Discuss the characterization of Selina.

Selina is the main character of Brown Girl, Brownstones. She is the daughter of immigrants from Barbados, growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and 1940s. Selina does not like her mother or her sister Ina, getting along only with her father. Young Selina has eyes which look too old, as though she has already seen a lot of pain, even as a child.

Selina has a boisterous, bullying personality, and she often says cruel things to the people around her, or beats up Ina, even though Ina is several years older. Selina plays with her best friend Beryl and other little girls, but when she is trying to deal with confusing emotions, she tends to hang around with the other tenants in her house, or with Miss Thompson, an old beautician.

Much of Selina's adolescence is spent trying to reconcile the adult impulses and the childish impulses inside of herself. She shows, at the end, that she is capable of rejecting the parts of her personality which she hates so much in her mother, and Selina gives up the scholarship, even though she offends many of her family friends by doing so.