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In an M.A. (senior) course on New Literatures in English-Part I (JulyDecember 2017), at an urban yet demographically diverse publicly funded university in central India, the University of Hyderabad, a section was dedicated to "The Nation-as-Home, Precarious Belonging and Postcolonial Subalternity." This section discussed women and national belonging in the postcolony. The authors included the following: Kath Walker (Australia, Aboriginal), "We are Going"; Selections from Wangari Maathai (Kenya), Unbowed: A Memoir; Kishwar Naheed (Pakistan), "We Sinful Women"; Jamaica Kincaid (Caribbean-American), "Girl"; and Choman Hardi (Palestine), "My Mother's Kitchen." The aim was to study how gendered subalterns are formed within the postcolony, and the conditions in which their sense of belonging was rendered precarious.
Students in this M.A. class come from around India and range from metropolitan educated, fluent-in-English students to those from underprivileged sections and rural or semi-urban settings. Most of the students-almost 98%-have a B.A. (English, Literature) background as well, and so have some experience of close reading.
When dealing with Kincaid's 1978 short story (sometimes discussed as a poem), "Girl," the class discussion revolved around several concerns of gendered belonging and the norms through which the girl child is acculturated into accepting a predesigned role in the postcolony. But some of their interest also lay in the nature of the mother's speech which, for many of the students, made a larger point about cultural training itself.
The story is cast as a mother's breathless recital of do's and don'ts for the daughter. The daughter interrupts the narrative twice: once to assert that she does not sing what the mother believes she sings, and once to express her doubt that the baker would allow her to touch freshly baked bread. The remainder of the narrative is in the mother's voice.
The Pedagogic and the Performative
The mother's narrative is clearly organized around specific norms about feminine behavior. First, there is a set of instructions on domesticity, and have to do with cooking specific foods, laying the table, cutlery, and the practice of thrift and a moral economy.
This is how you grow okra... this is how you sweep the whole house... this is how you set a table for dinner. this is how to make doukona. this is how to make pepper pot.
Second,...