Annie John

She smelled sometimes of lemons, sometimes of sage, sometimes of roses, sometimes of bay leaf. At times I would no longer hear what it was 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

we, the descendants of the slaves, knew quite well what had really happened, and I was sure that if the tables had been turned we would have acted differently; I was sure that if our ancestors had gone from Africa to Europe and come upon the people living there, they would have taken a proper interest in the Europeans on first seeing them, and said “How nice,” and then gone home to tell their friends about it

When I picked up Annie John at a used bookstore recently, little did I know that I was about to discover an author who would have a profound effect on me. From the first pages, I was utterly entranced. The writing is deceptively simple, but the images are so vivid and powerful that I could not only picture them in my mind’s eye but feel them in my flesh as if I were Annie.

The novel opens with a chapter exploring young Annie’s fascination with death. This quickly progresses from an interest in wa

When I picked up Annie John at a used bookstore recently, little did I know that I was about to discover an author who would have a profound effect on me. From the first pages, I was utterly entranced. The writing is deceptively simple, but the images are so vivid and powerful that I could not only picture them in my mind’s eye but feel them in my flesh as if I were Annie.

The novel opens with a chapter exploring young Annie’s fascination with death. This quickly progresses from an interest in watching funeral processions to lying to her mother so as to gate-crash local funerals and gape at dead people. I love the wonderful strangeness of Kincaid’s descriptions, like this one depicting Annie’s first observation of a burial:

“I did not know it was the cemetery until one day when I said to my mother that sometimes in the evening, while feeding the pig, I could see various small, sticklike figures, some dressed in black, some dressed in white bobbing up and down in the distance. I noticed, too, that sometimes the black and white sticklike figures appeared in the morning. My mother said that it was probably a child being buried, since children were always buried in the morning. Until then, I had not known that children died.” (p. 4)

Annie John is coming-of-age story; it begins when she is ten and ends when she is seventeen. It takes place in colonial Antigua, but no dates are given. Overall it has a timeless, dreamlike quality: floating sketches of girlhood set in a tropical colonial past. My own parents grew up in colonial Ceylon, so I felt a connection to the place described in the book.

The chapters in the novel are sketches of Annie’s life as she moves through adolescence. At the centre of it is an unflinchingly honest depiction of a love-hate relationship between a daughter and her mother. Kincaid doesn’t shy away from saying ugly things about the woman who bore, raised, and nurtured Annie, and I strongly suspect that much of it is autobiographical.

When Annie is around twelve years old, her mother starts to treat her as a “young lady,” becoming more distant and critical. Annie’s reaction to what she perceives as the ultimate betrayal is to feel “bitterness and hatred” toward her mother. She begins to lie to her mother, steal from her, and purposely do the opposite of what her mother wants just to displease her.

To soothe the pain of losing this first, essential, all-encompassing love, Annie develops passionate friendships with two other girls her age. What psychological insight Kincaid has! I had never before considered the link between splitting off from one’s mother in adolescence and developing intense romantic friendships with other girls as a subconscious attempt to replace the lost mother’s love.

Annie is tormented by what she perceives as a change in her mother, but of course Annie herself is changing even more rapidly as she is going through puberty. From her point of view, it is as if she had had two mothers: the one she had pre-puberty with whom she was fused in mutual love and the one she finds herself with after the onset of puberty whom she perceives as a rival.

Near the end of the novel, the chapter “The Long Rain” describes what seems to be a severe depressive episode during which Annie spends several months in bed, unable to do anything. More than ever, Kincaid uses hallucinatory imagery to draw the reader into Annie’s mental state:

“The photographs, as they stood on the table, now began to blow themselves up until they touched the ceiling and then shrink back down, but to a size that I could not easily see. They did this with a special regularity, keeping beat to a music that I was not privy to. Up and down they went, up and down. They did this for so long that they began to perspire quite a bit, and when they finally stopped, falling back on the table limp with exhaustion, the smell coming from them was unbearable to me.” (p. 119)

I imagine Kincaid intended her surrealistic, incantatory prose to put readers into a sort of trance. I went into the red-hot heart of this strange novel and emerged changed.