How-To: Readings and Responses
Jamaica Kincaid’s Girl acts as both user manual and cautionary tale. A guide to adulting passed between generations as much as it serves as a warning to the instructed of the dangers ahead. It speaks of the household tasks of tailoring and kitchen but also the avoidance of wharf-rat boys and the becoming of the slut which the recipient is already on the path towards. It’s a guide for how to set the table but also a warning for how to set oneself for a life ahead. It cautions on how ‘to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it becomes a child’ as much as it instructs the girl on how to stand up for herself both in love and anger. It advocates for everything the instructor believes the girl should become but is not yet. It’s a rulebook told from experience. Prescription for the future to be applied in the present, and if faithfully adhered to, will serve as a compass through the life ahead.
If Kincaid’s Girl acts as domestic survival guide, Moore’s How To Become A Writer is a map for navigating through the pain and suffering of rejection, failure and the awkwardness of finding one’s path through life out in the real world. If Kincaid’s guide is a rulebook, then Moore’s is one which tears the rules up, and leans into the chaos of experimentation, throwing oneself off the cliff of academic teaching with the same frequent dismissal of the writer’s ability to grasp the mechanics of plot. As she says with revenge in the private margins of her book as she rejects the rules placed upon her ‘Plots are for dead people, Pore-Face’. It’s a guide which advocates for a life spent trying everything and the serendipity brought about by staying in the wrong class but still remaining curious. A guide which understands that some people you’ll meet are smarter than you, some dumber, but that you are neither. To write into one’s life as a source of energy and to hell with the approved mechanics of language. A guide which encourages asking the big questions but allows the room for one’s imagination to grow big-bellied. But most of all it’s advice empowering the rejection of the miasma of guidance and sense-making which surrounds the writer. Advice to draw from oneself without taking oneself too seriously. To look deeper. Listen harder. And to write with a life-giving curiosity which just might inspire others.
In contrast, Uma Dwivedi’s How To Comb Someone’s Hair is a manual for kindness, but also for the ordering of the chaos which so deeply surrounds Moore’s writer. In combing another’s hair, an intimacy of ritual is shared between two people which starts broad but becomes specific. At first running one’s fingers through the hair and with subsequent brushes getting finer and finer until the hair ‘shines with effort’. For Moore’s writer this echoes the editing process. Dwivedi writes without capitalization, her language itself combed between sentences until the crescendo of the ritual’s final act of kissing the head and squeezing the shoulders to indicate an edited closure. If Kincaid’s manual is one of love through order, Dwvedi’s is one of order through love. Love through the ritual of repetition, with distinct beginnings and ends, but for which there is an infinite supply.
Spanning over forty years, Moore’s How To Talk To Your Mother asks us to reconcile reading forward in the present through a story told in reverse. Traveling back in time, Moore gives away the answer before we know the question. Her mother dies before we learn of her funeral. Gets sick with senility long before there were any signs of dementia. And adjacent to Moore’s reverse memories of her mother are echoed her memories of country. Of Regan and Nixon. Moon landing and Kennedy in Dallas. It’s Moore making sense of grief and loss by leaning on memory, something of which her mother was robbed. And in talking to the past, she is able to talk to her mother again, keeping her memory alive. A countermeasure to the dementia which took her life. If Moore lives in these memories, surrounded by both the intimacy of family and the chaos of the twentieth century around her, she erodes the sense of loss which is so wonderfully echoed by the opening hum of the defrosting refrigerator as it ‘creaks, aches, groans’ as the last drop of ice, like her memories must not do, melts away.
Brainard’s I Remember also uses a framework of memory, but is neither cautionary, instructive or a means of keeping remembrance alive. It is anecdote over action. Archive over atlas. And while both Brainard and Moore lean on the dark humor of the awkward and uncomfortable, Moore seeks to find a path through it where Brainard wallows inside it. Brainard allows himself and the reader to sit in the the discomfort in a way in which Moore does not. When faced with the awkwardness of youth, Moore swiftly moves on in a way which Brainard actively indulges. Similarly, Brainard’s recollections are themselves a ritual. A mantra whereby the repeated sentence opener of I Remember produces a harmonic resonance which brings order to the cacophony of his memories. It is itself, like Dwivedi, a way to bring order to chaos. In Brainard’s case it’s his memories, in Dwivedi’s the combed hair. One is a chant, the other a gesture. But if Dwivedi’s hair shines with effort, we get no such satisfaction and closure from Brainard, who refuses to kiss our head and squeeze our shoulders before the piece abruptly ends. Kincaid’s Girl is filled which the kinds of domestic rules Brainard works so hard to dismantle, but both are focused on the details of life. The cut of a piece of clothing, the right thing to say, the right way to think, how to navigate the finer things in home and body. But it is Kincaid’s girl who is learning here, and feeling the benefit of someone else’s experience. Brainard is on his own, and receives little instruction from others. His is not a how-to guide, his learning has been from his own experience. There is no manual for Brainard’s recollection, with the past doomed to repeat itself.
