Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

Form and Content

Annie John, a slim novel—the chapters of which originally appeared as short stories in The New Yorker—is a first-person account of the childhood and adolescence of Annie John, a girl reared on the small Caribbean island of Antigua.

The conflicts of adolescence lead Annie to sail to England at the age of seventeen to study nursing, not a career that she desires but one that offers an escape from the island. As she walks between her parents to the jetty, her departure is edged with conflicting emotions (Stanchich, 48). She, “on the verge of feeling that it had all been a mistake,” almost regrets her decision: “I don't know what stopped me from falling in a heap at my parents' feet.” On the other hand, she wants to escape the “unbearable burden” that her life has become and escape to “a place where nobody knew a thing about me.”

Themes and Meanings

As was the case with At the Bottom of the River, Kincaid's first book, Annie John is a novel about the pain and necessity of adolescent rebellion for a young girl growing up in the Caribbean. Annie is presented as a strong-willed, independent child who charts a course for growing up that is largely of her own making. A point that the author seems to want to make, however, is that this individuality comes at the cost of considerable emotional distress (Murdoch, 53).

Annie's independence of spirit is exhibited early in the novel. Annie's attraction to funerals as a young girl, besides marking her as a young girl possessed of a fiercely unique spirit, is already a movement away from her parents, in that it denotes a nascent awareness of her own mortality and the need to be, ultimately, separate.

Annie is distressed when she realizes that her mother means for her to begin to assert her own identity. This realization leads Annie to “act up” more, and in ways that her mother frequently cannot abide. To an extent, Annie at first wants to be able to misbehave, but she also wants to receive the maternal approval that she needs. As her mother increasingly withdraws her approval, however, Annie asserts her own personality, though the lack she feels at her mother's missing support remains painful, and she and her mother become more careful and guarded toward one another. The chapters “The Red Girl,” “Columbus in Chains ”and“ Somewhere in Belgium” trace the growing strife and distrust between mother and daughter—as well as Annie's sagging spirits—but it is in “The Long Rain” that the situation comes to a crisis.

“The Long Rain” is powerful in part because it lends itself to two culturally separate but complementary interpretations. In Western psychological terms, Annie is suffering through an acute depression brought on by the worsening strife between her and her mother; looked at from an Afrocentric spiritual perspective, Annie's sickness can be seen as a dormant period that she has to endure before the final emergence of her adult identity (Ismond, ...