In this autobiographical bildungsroman set in the colonial Antigua of Jamaica Kincaid’s own childhood, adolescence is figured as loss: loss of the protagonist’s irreplaceable bond with her mother, loss of friends that she outgrows, and finally loss of home, as, having come of age, Annie John strikes out on her own and embarks for England. Yet the novel also shows adolescence as a time of spirited rebellion: like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Annie John rails against injustice, forging an independent identity in spite of the forces that oppress her (in Annie’s case, these are racial, cultural, and patriarchal).
The novel’s open-ended conclusion leaves unresolved this tension between the pathos of separation and the triumph of hard-won autonomy. Originally published as a series of short stories in The New Yorker, the novel is episodic. The first sections of the novel depict 10-year-old Annie’s relationship with her mother as a paradise of shared experience: they share the same name, wear the same clothes, bathe together, and go to market together, with Annie following “ever in her [mother’s] wake” (17).
That Annie is the center of her mother’s world is symbolized by the hope chest in which her mother has stored everything associated with Annie’s life: no artifact is too trivial, and each becomes the subject of an anecdote that is a piece of the larger narrative. The inspiration for the hope chest and its stories is autobiographical: calling her mother “the fertile soil” of her “creative life,” Kincaid muses, “Clearly the way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me” (O’Conner, 6).
The growing estrangement between mother and daughter with which the rest of the novel (and much of Kincaid’s work) is concerned is also rooted in the author’s experience. In interviews, Kincaid candidly describes how her “love affair” with her mother abruptly came to an end when her brother was born.
It is Annie’s mother who initiates the estrangement between the two, and not, as in Kincaid’s life, because another child is born, but rather because she seems to have suddenly decided it is time for Annie to grow up. As she somewhat callously tells her daughter, “you can’t be a little me” (26). Annie perceives her mother’s growing distance as abandonment and a betrayal of their intimacy.
Annie’s sense of abandonment is converted into a vehement rejection of her mother. This repudiation embroils Annie in a battle of deceit and secrecy, as she combats her mother’s perceived treachery with her own actual treachery—lying, stealing, and sneaking out after school.
Jamaica Kincaid
Annie’s rising adolescent rebellion merges with the anticolonial subtext of the novel, as Annie comes to reject the authority of not only her mother but also her English school mistresses. Much as Kincaid reportedly refused to sing “Rule Britannia!” in school—objecting to the line “Britons never shall be slaves” on the grounds that “we weren’t Britons and we were slaves” (Cudjoe, 397)—Annie rejects the colonial values she is being taught, writing graffiti beneath a picture of Christopher Columbus in her history book. Her punishment takes the shape of being forced to honor the English canon by copying the first two books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
As Annie struggles to form an independent identity, she must confront the legacy of colonial domination, which is a privileging of all things English.
Annie’s rebellion serves to strand her in an adolescent wonderland, with her body undergoing confusing changes, and a conspiracy of social and political values that are bewildering at best. The two temporarily sustaining friendships she forges mark the poles of imaginable feminine behavior. The one with Gwen embodies the code of polite womanhood celebrated at school and at home, and the other with the “Red Girl,” who refuses to bathe, plays marbles, and climbs trees, defies supposed feminine propriety.
Eventually rejecting both models, Annie is left trying to navigate her way through adolescence without a map or a rudder. Despite Annie’s apparent independence, her separation from her mother on the one hand and her friends on the other leaves her dangerously alienated and ultimately prompts a nervous breakdown.
In this impressionistic and intriguing section of the novel, the wonderland of adolescence shows its terrifying side, as Annie alternately feels that she is disappearing, levitating, or being torn to pieces. Overcome by a profound malaise that descends upon her like a mist, she stops eating and retreats into an infantile state, spending the day in bed while her parents care for her as though she were a baby.
Though she is estranged from her mother, Annie is in effect “rescued” by her maternal grandmother, Ma Chess, who uses obeah, an African-based practice of exercising power over the spirit world. According to both Simone Alexander and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, the role of Ma Chess is to show a redemptive female-female family relationship, and to affirm the tenacious power of African-derived tradition in a colonial setting.
The novel ends ambivalently as Annie embarks on a sea journey to England, where she intends to study to become a nurse. This may be interpreted as a final step toward independence, although Annie’s destination, the colonial “motherland,” in its inconsistency with the novel’s critique of colonialism, seems to undercut the theme of independence.
Nonetheless, critics tend to read the ending with qualified optimism. Donna Perry focuses on the implication that ahead of Annie is a new life for which “her apprenticeship in Antigua has prepared her” (247). Antonia MacDonald-Smythe points out that in the classic male bildungsroman, the protagonist is reabsorbed into a society that, though deficient, can accommodate him, whereas in the “creolized” form, the resolution is less triumphant, since the protagonist may be absorbed by the wrong society.
Kincaid’s open-endedness, though, may reflect the process of constructing female subjectivity. Finally, we may read Kincaid’s tentative ending as representing Annie’s “fragile victory” of separation from her mother and her homeland (Cudjoe, 407). In this light, we can interpret the voyage with which the novel ends as another beginning, in which Annie sets off on the next journey in an ongoing quest for independence.
Sources
Alexander, Simone James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Jamaica Kincaid. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1998.
Cudjoe, Selwyn R. “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview.” Callaloo 12 (Spring 1989): 396–411.
Ferguson, Moira. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
MacDonald-Smythe, Antonia. Making Homes in the West Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2001.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Perry, Donna. “Initiation in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, 245–253. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux Publications, 1990.
Phillips, Caryl. Review of Island in the Dark: A Small Place. Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 17, 1988, p. 1.
Simmons, Diane. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.
Tapping, Craig. “Children and History in the Caribbean Novel: George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Kunapipi 9 (1989): 51–59.
Timothy, Helen Pyne. “Adolescent Rebellion and Gender Relations in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John.” In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, 233–242. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux Publications, 1990.
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