpectedly reached his final destination. Probably only because he was not insane, his soul neither wavered nor broke its bounds. Feeling an immediate necessity for order and for giving names to what exists, he called her Little Flower. And in order to be able to classify her among the recognizable realities, he immediately began to collect facts about her.

Her race will soon be exterminated. Few examples are left of this species, which, if it were not for the sly dangers of Africa, might have multiplied. Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, and ranging beasts, the great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes, a threat that surrounds them in the silent air, like the dawn of battle.

The Bahundes hunt them with nets, like monkeys. And eat them. Like that: they catch them in nets and
eat
them. The tiny race, retreating, always retreating, has finished hiding away in the heart of Africa, where the lucky explorer discovered it. For strategic defense, they live in the highest trees.