22 Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John

Dr. Alice Samson

 Introduction to Jamiaca Kincaid

Commonly identified as the most commercially successful female Caribbean writer, Jamaica Kincaid has received much critical acclaim as well. She has come to represent a new wave of postcolonial writing that simultaneously disavows the colonial legacy and engages with it. Her position, contrasting sharply with writers who attempt to recover their ‘true’ precolonial heritage, has allowed her to use the very instruments of colonial oppression, English literature and language, to undo the erasure of her identity as a non-white person. In this lesson we will undertake a discussion of Kincaid’s autobiographical novel Annie John.

About the Author

Born Elaine Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949 in St. John, Antigua, Jamaica, Kincaid changed her name when she began writing professionally in New York. Kincaid was born into a humble home and never received support from her biological father. The only child of her mother and step-father for nine years after her birth, Kincaid was deeply affected by the arrival of siblings when she was around 9. The loss of the bond with her mother has remained a significant theme of Kincaid’s writing. Having attended school from a fairly young age, Kincaid’s imaginative and literary talents were evident long before she left Antigua. A product of the British Colonial Education System, Kincaid has used her experiences in Antigua as well as her exposure to European and American culture to develop a unique voice of postcolonial consciousness. Her personality for trouble, led young Jamaica to get into trouble with teachers in school. Constantly rebuked for her trouble making ways,she often sympathised with the negative characters in English Literary texts for e.g. Lucifer in Paradise Lost.

At 17, in spite of being a top student in her class, Kincaid was removed from school and sent to work as a nanny in America.Uprooted from the familiar land and home, Kincaid tried to rebuild her life on her own. She enrolled in evening classes, acquired her general equivalency diploma and started taking photography classes.She won a scholarship to study at Franconia College in New Hampshire. In 1973,two years into the program, she dropped out and returned to New York to try her hand at writing. It is at this time that she changed her name so she could remain anonymous while her first articles and stories were published.She used the name Jamaica to identify herself with the region she came from. Kincaid was selected as  a last name, she says, because it seemed to go well with Jamaica. Changing her name was also a way for her to attempt new things which her life would not have ordinarily permitted her to.

Kincaid’s first article “When I was Seventeen” was published by Ingénue in 1973 and she became a regular writer for The Village Voice and Ingénue. Her friendship with George W.S Trow a columnist at The New Yorker and legendary editor William Shawn quickly got her noticed in the field of writing and she was soon offered a column at The New Yorker. Michael Arlen, the columnist at The New Yorker, for whom Kincaid had first come to America to work as a nanny, became her colleague at the magazine.

At The New Yorker,Kincaid was often asked how she got the job. She attributes it to her being black, without a degree or any credentials. The magazine however found great merit in her writing and even serialised her novel Lucy before it was published.She was given a regular gardening column at the magazine which she wrote till 1996 when she resigned over differences with the magazine’s new editor. Kincaid is professor of African and African- American studies at Harvard University.

Her first book publication was a collection of short stories At the Bottom of the River (1983). Her novels are Annie John (1985) Lucy (1990)The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Mr.Potter (2002) and See Now Then (2013). Kincaid’s fiction is mostly considered to be autobiographical but Kincaid and her colleagues often warn against taking this influence too seriously. Apart from fiction, Kincaid has also published several non-fiction works including A Small Place and My Garden Book.

The themes of her works include the impact of colonialism on African and African-American populations, sexuality and gender and emotional and psychological changes accompanying adolescence.

Writers like Dereck Walcott and several literary critics including Henry Louis Gates Jr and Susan Sontag have pointed to the merits of Kincaid’s writing and its place in developing a postcolonial consciousness. She has been honoured with several awards including the Guggenheim Award for Fiction, Awards from both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Arts and Sciences amongst others. She has also been conferred with two honorary doctorates from Tufts University and Brandeis University.

Kincaid continues to live in the United States and write fiction, popular newspaper articles and teach at various academic institutions.

Introduction to the Novel Annie John

Annie John was published in 1985. It was Kincaid’s first piece of fiction and received much critical acclaim. It is considered a bildungsroman or a novel that depicts the maturing of a character from childhood into an adult. It traces the physical, psychological and intellectual growth of the central character Annie in the novel. The novel chronicles the life of Annie, a little girl, who lives on the island of Antigua with her mother and father. It traces the experiences of the child until the age of seventeen when she leaves home. Like many Caribbean novels in this genre, Annie’s movement away from her mother and society is similar to the movement of the region from colonialism to independence. Critics have argued that Annie’s difficult and often confused relation with her mother is reflective of the relation between Antigua and its British imperial rulers. It won the Center for Fiction’s Clifton Fadiman Medal in 2010 and was shortlisted for many prestigious literary awards including International Ritz Paris Hemingway Award.

A Summary and Analysis of the Novel

Chapter One of the novel titled “Figures in the Distance” opens with Annie’s voice telling the reader about when she first became aware of death.The family was living in Fort Road away from the town house in Dickenson Bay Street because it was under repair. With very little to do in the isolated farm, Annie would mind the pigs and ducks and says the only thing she liked to eat were the hard-boiled duck eggs. The cemetery was visible from Annie’s house and in this house for the first time at the age of ten her mother described to her what was being done there by the people she could see. Annie describes the people she saw at the cemetery as “ stick like figures, some dressed in black, some in white, bobbing up and down in the distance.” Having come to know about this phenomenon called death,the ten year old.

Annie’s voice tells us about her fears of dead people who showed up and would follow you until you joined them, the smell of wood and varnish at the undertaker’s shop in town and the many ways in which people mourned their dead.She also becomes aware that children, like herself, too could die. The death of Nalda,whom Annie describes as “a girl smaller than I, a girl whose mother was a friend of my mother’s” evoked strong feelings of repulsion towards her mother. This was because she felt sickened at the thought of her mother’s hands, which had stroked the dead girl, washed and dressed her, touching her. As is typical of kids that age, Annie discusses her new fascination for death with friends at school and they swap stories. Her attitude towards everything during that time was shaped by this new found awareness of death. She even stopped talking to another girl whom she liked very much because her mother had died. Annie soon begins to attend funerals out of her fascination for death. The church bell tolling for the dead would be her signal. She would make enquiries about who had died and make her way to their home or the funeral parlour to see for herself. As she describes it, she never felt anything because she did not know the person and went “just out of curiosity”. Annie finally got to see a dead person whom she had previously seen alive, a humpbacked girl who was her age. She describes the face of the dead girl lying in the coffin to be the same as before except that her “eyes were closed and she was so still” and compares it to that of picture that wasn’t real or lifelike. Annie walked home that day wondering if the ghost of the girl would appear to her “standing under a tree” and get her too. The chapter  ends with her mother punishing her for forgetting to get the fish for dinner. She is made to eat her dinner outside “alone, under the breadfruit tree” and although her mother had said she wouldn’t kiss her goodnight she eventually did.

In this chapter, Kincaid’s portrayal of the young girl’s first encounter with the idea of permanent loss signified by death is important. She conveys the way the child makes sense of things by describing the: smells; of bay rum which her mother smelt of when she came home from a friend’s daughter’s funeral or pitch pine and varnish at the undertaker’s shop; feelings of repulsion at her mother’s hands that had touched a corpse; fears of ghosts coming to haunt her; the still-life character of death and the way it completely absorbed her making her forget herself. By taking the reader into the child’s mind, Kincaid manages to separate the experience of grief accompanying death from all the other things that mean or symbolise it. It is this style of writing that has earned her the distinction of being able to portray the lives and realities of black people without taking recourse to large labels of racism or oppression.

Chapter Two titled “The Circling Hand” describes Annie’s encounter with sex, sexuality and recognition of human beings as sexual beings. She describes her physical connection with her mother when she was a child. The way her mother held her, kissed her, the way she followed her mother everywhere and the rituals of joy they shared. As she turned twelve, all this changed and her mother began asserting the difference between their bodies. She was stopped getting dresses out of the same material for both of them, stopped rewarding her with a kiss every time she spoke to her and began insisting on her learning new things to prepare to become the young lady she was becoming. As Annie tell the reader, her “paradise” was lost. She found her mother’s punishment for not attending the piano or manners classes she was sent to, or not doing her chores properly to be very harsh. This new attitude of her mother accompanied other new things like the physical changes in her body during puberty, the change of school and friends and her experimentation with fashioning a new self what  she described as “ a new set of airs” she would put on. As she endures these tumultuous changes of adolescence, one day Annie sees her parents getting physically intimate and her entire perception of her mother, a beautiful, strong creature until then changes. The sight of her mother’s hand circling the father’s back as she kissed his face made her mother look like some unfamiliar creature. She also begins to talk back to her mother and finds herself attracted to a girl in her new school called Gwen.

In this chapter, Kincaid captures the overpowering effect of bodily changes and sexual attraction in adolescents. As she reminds us here, the discovery of sexuality and maturing of the body are a strong force on shaping the psyche of the teenager. Annie’s resistance at inculcating proper manners and lady like talents show how the norms and ways of an  imperial society don’t fit in organically with Annie’s world. Having a bowl of plums decorate a piano or learning the correct way to courtesy seem ridiculous to the teenage Annie. Her mother’s refusal to acknowledge the person she is without this learnt behaviour hurts her.

Once Annie understand the changes occurring in her body and recognises desire, in this case for Gwen, the perception of her mother, whom she now recognises as a sexual being, becomes less glorious and admirable. Even while not fully understanding what’s going on, the associations that sexuality bear; loss of the paradise of childhood, make it shameful or negative for Annie. This is visible in the defiant attitude Annie takes against her mother as she begins to for the first time talk back to her after she observes her parents becoming intimate.It is clear Annie thinks her mother to be shameful. Similarly when she withholds her overpowering feelings for Gwen from her mother she indicates that she doesn’t feel very proud about them.

The teenage Annie’s anger against the forced norms of proper society and her hurt at the attitude of disavowal from her mother when she can’t become proper enough, parallel the attitude of hurt expressed by colonised populations who are tormented by the colonisers for their lack of civilisation. Annie’s awareness about her attraction towards Gwen also highlight the raw and unrestricted nature of human desire which is often, past childhood, tutored into particular ideas of the norms of sexual attraction.

Chapter two ends with a paragraph describing her entire experience of the first day at her new school from the unfamiliar students she saw to her coming home arm in arm with Gwen. Yet this is a mere synopsis of the detailed description of this day in Annie’s life.

Chapter Three titled “Gwen” gives minute details of the adolescent Annie’s interaction with a new set of people: her English breed teachers and the girls at school. The chapter details Annie’s impression about both the formal education system of the British colonial establishment with its subjects, its disciplining structure and the well trained English teachers and the constant negotiations by students of the structure of education imposed on them. Annie contrasts the well scrubbed odourless classrooms she had seen and its actual smell and feel when it was populated to draw attention to the lack of organic relations between the existing education system and its subjects. As Annie recounts the contents of her first assignment “ an autobiographical essay” about the special bond between her mother and herself, the entire class is moved by the story of her feeling abandoned by her mother when they are out for a swim and the two get separated. This chapter also describes Annie’s entry into puberty and the start of menstruation. The experience makes Annie wish for the return and perseverance of her childhood where the friendships she shared with her friends and their simple desires would remain unhindered. The (colonial) school and the church however came in the way of this as is evident from the scene where Annie describes herself to be surrounded by her amazed girlfriends at school, while she described the experience of menstruation. The scene where Annie is talking to her girlfriends in the schoolyard with the church and the school in sight signifies the influence these institutions of colonial power had on shaping the experiences of girlhood.

Chapter Four Titled “The Red Girl” describes the rebellious nature of teenage Annie. She begins to court danger and things outlawed by her society like being dirty, stealing or telling lies. For Annie all that is outside of her world is represented by The Red Girl who rarely washes, changes clothes, combs her hair or attends Sunday School. In addition she plays with rough boys and can climb trees and do other things like boys. Annie called her the red Girl because when she saw her for the first time, in Annie’s imagination, she felt the girl was surrounded by flames. The description of Annie thinking of rescuing her and them having a wonderful time together occur twice in the chapter indicating that the girl represents something that is dangerous like fire and that Annie felt drawn towards this unfamiliar and dangerous way of living. They become thick friends and do all sorts of forbidden activities like climbing the lighthouse or playing marbles.Annie’s mother soon finds out about her playing marbles and gives her a tough time about it. Thankfully for Annie the Red Girl  moves away and she has very few temptations to hide from her mother.

Chapter Five titled “Columbus in Chains” takes a deep look at the repercussions of colonialism through Annie’s experience at school learning about The West Indies and its history. The child’s voice turns on its head several important questions about the colonial encounter like what role the British colonisers played in the Caribbean society and posits simple and uncomplicated takes on the history of slavery. By focusing on Ruth, a rather dull girl in Annie’s class, who has come from England, Kincaid manages to overturn assumptions about intelligence and civilisational superiority. She also provides an imaginative alternative to the colonial encounter when she describes a hypothetical situation where the roles: English Coloniser and Caribbean colonised, were to be reversed. Annie feels confident that in that situation the African people would have got to know the Europeans better and acknowledged their difference without trying to change them. In contrast, Annie would have us note, the descendents of the slaves like herself were continually forced to acknowledge  the  superiority of the white people by learning their ways. The chapter describes a scene in Annie’s new school when during a history lesson about the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean island of Dominica, Annie comes across a picture of Christopher Columbus in chains being deported to Spain. The young Annie who seems, very unusually for her age, aware of the violence of colonialism, felt jubilant at seeing this triumphant conqueror of her people in chains. When she hears her mother talking gleefully about the debilitating condition of her grandfather back home in Dominica, Annie instantly connects with the joy her mother feels at witnessing the fall of the tormentor. This aligning of patriarchy and colonial rule is one of the major theme of Kincaid’s work.The forcible discipling of young Annie and the punishments imposed on her due to her unwillingness to just submit to the version of history and propriety that they imposed on her all made Annie extremely resentful. Kincaid’s description of the secret lives the girls led outside the watchful eyes of their parents and teachers provides the reader with an idea of the repression the children in the British Colonial education system felt. Instead of the prayers, hymn, ladylike games and activities taught to them, the children preferred to sing forbidden calypso songs, explore their bodies and shout and dance in what was considered unladylike ways.This was, as Annie’s indicates to us, their natural selves, free and celebratory of life.

Chapter Six, titled “ Somewhere, Belgium” shows Annie struggling to obtain her own identity distinct from her mother. Her old world began to fall apart when she no longer found joy in things she used to like before and seemed to have an inexplicable desire to be different from her mother. Annie describes how she dreamed of desires to kill her mother. This indicates her desire to understand herself and see what it was that made her unique in herself. One of the literary characters Annie identifies with is Jane Eyre. Like Eyre,she sees herself moving away from the oppressive atmosphere of her existing life and living a life that would make sense to her. The authorial voice describing Annie’s realisation of herself as ugly and out of place indicates the torment the young women felt as she tried to find somewhere to belong. The society that she lived in only looked at her as a subordinate creature. Like the games the boy Mineu and she played as children, where Mineu would act out all the roles and Annie would be given a small part, Annie could see that all the good parts to be played were taken up by someone else. She could only stand and watch or play a very obscure role. When Annie takes a detour on her way home from school and goes to the Market street, she encounters Mineu and his friends. As they had done in childhood, the boys ridicule and make fun of her. Her mother who had seen her talking to them feels she conducted herself improperly and expresses disappointment with her. Although Annie longed to make things O.K again by explaining herself, she is unable to do so. She feels she is divided from her mother by a chasm. The only thing that makes her mother and herself behave normally towards each other is the presence of the father. The chapter ends with Annie asking her father to make her a trunk like the one her mother had. The trunk had a special place in Annie’s childhood.Her mother kept all of Annie’s things in it and going through the trunk together with her mother telling her stories about the articles inside was a special ritual in Annie’s childhood. A new trunk would give Annie her own space and memories to take into her adult life. Annie also feels afraid that her mother’s influence would always shape her life. As she puts it she feared that her mother’s shadow would be standing between herself and the rest of the world.

Chapter Seven, “The Long Rain” marks a departure from the development of Annie’s character from childhood through adolescence that had occupied earlier chapters. The  chapter begins with a description of the drought that had persisted for over a year and the arrival of the rains. Annie falls sick and, although fifteen, is reduced to an infant who can’t feel much, understand the words her parents are saying or reflect on memories she has. The chapter also describes the rituals and healing practises that are native to the region and contrast with the Englishman’s medicine systems. We are provided several details of how the English doctor, Dr Stephens diagnoses and tries to cure Annie and what the Obeah woman Ma Jolie tries. Both Annie’s father and her grandfather Pa chess disapproved of the native healing practises. One day during her illness, Annie’s grandmother Ma Chess comes to stay with them and look after Annie. She hears stories of how her uncle died even though the English doctor was treating him and he seemed to get better. as Annie lies delirious in her bed, she thinks of the English lady at the hardware store who never finds her special although she goes to great lengths to curtsey and be well mannered. Regardless of Annie’s participation in Brownie meetings and reintegration of allegiance to England as was required of the members, as Annie describes it, she felt insignificant and small, something like a toy. At the end of her illness when Annie steps back into her old life she finds it unbearable. In her words, she realises “ how much the whole world into which I had been born becomes an unbearable burden and I wished I could reduce it to some small thing that I could hold underwater until it died.” As Annie returned to school she found that she had grown significantly taller. Her attitude towards everything was also one where she wasn’t afraid of being different. Everything around her was marked by “envy and discontent” and yet this made her, Annie tells us, happy in a way she hadn’t felt before.

Chapter Eight,” A Walk to the Jetty” is the concluding chapter of the book. It describes Annie leaving the island of Antigua to go to England. In the chapter, Annie is seventeen and considers her transition into adulthood complete. She begins to describe her identity and also to recognise where it separates from her parents. Along with the physiological changes in her body, Annie recognises that she is capable of hypocrisy like her parents had been. Just like they had told her that they would love her and always be near her when she was a child, all the while “ proposing and arranging separation after separation” including the proposal to send her to England, Annie while appearing normal to her parents, vowed silently to never return to the island. As she prepared to depart instead of the longing for the familiar that one would hope from a young girl leaving home, Annie feels contempt for all that she is leaving behind. Her mother’s friends who came to say goodbye appeared tiresone to Annie, the obeah woman’s handiwork to protect her belonging and her from evil spirits were things she never wanted to see again. The thought of the daily and familiar routines of her parents and neighbours evoked disgust and she hoped never to hear them again. Although she once considered Gwen the love of her life,now she felt cold and aloof as she said her goodbyes to Gwen. All the people on the island who had rebuked her for not doing ladylike things, such  as sewing, properly, Annie wished to place on the “dustheap” of her life as she left the island. The novel ends with Annie passing the shops, banks, library and church that were part of her life on the island on her way to the jetty. Once she boards the ship she is overcome with feelings of both joy and sorrow. Having waved goodbye from the deck Annie lies down in her cabin thinking about the movement of the ship and we can guess that she is thinking about the life that awaits her.

Four: Characterisation in the Novel AnnieThe main character and the voice of the narrator, Annie is the centrepiece of this novel. The experience of life on the island of Antigua presented in the novel is solely through the eyes of Annie a rebellious teenage girl. Her perception of the world she encounters acts as a filter for the reader. The descriptions she provides sometimes appear contradictory and the reader gets view into the complex mind of the young Annie. For example, Annie provides a description of her mother as s a glorious and beautiful creature with nice white teeth and a beautiful head. Annie just loves this woman but and at other times when she is made to do things she doesn’t like, like eating breadfruit she describes the same beautiful features as resembling one of a crocodile. There is one thing that Annie’s character maintains throughout the novel, an intense feeling, either love or hate, sometimes both equally, towards anything she encounters around her. It is impossible for Annie to not feel strongly about everything. Even if she loses interest in one person or activity she quickly substitutes it with another equally strong fixation. In the beginning of the novel it was death, then her mother, then Gwen, then the Red girl and finally her own self. Annie’s ability to master easily what was taught to her at school and home make it difficult for her parents or teachers to punish her severely for her many indiscretions. It is as if she is perfectly capable of being moulded into any desired shape but has an individual will that will not submit to anything completely. She represents the raw and free thinking native who has retained a consciousness that makes her continually aware of what is being done to her and how she is being changed. She is a sharp contrast to the colonial powers’ understanding of the natives as without free will or intelligence. Having understood early on the role of the education system in subduing her natural self, Annie adopts a rebellious attitude to circumvent these efforts. She does forbidden things, keeps bad company and refuses to choose her teachers and tutors as models for herself. In an environment where both her gender and her race make her doubly distadvantaged, Annie uses her fierce spirit and sharp intelligence to short-circuit the powers that try to control her. She is representative of the native who resists the imposition of the colonisers way of life on them and even at the risk of unpopularity and punishment holds on to their own sense of the world and who they are. Annie’s character, as a black adolescent growing up in the colonial period, stands in for the confusion, misery and hopelessness of the colonial subject.

Mrs John 

Annie’s mother Mrs John is also a significant character in the book. She is also named Annie. The reader is never able to get a really complete description of this woman as it is always presented to us through Annie’s impressions of her mother and this changes from time to  time depending on what Annie is going through. We can gather that Mrs John comes from  the island of Dominica and left home due to differences with her father Pa Chess. Annie’s describes how her mother felt happy on receiving news of her father’s ill health. This tells us that Mrs John had a difficult time at home. She had Annie with another man before marrying Annie’s stepfather Alexander. She longs to make Annie a proper lady and is proud of her daughter’s achievements at school. However Annie’s rebellious attitude makes her upset. While Annie’s step-father appears to be a modern man who enjoyed playing cricket and prefers English doctors, Mrs John takes recourse to the native wisdom of the Obeah woman as she has learnt this from her own mother. The elaborate bath rituals, protective ceremonies and medicines she learns from Ma Jolie the Obeah woman contrast sharply with her efforts  to get Annie to learn the piano, become a well-mannered lady and follow the prescriptions of the church. This indicates that Mrs John is really not very proud of who she is and what her own heritage is. She holds the English ways superior to her own and wishes her daughter learn those properly instead of her own ways. Her decision to send Annie away to England and her hope that Annie would marry someone there all reiterate this. This also seems true in the area of sexuality. whereas Mrs John ran away from home to marry Annie’s father, and married a second time, she cannot bear the thought of Annie playing with the boys or not being ladylike and not keeping away from them.

GwenAnnie’s best friend in her teenage years, Gwen is a striking contrast to Annie. She doesn’t share the intensity of feeling and emotion as Annie, doesn’t feel the need to escape her circumstances and she follows the natural trajectory of a girl growing up by talking about boys or taking care of her appearance. Towards the end of the novel, as Annie leaves Antigua for England and a better life, we see Gwen reconciling to whatever was available to her and planning to settle down with a boy she knew from a long ago. As Annie puts it Gwen lacks the courage and conviction that drives Annie. This is perhaps the only difference between them because in terms of circumstances and upbringing they are pretty similar.

The Red Girl 

The Red Girl represents another kind of difference from Annie’s identity. She is raw, untamed and can’t be easily controlled. If Gwen is the model of the colonial education system working successfully, The Red Girl represents the raw uncivilised native. Annie was neither a completely Europeanised individual nor someone who wanted to go back to a pristine and untamed idea of self. Annie finds the Red Girl enigmatic but only till her mother finds out about her activities. Once the real possibility of her mother not thinking well of her is in front of her, Annie is glad that she has a way out of the company of the Red Girl and she can go back to Gwen.Though the character of the Red Girl, Kincaid presents to us an alternative to the colonial education system and its products. As is characteristic of Kincaid’s writing there is no glorification of this alternative, it is presented with attention to its own problems and failings.

 Five: Themes in the Novel Impact of ColonisationKincaid’s writing is an important part of the new wave of postcolonial fiction. Annie John deals quite centrally with the effect of colonisation on the island of Antigua. In a sense the adolescent Annie represents the confusion, loss and hopelessness of the postcolonial subject. She cannot belong truly to a society structured and serviced by the English born or those trained by them. At the same time the new ways of living that have permeated life completely in the island make the local traditions of calypso, the obeah woman’s medicines and charms and flora and fauna of the region all appear unconnected to Annie’s own life. The literature of England she reads is leagues away from the immediate concerns of the island. The calypso songs Annie and her school friends hide and sing are posited as a contrast to the alienation of English literature they study. This literature however talks about creatures and natural phenomenon Annie cannot recognise let alone identify with. Yet the loss of this connection between the people and the land is not described in tangible terms that can be repaired. Like the ball of blackness covered in cobwebs that Annie feels inside of her, the loss experienced by the subjects of the colonial empire is an absolute and irreplaceable one. One can only feel it, there is nothing much that can be done to remedy it.

Kincaid’s strategy of negotiation with her colonial past is one where she simultaneously receives and subverts it. This allows her to articulate a unique position for herself. This is really clear in the references to English literary texts in Annie John. Young Annie reads the literature of England meant to tutor the mind to become more English but turns the aims of the canon upside down when she identifies with vanquished characters like Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Instead of accepting the history of colonisation as a saving grace for her island nation, Annie finds great joy in knowledge about the miserable state of Columbus when he was sent back from the island. Towards the end of her schooling Annie’s demeanor, her accent and her emotions all bear testimony to this subversion of the received systems of language and proper social conduct.

Annie’s description of the attitude of white teachers towards her, stand in for the colonial subject’s state of affairs. Irrespective of the subject’s respect for the colonial institutions, ability to master the knowledge systems imposed on him or her and desire to please, he or she always remain invisible and finds no favor among the ruling powers. Mrs Dulcie who leads her Brownie group is a perfect analogy of this situation. Irrespective of how well Annie performed, Mrs Dulcie’s behaviour would be as if they weren’t there at all, i.e they were invisible.

The section detailing Annie’s reflection on Ruth a girl from England in her class also provides an imaginative alternative to the story of colonisation. Annie feels that with the abolition of slavery, white people like Ruth have to live with the constant knowledge of the violence they were part of. In a country far away from home, where the past sins of their ancestors loomed large, Annie feels it is difficult for Ruth to go about her business with as much ease as Annie. It is rare to see the postcolonial question approached from the side of the colonial powers. Yet as Annie reminds us,the shame of the coloniser is as real as the pain of the colonised.The only escape for the people like Annie to escape their fate is to leave the island.

Sexuality 

The novel’s focus on the transition of Annie from childhood through puberty into adolescence brings to light several aspects of the character’s sexual development. By juxtaposing description of physiological changes accompanying puberty in Annie’s body with the recognition of desire and the replacing of old emotional attachments with newer ones, Kincaid is able to present the theme of sexual desire in a broad and complete way. Annie’s childhood is marked with a deep and primal connection with her mother’s body. Symbolically this is represented by the two getting clothes stitched from the same cloth and Annie looking like a small version of her mother. As a child Annie follows her mother everywhere and is kissed and petted a great deal. Annie recounts the shared joy of going through her mother’s trunk, a ritual only the two of them shared unknown to the whole world. They often go for swims with Annie laying on her mother’s back as she swam. The description of this scene reminds us of the connection Annie had with her mother as she occupied the fluid filled womb. With her entry into teenage, her mother begins to draw the line to make Annie realise the separateness of their selves. For Annie, the loss of warmth and comfort that accompany this feels violent and fills her with a sense of loss.

Annie’s realisation of her mother as a sexual being goes hand in hand with the recognition of desire within herself. This marks the separation of the two into separate individuals.

Annie seems to substitute her deep attachment for her mother, which is no longer appreciated like before, with desire of her new friends Gwen and the Red Girl. She considers the danger associated with these new friendships to be payback for her loss of maternal love.

Gender 

Annie John also serves as a commentary on the gender relations among the island population. Through the characters of Annie’s parents, Annie and Alexander, her grandparents Ma and  Pa chess, the woman Catherine who is wife to the two fishermen, and Annie’s own relation with boys her age, the novel depicts the imbalance between male and female privileges in Caribbean society. Annie’s father has had several children from other women and these woman while behaving with properly in his presence heap abuses on Annie’s mother in the market. He is 30 years older than her mother and although he is depicted as a gentle and caring husband, it is unclear what he really thinks of his wife. Like Pa Chess, Annie’s father too controls the choices his wife makes but we infer that he is a lot less draconian than the old tyrant.

Annie feels dismal and weak when the boys make fun of her. Her perception of Gwen as weak because of her decision to marry and settle down indicates to us that in Annie’s eyes life is unfavourable to the woman without her independence and ambition.

Six : Conclusion 

Annie John is said to be autobiographical in nature. Kincaid’s description of her childhood in interviews provides us plenty of reference points for comparison and Kincaid has often conceded that her mother was an inspiration of the novel. However Kincaid and several of her colleagues have warned against taking this comparison between her life and the novel too seriously. The fictional quality of the novel is significant for its role in shifting the discourse and discussion about colonialism. Kincaid seeks to move away from overarching theories about racism and colonialism and bring the texture of life in the Caribbean into focus. The novel is interspersed with details of the types of fish that Annie’s family eats, the landscape that Annie explores around her home and the rituals of the natives. These minute descriptions offer a counterpoint to the indoctrination about England and English ways of living that are suffocating for Annie. By introducing the world to the ways her people live, love, cry and die, Kincaid succeeds at making them more human and dignified.

References

1. Ippolito, E. (1973). Jamaica Kincaid. The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2.05: African American Writing and Culture of the United States.Vol. eds: A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University). Retrieved November 7, 2016 from: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2502
2. Jamaica Kincaid.    (n.d.). Columbia    Guide    to    Contemporary    African    American Fiction. Literary Resource Center. Retrieved June 2014
3. Ferguson, Moira.      “A     Lot     of     Memory:      An     Interview     with     Jamaica Kincaid.” Kenyon Review 16.1 (Winter 1994): 163 – 88.
4. De Ferrari, Guillermina. Vulnerable states : bodies of memory in contemporary Caribbean fiction. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2007.
5. Muirhead, Pamela Buchanan. “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” Clockwatch Review: A Journal of the Arts 9.1&2 (1994-1995): 39-48.
6. Ramone, Jenni. Postcolonial theories. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.