Humor

This is how not to write a Marxist response to “Girl.”

Maybe “Girl” has a bit more of a sense of humor than it first appears to. Maybe it isn’t only a, what’s the stock phrase, scathing commentary on the oppression and (apparently voluntary) commodification of women.

Here is one reason I think maybe the piece isn’t completely dour. Although the main speaker and the girl are probably Christian—that’s how I’m reading the references to Sunday school—the speaker also mentions things that seem to indicate non-Christian superstitions (but I don’t know much about Caribbean culture, so I could be misinterpreting): “don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all”; “this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you.” That second example leads to a mildly comic moment later on. See, throwing back a fish in a certain way to prevent “something bad . . . fall[ing] on you” sounds like a ward against evil or bad luck. And the speaker uses the phrase “fall on you” in association with something else that sounds like a ward (but, again, I might be misreading): “this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you.” Spitting in the air could be like properly returning an unwanted fish to water or like a practice more familiar to us, knocking on wood. But when the speaker tells how “to move quick so that it [spit] doesn’t fall on you,” I think that’s sort of funny; getting spit on your face is the bad luck that moving quickly prevents.