There are 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 masculinity even though I wouldn’t admit it. Instead, I prefer to retreat to a humble role and blame love for the trembling orgasms we were producing: wrong and clueless things, but bear with me. Then came Audre Lorde’s incredible Zami, in Zami Audre Lorde reveals what it feels like to be in control and bliss without a penis or the limited definition of manhood.
Sometimes Audre Lorde seems like a man’s man. I love Zami, it was a change of heart. My penis and I were not so special, we were the substitute for other feelings. Feelings that lead young men and women to search for substitutes, for transfers, for love. However, as substitutes, the penis was luxurious. The “I love you” said, and morale was compromised. And I wanted to believe. Everyone is having a good time until the feeling ends. Then come the questions, and the blame begins, and the unresolved issues make their appearance.
My next epiphany came with “The Blues Eyes” by Toni Morrison. He didn’t think there was such a level of self-loathing with some black people, ever. And the depth to which they will descend internalizing that hatred. His father’s rape of Pecola and his mother’s emotional abuse. And the joy with which Morrison’s characters take it all in. This book blows my mind. I came to believe that Toni Morrison is a sorceress. A good witch! She is aware.
Now adding to that list, enter Jamaica Kincaid’s book, Lucy. This novel is the most honest retelling of a women’s story that she has ever read. It’s like reading the private thoughts in your ex girlfriend’s diary. The thoughts. Not the events written, but the circumstances that led to the fellatio. Or, the idea of how you come to find yourself naked in a room with your boyfriend and his children. Or bragging to jealous friends about the time you lost your mind seducing your best friend, sibling, parent, or parent. Jamaican Kincaid Lucy is that good.
Our protagonist Lucy tells the story of Myrna while looking at her boyfriend’s hand in a fish tank. She said of Myrna’s mother, “That was so cruel that it was like she had an evil stepmother.” Mothers are a recurring theme in Kincaid’s stories. More on mothers later. They were waiting for Mr. Thomas and Mr. Mathew, the fishermen who do business with their mothers.
Mr. Thomas had been drinking that day, and he and his fish did not appear. Mr. Mathew came to tell them the story; he was pitiful, she said, he broke her heart. She fell sad. As they walk home, Lucy notices that Myrna was crying a lot. Lucy tries to comfort her with “nonsense about there being a great wise purpose behind such things”. So Myrna drops this bombshell. She said that she used to meet Thomas (she didn’t call him “sir” now). They met, under a breadfruit tree near her latrine, near the entrance to the alley behind her house. And she’d stand in the dark, fully dressed but without her panties on, and he’d put his middle finger inside her.” “Wait, that’s not the bomb. Lucy tells the story that this is expected behavior from men; They are not nice, and rather men are dogs.” Everybody knew that men have no morals, that they don’t know how to behave, that they don’t know how to treat other people. That is why men like laws so much; that was why they had to invent such things that they need a guide. When they’re not sure what to do, they refer to this guide. If the guide gives them advice they don’t like, they change guides.” So far what Lucy thinks of men another of those paradoxes of life about to reveal itself. Myna was crying because she won’t get the money anymore: ten cents a shell, sometimes just sixpence that Mr. Thomas used to give her for putting her middle finger in it. She needed that money for something she didn’t know about yet. However, it wasn’t enough, and she was upset that there wasn’t more.
I thought how far young women would go to get away from an evil mother. Myrna’s story made me wonder about the reasons young girls turn to sex. It wasn’t for penis or for love but to feel better. To get away from the cruelest oxymoron, bad mother. The further away you are from them, the greater their influence on your life.
Then, on page 105, Lucy said the most amazing thing: Lucy overcomes jealousy, she said. “Why did something so extraordinary happen to her and not to me? Why did Mr. Thomas choose Myrna as the girl he would secretly meet and put her middle finger inside her and not from my?” Lucia continues. “This would have become the experience of a lifetime, one that everyone else would have to live up to.”
Lucy goes on to talk more about how she felt about that story. Kincaid is aware of what she was sharing, she goes on to make it clear. Lucy: “I could have retreated into falsehood and said all the appropriate disapproving things, but I saw that she was beyond damnation.” Lucy wanted to ask, she felt great! -Guy! -What a story, Kincaid made me realize that they are something he thought he knew about young women, but I have no idea. At the same time, I question the depth of my feeling, why and how I define my manhood. What am I looking for? What makes me feel great? I mean, most of them come from some great lost, like Lucy’s.
The truth is that the novel Lucy is constantly struggling with her feelings towards her mother who is teetering between love and hate. One causes the other. While Lucy tries to understand her feelings and affirms her physical and emotional independence, her mother’s love or lack of love is the anchor or wings that guide her decisions. She constantly seeks her mother’s approval at the same time that she hates her mother’s judgments of her Christian morality. After all, this is a mother who called her Lucy, a girl’s name for Lucifer. That her mother found her, her devilish form didn’t surprise Lucy. She said: “I often think of her as a god, and aren’t the children of the demon gods?”
In my youth, I believed that a weird girl was really interested in you, whatever you told her to do, she would do. Like Alanis Morissette: “Is she a pervert like me? Would she fuck you in a theater?” I thought it was my penis or me. We were worship. I didn’t realize somewhere that it was about the unrequited love of a mother or father. It’s not like women don’t give us clues, Carly Simon: “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.” But we never see our needs until those needs are revealed in someone else’s story.
Lucy showed the lengths to which she will go to assert her independence, to distance herself from her mother. But no matter how far Lucy went. She was always emotionally attached to her mother, her efforts always compared to hers. Lucy’s jealousy of Myrna is a direct result of the lack of love that she has not been given. Lucy wants someone, an older person, to want her, like Mr. Thomas wanted Myrna. Lucy longs for a loved one.
Jamaica Kincaid further emphasizes this analogy in the novel. Lucy feels the same about her new home in the United States at the end of the novel as she did at the beginning when she was leaving her home island. Although her body moved across the ocean, in the end, she felt the same way, alone. No matter how many times we move or where we go, we are tied to that first shelter.
His mother’s affections changed when she gave birth to his son. Lucy was no longer the same. She was jealous of a love that she belonged to but she denied him. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid details the difficult relationship of a mother’s love and her daughter’s disappointments. Indeed, Kincaid’s novel gives us a detailed account of where Lucy is and how she relates to her mother. And she hints at what brought her to where she is: “OH, the injustice of it all. What words did Mr. Thomas use to make this arrangement with her, and why, again, had he not been worthy of listening to them? “
To me, this goes a long way to explaining why a partner hates you, or you hate them, you remind them of a father. The amazing sex we were looking for in the beginning no longer feels like “the experience of a lifetime.” Those encounters began as a substitute for that unrequited love and attention. Know your hate substitute. Now anger is the security of love. Or, as fourteen-year-old Lucy said, when she sucked Tanner’s tongue off her best friend’s brother at her house during a piano lesson, she was looking at her hands. “Taste is not what to look for in a language; how it makes you feel, that is the thing.
manuel palace