Yesterday I read Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, her first novel and the beginning of her explorations through fiction into the strange relationship between England and the Caribbean Islands it governed for years. England transplanted its culture and systems of education, government, religion, medicine, and even food through the observance of afternoon “tea” to the islands, and worked to eradicate traditional modes of healing, spirituality, and village governance.
The conflict between the colonial power, dictating how things should be done, and the colonized, struggling to maintain sovereignty over personal choices and issues of self-determination is illustrated through Annie John’s schooling, the care she receives when she suffers from a mysterious malady (a very severe depression) and the “magic” her thoroughly sensible mother utilizes to ward off curses against her daughter.
The conflict is also presented through the conflict between parent and child. Annie John is as close to her mother as a child can be, protected and nurtured and loved, and adoring her mother in turn. However, as she approaches adolescence she begins to move away from her mother, quite violently even at times. She finds refuge and love with girls her own age, and even befriends a very wild child so different from herself and from her mother, and of whom her mother deeply disapproves.
Like England, Annie’s mother has strict rules of behavior –how things must be done — and like a Caribbean nation growing in self-awareness, Annie must rebel against the controlling culture of her mother. She transforms the defiance she began as a child, hidden transgressions of stealing and lying, into more overt and open rebellion against her mother and her mother’s ways. But the rebellion has a cost: Annie suffers a severe depression, a breakdown of the body and the spirit and she can hear nothing, taste nothing, and find nothing to soothe her in the people that surround her, nursing her both traditionally through her Obeah grandmother, and with modern medicine through an English-trained doctor.
Annie’s struggle is the age-old struggle of the new generation against the old, both in terms of family, and in terms of governance. Annie must leave her family and Antigua must eventually be free of England. (Ironically, Annie leaves Antigua for England). Annie’s mother knows her daughter will leave; she herself left her family and ventured to a new island to start her own life. And Antigua will also be free: it became fully independent of England in 1981.
Annie John is extremely interesting in how it presents the colonial conflict though a very personal story. And yet I cannot say that I liked this book. As much as Annie shares her feelings, her surroundings, and her friends, I felt removed from the island of Antigua and from the person of Annie. Despite her effusive descriptions and her involved narrative, Annie did not seem real to me. Perhaps this is because the chapters of the book began as stand-alone short stories, and there is a choppiness there that dislocates and isolates the reader. I was set apart, I felt like an observer and not a participant. I stayed in my place, looking on with interest, but I never became engaged with the girl transforming before me.
