Alice Walker - Jamaica Kincaid

The Flowers by Alice Walker starts out very innocent and cheerful. A little girl walking around in the early morning skipping and humming a tune. She is carefree, she then starts to explore the woods looking to pick flowers. She finds lots of flowers but when she turns to go back home the mood turns dark and almost sinister. It is a glaring contrast to the start of the work. In the fifth paragraph the contrast is first evident "It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself. The air was damp, the silence close and deep." She then accidentally steps on a dead mans severed head. She is surprised when she first realizes its a corpse but then she is distracted by a pink flower that is growing right where she stepped. She picks it to add to her collection of flowers but then notices that it was growing on part of the man's nose. She then lays all her flowers down over the dead man.

In this short work I see a persons life play out. At first we are carefree children walking along familiar ground at home singing tunes. Next we become teens and young adults and start venturing out into the world, past the spring but we need to eventually grow up and go out into the world on our own. In paragraph four it says how she is making her own path, "Often, in late autumn, her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves. Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes." We do the same when we venture out into the world on our own forging our own life paths. She goes to find flowers and other pretty things just like an adult makes money for a living. When she is returning home its sort of like the ending of someones life she is unfamiliar with it just like people are frightened and unfamiliar with death. She steps on the dead man and is surprised by it just like how some people are surprised by death. But after she picks the pink flower she realizes it wasn't right to disturb the man's resting place so she lays down all of her flowers. Just like the end of a person's life when they are accepting death. At the end of the story it says summer was over. A lot of times spring and summer are seen as a time of new life and fall and winter are associated with death with the shortening of the days and the falling of dead leaves and barren trees. That's where I see a connection with the end of the person's life.

Girl by Jamaica Kincaid is a short work about one girl or woman telling another girl or woman how to live the life of a proper lady. The whole time the older one is telling the younger one how to do different things that are important in a woman's life. Every once in a while the one being told all of this will ask some question about something the other has said. I see it as a mother teaching her daughter the proper way to live when she is not around. She seems to be telling her how to do the most important things in life correctly.

In the story it repeatedly references "benna" so I looked that word up and according to Wikipedia it means folk music which makes sense because the mother continually tells her daughter to not sing benna. For example on the eighth line "don't sing benna in Sunday school." I looked up "doukona" to get a better idea of the setting of the work and found it to mean a spicy Caribean dish from the site http://www.proz.com/kudoz/English/cooking_culinary/151233-doukona.html. I also looked up the word "dasheen" and found it to be a plant in the Caribean according to The Free Dictionary by Farlex.