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 