Fiction – paperback; Picador; 151 pages; 2022.
First published in 1985, Annie John, by Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid, follows the life of the titular Annie John, a young girl growing up in Antigua.
It’s billed as a coming-of-age story, but it is also a haunting portrait of a mother-daughter relationship that undergoes a radical transformation.
It’s a universal tale about what it’s like to seek independence from your parents, to find your feet and discover the wider world, and it’s characterised by moments of great tenderness, cruelty, heartbreak and longing. I loved it.
Mother love
When the novel starts, Annie is 10 years old. She’s an only child and has a close bond with her mother, whom she adores:
She smelled sometimes of lemons, sometimes of sage, sometimes of roses, sometimes of bay leaf. At times I would no longer hear what she was saying; I just liked to look at her mouth as it opened and closed over words, or as she laughed. How terrible it must be for all the people who had no one to love them so and no one whom they loved so, I thought. (page 20)
When she’s 12, on the “verge of becoming a young lady”, she’s “sent off to learn one thing and another” but plays up:
I was sent to someone who knew all about manners and how to meet and greet important people in the world. This woman soon asked me not to come again, since I could not resist making farting-like noises each time I had to practice a curtsy, it made the other girls laugh so. I was sent for piano lessans. The piano teacher, a shriveled-up old spinster from Lancashire, England, soon asked me not to come back, since I seemed unable to resist eating from the bowl of plums she had placed on the piano purely for decoration. (page 25)
After a slightly nervous start at a new school, she makes many new friends and becomes popular among her peers. She’s clever, to the point she doesn’t have to try very hard to excel in class, but she’s also mischievous and rebellious and begins to misbehave. Her report card usually goes something like this:
Annie is an unusually bright girl. She is well-behaved in class, at least in the presence of her masters and mistresses, but behind their backs and outside the classroom, quite the opposite is true. (page 75)
She steals library books and hides them under the house, for instance, and plays (and collects) marbles at school when her mother tells her not to.
She’s fierce and funny, loyal and cheeky, but she’s also unpredictable, which makes her slightly unnerving.
Intense friendships
Annie initially forms a close and intense friendship with a girl named Gwen, with whom she shares many traits: they are both proper, neat and respectable girls. But as Annie becomes more rebellious and pushes at conventions, she becomes infatuated with a student dubbed the Red Girl, who is her complete opposite: unkempt, dirty and free from any sort of parental control.
This friendship shows Annie a different way of being, bringing her into more conflict with her mother.
Things go unexpectedly awry later when Annie develops an unexplained illness that confines her to bed for many months. Is it depression? Or is it an excuse to cling to her beloved parents for a little longer?
Eventually, of course, she has to grow up, and at age 17, she makes a fateful decision to leave her mother and father and go to England, where she will study to be a nurse. It’s not something she particularly wants to do, but she is desperate to begin a new life for herself, free from her past, free from the town she grew up in, free from her parents.
The book ends with a sense of anticipation (and a little bit of foreboding and dread) for Annie’s future.
Different interpretations
Annie John is regarded as a classic of Caribbean women’s writing. It came to my attention via ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which described it as a novel “foremost within the first wave of Caribbean women’s writing to attract critical attention outside the region”.
It suggests the book can be read in one of two ways: as a bildungsroman, “placing it within a white, male, European tradition”, or by focussing on the intense mother-daughter bond, as a “painful separation narrative”. For me, it was both.
But there’s another interpretation, too, that This is the Canon doesn’t mention: Annie’s journey from childhood to young adulthood, in which she confronts issues of identity, independence, separation and self-definition, could be a metaphor for Antigua’s own coming of age — the country did not become an independent state until 1 November 1981.
This is my third book for the #20booksofsummer 2024 edition. I purchased it about a year ago after seeing it listed in ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which focuses on fiction produced by writers of African descent, Asian descent and Indigenous Peoples.
Reading Matters 
This review has prompted me to do what I meant to do when I read your original ‘decolonise your bookshelves’ post… i.e. tag my reviews that feature in that list. It turns out that of the 15 I’d read only 7 of them are reviewed on my blog. And most of them I read so long ago that they’re not even in my reading journal so I can’t do a ‘review from the archive’.
I’m tempted to ‘cheat’ and tag the authors listed whose other books I’ve read, just not the one they’ve chosen.
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Why restrict yourself to the books listed in this book? You could tag any review written by writers of African descent, Asian descent and Indigenous Peoples. I’m actually tempted to replace my old (British terminology) BIPOC tag with this one.
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You’re right, it’s daft. As you can see from my drop-down categories menu, that info is already there and I have read and reviewed heaps of books in those categories. Especially the Indigenous category because of hosting ILW/FNRW for 15 years.
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I read this book before blogging, and was wondering what brought you to it, but then you answered it! I remember enjoying it … because of the different setting and because I like good coming-of-age novels.
I feel I also read her Autobiography of my mother, but I’m out and about so away from my spreadsheet!
I enjoyed your review and your added reason for reading it.
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I really loved this book. It reminded me of Sula a little bit … just the intense friendships formed between girls and how they change over time.
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Toni Morrison’s book? I’ve not read that one … have wanted to. This just enthuses me more.
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Yea, I should have mentioned the author’s name. Interestingly, Jackie Kay writes an introduction to this edition of Annie John and she states that Jamaica Kidd did not write about race for the white gaze as per Morrison. I think that’s a good point to know. Jamaica Kincaid apparently wrote Annie John for a “local” audience; she wasn’t thinking her book would be read by white audiences outside of the Caribbean so she didn’t make any social commentary about race or even mention skin colour at all. Mind you, she does make a few swipes at British colonialism!
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Oh that’s really interesting about audience Kimbofo. I think when people complain about Austen not discussing certain things they forget that she just assumed people of her era understood from what she was saying where she was coming from, whereas we have to try to glean it.
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This looks a really appetising read, which crams a lot into 150 pages.
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Much of it is about school life so there’s not a huge amount to the story in terms of plot, but it’s a great read because Annie is such a terrific character. She’s a good two shoes who becomes a mischievous rebel to test the waters and flout convention. Mothers with grumpy teen daughters would find a lot to identify with in this novel 😆
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My elder daughter took Grumpy Teenager to a whole new level. So this is now a Must Read.
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I read this book last year and loved it. So much depth in the story and I loved the feisty protagonist in it. I am a fan of Carribean literature, having started with the Wide Sargasso Sea many years ago. I am currently reading the Womens Prize shortlisted How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. About her growing up in a Jamaican Rasta family. Hard to put down its so good
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Oh, I loved Wide Sargasso Sea (I love Jean Rhys) and I can highly recommend Small Island by Andrea Levy, too. Thanks for telling me about Say Babylon… I will look that one up!
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Ooh I really love the sound of this. I so enjoy coming of age style narratives. I had heard of Jamaica Kincaid and often wondered what her books would be like. This should clearly go on my list.
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I think you’d like this, Ali. There’s a lovely introduction by Jackie Kay which suggests that once you read one Jamaica Kincaid book you want to read them all – and I think she may be right! Just giving you the heads up now so you’re aware your TBR might get a little taller if you choose to read Annie John 😆
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