Helado Negro – This Is How You Smile

The Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid first published the short story “Girl” in The New Yorker in 1978. In what is essentially one long run-on sentence, “Girl” takes the form of a stern mother’s list of instructions to her daughter on how to become a skilled, self-possessed woman (“this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all”).

The litany is imbued with both intense maternal love and unsparing criticism, an imbalance that reflects a colonialist structure that Kincaid sharply excoriates in writing. “I’ve come to see that I’ve worked through the relationship of the mother and the girl to a relationship between Europe and the place that I’m from,” Kincaid explained to Mississippi Review in 1996. “Which is to say, a relationship between the powerful and the powerless.”

- Pitchfork.com