Performance and the Gendered Body in Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" and Oonya Kempadoo's Buxton Spice

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story "Girl," the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of "woman" in postcolonial Caribbean contexts. The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender. "Girl"'s emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies. Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Headnote

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story "Girl," the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of "woman" in postcolonial Caribbean contexts. The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender. "Girl"'s emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies. Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them.

Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story "Girl," the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of "woman" in postcolonial Caribbean contexts.1 The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender.2 "Girl" 's emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. This landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's discourse on the centrality of stylized acts in creating and crafting gendered selves.3

Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies.4 Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them.

Performing Womanhood, Preserving the Self: "Girl"

As noted earlier, the list of instructions that comprise "Girl" is very much an induction into the community of women and an orientation into the performance of womanhood. The instructions relate mainly to domestic chores, but also include directions for social relations and moral conduct; they include how to: "wash white clothes," "plant dasheen," "throw away a child," and "bully a man." Readers of "Girl" often observe a fictional representation of the double-edged tendencies of child-rearing practices in many Caribbean societies: as the adult speaker provides guidelines for living, the moments of care are repeatedly undercut by the severity evident in what the speaker actually says and by the fact that the child is lectured with little room for discussion. Consequently, "Girl" is usually justly read as typical of Caribbean women writers' rejection of what Catherine John refers to as "culturally Eurogendered paradigms of womanhood" (John 2003, 56). Critics tend to read "Girl" as a critique of child-rearing practices that re-inscribe (mostly) colonially derived models of womanhood. Therefore readings of "Girl" often call attention to women's complicity with the imperatives of an ideologically patriarchal society. As Giovanna Covi writes, "The law of gender hierarchy is proclaimed and imposed by the mother [in "Girl"], whose first encounter with normative power is represented by her mother" (Covi 2003, 69).5 Covi's observation represents readers' preoccupation with "Girl's" glaring endorsement of a patriarchal power structure.

Undoubtedly, the speaker in "Girl" locates herself within this larger patriarchal structure with the presentation of a list of clearly defined roles and markers of respectability based on the standards of the dominant culture. The long list of instructions about how to effectively perform the roles assigned to women in Caribbean societies is indicative of the centrality of certain stylized acts in domestic, social, and other spheres. The story's primary refrain, "this is how," shows a clear emphasis on particular ways of being that depend on defined ways of acting, and calls attention to the entrenched nature of the performative acts that allows the young female to cement her place in the community of respectable women. As has been well documented by several critics of Kincaid's work, this emphasis on "correct," expected performative acts points to the speaker's acceptance of the place prescribed for women.6 Instructions such as "On Sundays walk like a lady and not like the slut you are bent on becoming" and "This is how you behave in the presence of men you don't know" are unequivocal indicators of the speaker's understanding and acceptance of the society's ostensible expectations of women. By instructing the young female to follow the script, the speaker emphasizes the view that females' survival depends on performing their gender "appropriately" in societies in which their adherence to these standards is constantly scrutinized and evaluated.

Kincaid therefore presents "Girl's" setting (most likely a Caribbean island) as a stage where females perform and where their bodies are constantly under scrutiny by an audience always fully aware of how the body is to be shaped and the behaviors that women are supposed to display in order to reinforce dominant gender ideologies. Hence the speaker's long list of instructions (or stage directions) reiterates the marking of the female body as a storehouse of performative acts from which she should always retrieve those acts of decency and the domestic roles that will render her acceptable and earn her applause from attentive audiences.

The emphasis on domestic performance alludes to race and class as sub-textual issues in "Girl." Given the emphasis on domestic competence it is reasonable to assume that the female subject in "Girl" is black and working-class. The pressure to do their gendered household chores creditably is often an added burden on black working-class women, a direct vestige of colonial societies in which black women bore the brunt of field and domestic labor. In "Girl" the young female is told how to "wash white clothes," "make bread pudding," . . . and "grow dasheen [and] okra" (Kincaid 1983, 5). This mix of domestic and farming skills alludes to house and field labor that has historically characterized the lives of black and East Indian working-class females. The performances the young female enacts in order to craft a specific gendered self are also meant to reinforce historical race and class experiences, and therefore these acts serve the additional role of enforcing gender, race, and class positions.

However, to read "Girl" as a story that simply shows older females' role in inducting younger females into the community of women, and one that only exposes females' complicity in the larger colonial patriarchal structure, is to miss a significant component of this text: its contribution to the diverse and ongoing discourse on gender ideologies, and more importantly, its presentation of the transgressive potential of performance. Indeed, many of the social and moral guidelines that the adult speaker offers draw attention to the possibility of separating the self from the performances that females are expected to embody and, often out of necessity, to stage in their daily lives. In other words the strictures about how to carry and use the body imply that gender is, as Judith Butler suggests, "tenuously constituted" (Butler 1988, 270).

"The slut you're bent on becoming" and variations of this expression recur throughout the text and might be one of the seemingly obvious lines that suggests the speaker's complicity with the system and illustrates her efforts to shape a woman who performs the script of chastity appropriately. Justifiably, this phrase has attracted significant critical attention. Covi, for example, refers to this line as "the final condemnation of the girl" (Covi 2003, 69). Yet, when read in relation to other lines, such as "so they won't recognize immediately the slut I've warned you against becoming" (Kincaid 1983, 4; emphasis mine), this refrain offers other interpretive possibilities. This line, which arguably carries the full weight of the burden of Caribbean womanhood, supports the suggestion that the speaker is perhaps more concerned with the appearance of a (proper) woman than she is about whether or not the girl is, in actuality, a "slut." In other words, the speaker stresses the public performance of a particular virtuous gendered self as a survival strategy on this stage, as she implies that there is a possibility for the existence of an offstage self.

The idea that the performances that the speaker details are supposed to protect the female's public persona and possibly allow her space to be another person in private life is further supported by other instructions that link the girl to an almost secret female society. Near the end of the piece, the speaker says the following: "This is how to make medicine to throw away a child before it becomes a child." Like many others in "Girl," this command is cryptic; there is no elaboration, but we can speculate that the speaker is helping the girl to avoid the crippling effects that an unplanned pregnancy may have on her future. Younger, unmarried women are usually those who seek abortions more frequently, and so this instruction about "how to throw away a child" may be tacit permission to be other than "chaste" in her private life. This statement might therefore be the speaker's way of protecting the girl from social stigma and shows the speaker trying to ensure that a bad reputation does not prevent her from finding a husband, the ultimate crown of respectability. At the same time, there is a suggestion of some freedom to live outside of the agreed-upon boundaries. Thus, this piece of instruction indicates that the speaker's preoccupation with sexuality suggested in "the slut you are bent on becoming" does not necessarily mean the speaker is expecting the girl to make choices about sex based on the standards the society has set up for women; instead, the emphasis seems to be more on how to destroy the evidence, so she can offer a convincing performance of chastity, while making choices about sexual activity that are really hers, and not necessarily those stipulated by her community, with no evidence that she acts otherwise. So when she "walk[s] like a lady" or displays ladylike behavior, with no evidence to the contrary, her attentive audience will believe that she is a lady.

The integral relationship between the public display of an acceptable self and mostly colonially derived ideas of womanhood, which many readers have addressed, are emphasized in statements such as "This is how you walk like a lady," "Don't sing Benna," "Don't squat and play marbles you're not a boy you know," and other social performances. These instructions offer clear suggestions that the speaker not only understands what constitutes "ladylike" behavior in this society; she also ensures the young female's understanding of its importance in her public life, and perhaps ensures her chances of achieving other ends that the community deems important. But again, more than a pure sanctioning of a system, these examples underscore the idea that an important subtext (if not text) in "Girl" is how to perform and protect oneself from discrimination when she is under the proverbial watchful eye of this patriarchal community. Other lines, such as "This is how you smile to someone you like" and "This is how you smile to someone you don't like," further undermine the idea that the speaker in "Girl" exclusively embraces the patriarchal system that she ostensibly upholds. The fake smile is a convincing example of the speaker's understanding of the need for females to live under guise. This example underscores my more general argument that the speaker not only instructs the child about how she should be, but also-and perhaps more so-how she should appear.

Although they cite deference to patriarchy as the speaker's primary aim, most critics still acknowledge her protective impulse. Moira Ferguson, for example, refers to Rhonda Cobham's reference to the "protective devices used over the years by West Indian women to ensure their children's survival" (Ferguson 1994, 175).7 Readings such as Ferguson's gesture toward recognition of the possibility of the speaker's tacit acknowledgment that females' survival depends in part on the performances of multiple selves. However, attention to performance moves analysis to a more transgressive place than Ferguson's insight suggests. What the speaker offers is more than advice for protection; she teaches the girl how to control her body and manage the presentation of herself in different contexts. Therefore, I have emphasized the importance of acting, and I suggest that, in the way the speaker presents them, these approved behaviors constitute only one dimension of the female. The speaker also gives her young charge space and permission to have some control over her body. It is the same body, then, that is the site of such anxiety about sexuality, domesticity, and socially appropriate behavior that the girl is able to manipulate to ensure that the community sees what it desires. The child is therefore taught that the same body gives her the capacity to be another person when she is offstage. Although private and public spaces and selves are often intertwined, the possibilities of having an offstage self still exist in instances such as secret relationships with males, and in private domestic spaces where women and sometimes men relinquish the standards set by the dominant culture. But perhaps most importantly, this space is the self she is able to hold in her consciousness-the place where agency is developed and honed.

One Body, Any Gender: Buxton Spice

Buxton Spice, a coming-of-age story, centers primarily on the experiences of four girls during one of their summer vacations. Through the girls' interactions with one another, as well as with peers and adults, readers get access to their community, particularly to how gender is constructed and functions. As they converse, play with one another, and offer their opinions about life in their community, these girls realize and expose the tenuousness of local and transnational gender constructs. Given its overt interrogation of gender performance and expectation, placing Buxton Spice in conversation with "Girl" provides another layer on the multiple ways in which Caribbean women writers address and reconfigure gender constructs. Undoubtedly, the speaker in "Girl" inducts the young woman into the performance culture that should guarantee her survival through an adherence to the guidelines of a designated script. I have also noted some of the speaker's guidelines that suggest that the female child can act outside the boundaries of this script. The young female characters in Buxton Spice openly challenge that script by exposing it as precisely that-a guide to performance that the actors can interpret in diverse ways, and further as "codes," as Patricia Mohammed names them (Mohammed 1998), that either sexed body can interpret and enact. Although the pubescent females in Buxton Spice appear to be fully aware of a script that requires them to shape their bodies in specific, gendered ways, they appear equally aware of the malleability of this script. Although I am not suggesting that there is a teleological movement in the way Caribbean women writers challenge gender ideologies, Oonya Kempadoo's bold and specific attention to girls' experimentation with their bodies and sexuality indicates a shift toward a more liberal, openly transgressive challenge to the gender script. Kempadoo presents gender outside of what Forbes refers to as "the deadlock of oppositional masculinist/feminist discourse" (Forbes 2005, 3) and embraces the fluidity that tends to characterize gender performances in the lived experience.8

The young females in Buxton Spice play in ways not uncommon among children. In one of their main games the pubescent females recreate male-female interactions and gendered behaviors in the domestic space. It is significant that these young females are on the threshold of puberty-a time when they come to an understanding of societal expectations for gender roles. Therefore their deliberate slippage in and out of gendered selves represents the challenge to authority that is the larger thematic thrust of the novel: "Today Rachel is wife and I am husband, Sammy is wife and Judy husband. Sometimes we all just girls, with towels over our head for long hippie hair" (Kempadoo 1999, 85). The inclusion of "today" implies that there are other days and illustrates the girls' deliberate manipulation of gender roles. That statement and "Sometimes we all just girls" also suggest gender variability and instability. Being a girl is presented as a role one assumes, retrieves, and embodies, and not a body or fixed identity.

Kempadoo's presentation of the young females at play engages a number of the issues around gender that Kincaid troubles in "Girl." One of these is the idea that there is always the looming presence of a community script. Whereas Kincaid's girl gets her script from the speaker who presents a gendered, local, community value system, Kempadoo's girls respond to wider cross-cultural scripts that, like Kincaid's script, present the agreedupon performances that define "woman":

When I was wife I took pride in my housework . . . got down on my knees and buffed the whole floor of the houseroom. I put away the kitchen neatly, made the beds without crease, always aware of my towel hair swinging . . . the Gary Cooper films was boring. They didn't even do anything, and then all of a sudden their house'd be spotless and dinner ready to serve. (Kempadoo 1999, 86)

The awareness of what a woman should do with her body, and what that body should look like in the domestic space, is part of what the young females in Buxton Spice share with the young female in "Girl." But the speaker in this passage from Kempadoo's novel shows an awareness of similar yet competing scripts. This girl chooses to take "pride in [her] housework" and rejects the model of womanhood that she most likely receives from the Euro-American Hollywood presentation of a pristine domestic space that excludes the performing body of the domestic woman. This is an ideal of womanhood that persists in the Caribbean gender construct and reality, and which the girls consider a preferable model in some of their interactions as they play. Here the girls' actions call to mind what has been referred to as a "less antagonistic brand of feminism" that accepts and embraces some of the traditional roles and does not preclude agency, equality, and the performance of conventional "woman" roles. In a context where the young females question and challenge the roles accorded to them, it is interesting that pride in domestic competence is one of the roles that they embrace. It is also noteworthy that they reject outside influence in favor of this particular local model of womanhood.

In the above example Kempadoo's treatment of gender highlights gender identities as integral to local identities and to current sociopolitical exigencies. The fact that the young characters opt to affirm local models of womanhood speaks to affiliation with not just the global female collective, but also to a region that has its own cherished value system. This is apparent in their turn away from some aspects of a foreign gender script and in their exploration of the range of performances available to them. This embrace of the local seems to be part of the larger climate of nationalism that animated Guyana at the time of the novel's setting.

Yet the same scene that shows the girls embracing a local model of womanhood reveals that while there is a suggestion of a certain kind of situated, even country- or region-oriented identity, it can accommodate interpretations of other gender scripts; we observe the young females also choosing to embrace an outside model of gender performance:

As we stepped through the door from the hectic world of Wall Street Sammy and Rachel [the wives] hurriedly straighten their hair and dresses. . . . We pecked them [the men] gravely on the cheek, pretending to take off hats and hang them behind the door. . . . We picked up our pens and pencils and began to eat politely without further talk. The wives kept glancing at our expressions to see how good their cooking was. Wasn't bad, loaded with things we'd never eaten or seen before. (Kempadoo 1999, 86)

Interestingly, the turn to Wall Street and an out-of-culture model of gender performance reaffirms the acceptance of domestic roles within a complex set of transcultural gender performances. The entire scene above captures the children's vicarious experience-via the mass media-of performances in a domestic space. The reconstitution of gender is apparent in the way girls shift roles-alternating between men's and women's roles while being fully conscious of the female bodies in which they live. They are equally aware that they are acting out these roles that are based on multicultural directives, thus drawing attention not only to the malleability of gender itself, but also to culturally inflected gender scripts with which females in modern societies must contend.

Buxton Spice is replete with fictional representations of the clash between Caribbean gender ideology and lived experience, a feature of Caribbean gender experiences that Forbes describes as a "basic mismatch between the populace's lived experience and official dogma" (Forbes 2005, 29). Among the kinds of women included in Buxton Spice's continuum of womanhood are a few who offer performances that are in stark contrast to the sanctioned model of womanhood that the speaker in "Girl" extols. In this representation Kempadoo focuses on the sexualized body of the female, an area that Caribbean writers highlight as central to anxieties about gender. Lula introduces three of the community's prostitutes, each of whom presents her body as a site of defiance and as a proclamation of the ways it undermines the emphasis on female chastity:

A sweet cool afternoon was just right to watch Sugar Baby slip-slapsing down the road in her cut-off jeans shorts, freshly bathed and powdered . . . She walked with untouchable attitude, braced back, one arm permanently akimbo, rolling on bow legs. Her high stomach led the way, popping open the button of her shorts. . . . You gave her room when she came down the street, with her head raked back, she just glanced through half open slits, ready to steups at the slightest thing. (Kempadoo 1999, 64)9

Sugar Baby's walk is exactly the walk that the speaker in "Girl" names as the tell-tale performance of whoredom. Completely comfortable with her body and with the work she is known to do, Sugar Baby foregrounds that "unladylike" performance. "Slip-slapsing" suggests a careless, loose way of carrying the body, most likely with legs constantly flung far from each other, and noise from her slippers. Her shorts are only partially buttoned, and the "untouchable attitude" with which she walks implies that hers is a deliberate push against the established ideas about the ways the female body should be carried, and what it should say. Sugar Baby presents a self that suggests she is the "slut" the speaker in "Girl" warns her young charge against becoming, and shows no sign of the shame that the presumed mother in "Girl" suggests this kind of behavior should warrant.

Another of the prostitutes, Bullet, is equally overt with the presentation of her body out of accordance with the designated script:

She walked the way any nineteen-year-old walked down the street. Her small pointed bubbies bouncing under the thin white vest. Her shorts riding her firm backside and everybody from Uncle Joe to my brother couldn't help watching her and calling out to her. I liked her the way I liked my sister's friend from town. . . . The bouncing said to everybody "I like sex so what?" They so big about their sexiness, was a joy to watch. . . . (Kempadoo 1999, 69)

The similarities between the women are self-evident, as is their shared understanding of the importance of the body as a location of resistance to Caribbean gender ideology. But the passage above offers another layer of the complex attitudes toward ideological constructions of decency and people's value system. Not only does Bullet adopt a performance that celebrates a brand of womanhood that is outside the ambit of respectable conduct; her audience is intrigued by the presentation of her body, and contrary to the fear implied by the speaker in "Girl," some, including Lula, are openly approving. This response illustrates that defiance of the "official dogma" is not limited to the performers; it is shared by many in the community, which further illustrates the contradiction between lived experience and ideology that Forbes and others address.

Outside of play with her peers, in which she slips in and out of gender roles, Lula tests transgender experience in what might be considered the "real world." This begins with her observation and discussion of gender as an almost tangible thing that one carries, uses, and manipulates. She describes a range of "man-selves," variations of how manhood might be performed:

I watched Iggy's spriggy-hair heft man-self. He had an ease with it . . . not like the hard black-black Rasta silhouetted in the street light. . . . They held their man-self tighter inside them, coiled, ready to spring. I gauged how much that cool I could really get right, practiced the walk. But all that really came off was the stance-legs apart bounceme- nuh look. (Kempadoo 1999, 119)10

The holding of the "man-self tighter, coiled and ready to spring" presents this manhood as a detachable set of bodily movements that one may reach for, deploy, put away, and retrieve again. In Schechner's conceptualization, these are behaviors that males can "restore" (Schechner 1985). This emphasis on performance is reinforced in Lula's attention to the details of the act as that which can be studied, practiced, and reenacted:

I gauged how much of that cool I could get right, practiced the walk . . . All the nights I studied their movement from the upstairs window-the way they pulled the bright cigarette stub, and then swung down the hand, grab the crotch, shift to the other leg. That stance is all I could honestly imitate. But could do it anytime I wanted to, even in a dress and feel my man-self standing like that. Didn't matter that I didn't have a lolo muscle [penis]. (Kempadoo 1999, 119)

The language in the passage is noteworthy: Lula includes words such as "practice," "get right," "imitate" that signal the performative; the choice of language presents these performances as constitutive of that which she is able to do, or behavior she seeks to restore. These performative acts allow Lula to assume a man-self, a self that she presents as being not the sole prerogative of males, but a set of behaviors that can create selves available to anyone willing to study and practice. And Lula's indication that she can assume these behaviors even in a dress draw attention to another component of the performative through the suggestion that even without the "right" costume, the body can perform outside the boundaries of the agreed-upon acts. When Lula adds without "a lolo muscle," she moves beyond the suggestion of transgender acts to an explicit statement of the capacity of the female body to do as the male body does and therefore blurs lines of sex-based demarcations that the larger culture sets up. These are the constructs upon which this community depends for sustained entrenchment of gender ideologies.

The body's capacity to restore different gendered performances is further elaborated in Kempadoo's presentation of the "man-self" as a set of performances that are not sex-specific, but are also open to a range of masculinities:

Some of them big men's man-self was sloppy. It just hang around in a flab round they waist. . . . Jiggled in their shaking thighs and bellies. . . . Others held it stiff in their muscles. Look-Back had his man-self so covered up it was confusing. He'd walk and look back. Small mincing steps and look again. Bird movement, his long neck swivelling, jerking everywhere when he talked, eyes darting. Pants belted right upon his chest. . . . I looked at my brother's man-self. It was like he just beginning to know he had it. . . . It was wobbling around in his voice sometimes making his apple begin to bump out. (Kempadoo 1999, 120-21)

Lula emphasizes the variability of gendered selves in her observation of the diverse man-selves that present differently according to age, awareness of the man-self, or immediate sociopolitical exigencies. The passage above also suggests that this man-self does not exist in and of itself, but is rather part of particular males' developmental level and awareness, and social roles. In other words, "man-selves" are intertwined with various other social identities. "Look-Back," for example, betrays the insecurity of his age and the larger sociohistorical moment in which he constructs and performs masculinity.11 Buxton Spice is set at a time when Caribbean nationalism opened a space for a wide range of performances connected with shaping identities outside of the long imposed colonial models of masculinity. It is apparent that Look-Back is part of that generation of young men who are still trying to work out what manhood will mean for them; Lula's description of Look-Back suggests an awareness of Black Power, Rasta, and other cultural movements that present new ways of seeing and presenting the self.

Despite Buxton Spice's delineation of the differences between the sexed body and socially constructed, "unstable" gender, the novel is also attentive to the connections between sex and gender. Lula alerts the reader to the blurred line between sex and gender in her description of her brother's emerging "manself." This "man-self" "wobbl[ed] around sometimes and making his apple begin to bump out. His hand gripped too hard and surprised him. His belly called for more food . . . " (Kempadoo 1999, 121). Here Lula describes the physiological changes that mark the onset of adolescence and the journey into the adult male body; yet she also refers to this newly emerging body as her brother's "man-self," the body that tells their father that it is now time to give the boy the car keys and the privilege to be guardian of his sisters. Interestingly, whereas Lula describes the "man-self" in virtually all other instances as a set of acquired and cultivated behaviors, her slippage into physical development as part of the "man-self" speaks to the complexity the gender performances present, and the undeniable connection between bodies and performances. Therefore, as Kempadoo presents them, although sex and gender are undoubtedly separate and separable (from each other), their interrelationship, resulting from centuries of cultural negotiations, renders their connection virtually seamless in some instances.

Lula's description of her brother's emerging "man-self" also shows the inextricable link among gender performances, social relations, and power. She notes, "Dads must'a noticed it too. Gave him the keys to bring the car into the yard. Let him go to the cinema anytime he wanted, by himself. We had to go with one of them" (Kempadoo 1999, 121). The father's decision to grant more man privileges is an acknowledgment that the sexed body carries certain gender markers that are often codes of privilege associated with this newly acquired "man-self."

Kempadoo explores the importance of gender performances in social negotiations through Lula's description of Night Helicopter, the night watchman, who performs an intimidating ruggedness that bolsters his work persona:

When he walked down the road to work he strapped in some of his man-self with a big broad leather belt over his khaki shirt. The thing was pulled in so tight, looked like he wasn't going to breathe till he got there. . . . He rolled from leg to leg with an aluminum saucepan of food in one hand and his baton in the other. And if you couldn't see his man-self then, puffed up like that, you couldn't see it in anybody. (Kempadoo 1999, 120)

Night Helicopter depends on a particular performance of masculinity for professional survival. He needs the "broad, leather belt" and other markers of toughness to convince the community that he is worth his proverbial salt, most likely with the hope that this toughness will scare would-be intruders, and perhaps prevent him from actually doing the night-watchman work. Lula emphasizes the constructed nature of Night Helicopter's "man-self" in her choice of language. His performance might well be a veneer for a less belligerent, softer self that, based on the strains of masculinity that the community values, would earn Night Helicopter little traction. Critics have pointed to such performances of toughness as indicative of Caribbean men's responses to colonial and neocolonial pressures to live up to iconic models of masculinity. Lula notes that he "strapped in some of his man-self with a broad leather belt." "Strapped" suggests a deliberate adoption of a certain brand of masculinity, and the play on the word "strapping" (which also means big and strong) also conveys Night Helicopter's association with a kind of masculinity that depends on physicality and brawn.

Lula's description of Night Helicopter relinquishing his man-self offers a comical and insightful perspective on the performativity of gendered selves. She notes, "Yan and his friends dared each other to shout his false name at him-'Night Helicopter'-to see him let out his breath, let go of his man-self and run mad" (Kempadoo 1999, 120). Lula describes a dramatic move from one persona to another. Each of Night Helicopter's acts is important as it shows the movement out of, and into, different selves. He, "let out his breath, let go of his man-self, and run[s] mad." Night Helicopter literally loses hold on the self he projects to the community. He sheds the protective shield that this man-self provides and that earns him credibility as a tough law-enforcement officer. It is noteworthy that Lula describes Night Helicopter as going "mad." Aside from suggesting anger, madness also implies a movement out of a certain level of awareness, that same awareness that allows Night Helicopter and others to assume whatever version of a gendered self that helps them to maintain respectability and any other value that the culture expects or imposes. These selves also ensure a hold on privileges that often accompany particular gendered performances.

Conclusion

In these two works Kincaid and Kempadoo engage questions around gender ideology as part of a more complex set of negotiations that, like others such as race and class, are bound up with the region's history, the creole societies that emerged from those histories, and the increasing infiltration of external cultural worldviews. The ways in which these writers foreground the body as a means of both endorsing and resisting colonially derived and other competing models of femininity and masculinity allude to a more general tendency among Caribbean writers to foreground performances in various ideological battles.

By foregrounding Kincaid's less obvious representation of the body's capacity to challenge ideological impositions through its performances, I have sought to explore one dimension of this work, initiated but hardly thoroughly explored in previous readings. The permission to transgress embedded in the speaker's admonitions calls for the body to be a repository of female agency. My more comprehensive reading of Buxton Spice demonstrates how Kempadoo's work dialogues with, but extends the possibilities for gender reconfiguration suggested in "Girl."

Schechner's theory of performance as "restored behavior" is particularly useful in underscoring my central point that in "Girl" and Buxton Spice gender is constructed, reaffirmed, reconfigured, and challenged through "stylized acts." The litany of instructions about what the female should do in "Girl" presents womanhood as being constantly reinforced through the body's restoration, retrieval, or enactment of specific acts or behaviors. The female body recreates a model of womanhood each time the female performs a domestic task in a way that the society designates and approves. Similarly, positioning the body according to standards of decency requires a recollection of specific approved behaviors. Kempadoo's emphasis on reshaping female bodies also illustrates how, through the restoration of a set of behaviors outside of those designated by the society, females as well as males can reshape gender; emphasis on these possibilities therefore underscores the transformative capacity of performance. These two texts show the ways in which gender is constituted by the individual's conscious or subconscious act of going to a place in memory-individual or cultural collective-to retrieve acts that may create or recreate gendered selves. They illustrate quite clearly the transgressive potential of performance.

Footnote

Notes

1. Diane Simmons refers to "Girl" as the story in which Kincaid finds her voice as a writer (Simmons 1994, 47-56). Also, in Understanding Jamaica Kincaid, Justin D. Edwards notes that "Girl" is "an early example of Kincaid's lyrical and hypnotic tone. . . . a brief fragment, an illuminating flash" and that the story contains "many of the major themes and issues Kincaid will develop in her later work" (Edwards 2007, 17).

2. Consistent with feminist scholarship, throughout this paper I use the terms "female" and "female child" when referring to individuals' biological category. I use "girl" and "woman" only in reference to social designations, or when quoting directly from other texts.

3. This attention to gender as that which can be allocated and reallocated forms the basis of Judith Butler's essay, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," one of the best known delineations of the tenuous nature of gender. Butler underscores the value of performance in both creating and unsettling gender allocation. According to Butler, "gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time-an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body, and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self" (Butler 1988, 270).

4. Kincaid and Kempadoo (Antiguan and Guyanese respectively) are from areas designated part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Buxton Spice is clearly set in 1970s Guyana. Despite its physical location on the South American mainland, politically Guyana is considered part of the Caribbean. There is no identifiable geographical setting for "Girl," yet there are sufficient cultural references to suggest that this story is set in the Caribbean. Writing specifically about gender constructions in this region, Patricia Mohammed highlights the "reconstructing of gender identities" as part of the larger concern with the reconfiguration of selves that Caribbean people have found necessary to attend to after slavery, indentureship, and formal colonization. Thus Mohammed, like many critics of Kincaid's work, identifies a clear link between the Caribbean's colonial history and the construction and enactment of gender and gender roles (Mohammed 1998).

5. Covi also includes Lizabeth Pravisini-Gebert's idea that Kincaid's use of the figure of the mother as the main channel is not only patriarchal, but also instills colonial principles, and that the model she holds up is that of an English lady (Covi 2003, 69).

6. See, for example, Covi 2003, 67-96, and Moira Ferguson, "At the Bottom of the River: Mystical (De)coding Jamaica Kincaid," in Ferguson 1994, 7-40.

7. See also Simmons, "Rhythm and Repetitions: Kincaid's Incantatory List," in Simmons 1994, 47-56. Here Simmons notes that alongside the condemnatory admonitions, "the mother speech is also inviting and nurturing" (47).

8. Forbes argues that transgression is inherent in the way genders are lived out in Caribbean societies, and that the on-the-ground tendency to cross ideological boundaries is part of what has emerged out of the Caribbean's complex historical context. In their fictional representations, Caribbean writers bring to the foreground, and into official conversations, a complex and dynamic experience of gender that is already part of the fabric of Caribbean society. Newer writers such as Kempadoo add fresh dimensions to a now well-established area of representation.

9. "Steups" used in Buxton Spice is a specifically Caribbean reference to "teeth hissing."

10. Lula alludes to a particular 1970s brand of masculinity that was part of the skeng/dread/rude-boy culture that was to a great extent marked by specific ways of carrying the male body. The confusion in the bodily posture that Lula observes speaks to uncertainties many young people experienced at the height of the nationalist movement. During this time there was immense pressure on males to construct new identities that openly resisted colonial legacies and affirmed local, indigenous, personal and collective selves. Earl Lovelace also explores this issue, particularly as it relates to males in his well-known novel The Dragon Can't Dance (Lovelace 1998).

11. Lula's description of the performance of masculinities here illustrates quite well Richard Schechner's theorization of performance as "restored behavior," which speaks to the ways in which bodies are either foregrounded or alluded to. Schechner defines "restored behavior" as "strips of behavior that can be rearranged or reconstructed" (Schechner 1985, 36) The self, Schechner argues, "can act in/as another; the social and transindividual self is a role or set of roles" (36). Speaking specifically about formal, staged performances, Schechner explains, "Because behavior is separate from those who are behaving, the behavior can be stored, transmitted, manipulated, transformed. The performers get in touch with, recover, or even invent these strips of behavior . . . either by being absorbed into them or by existing side by side with them" (36).

References

Works Cited

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Ferguson, Moira. 1994. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Forbes, Curdella. 2005. From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.

John, Catherine. 2003. Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Schechner, Richard. 1985. "Restored Behavior." In Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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