Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez is a thoughtful and sincere novel about the struggle of self-identification that persists way past adolescence.  The question of “who am I?” is a universal — everyone searches for where they fit within a family, a culture, societal hierarchy — and yet the question becomes particularly acute within the context of colonialism and immigration.  Anna is a woman in her early forties who has lived half her life off the Caribbean island of her birth, immigrating to New York City where she has a successful career and a failed marriage, and who comes back to her island (which remains un-named throughout the novel) for a long visit with her aging parents.

Nunez uses the scenario of a family crisis to stimulate within Anna a personal crisis of identity, not only of where she fits within her family, loved or despaired over, but also of where she fits culturally: on the island, she is of a certain and respected class, highly educated and motivated; in New York she is only a Black professional, with the emphasis on “Black”.  Anna struggles, in heated and uncomfortable discussions with family, through her own observations of the servants in her family’s house and her reminiscences of childhood, and through facts she uncovers about her parents and their families, to figure out what matters to her identity and what does not.

For many people, the country and culture that they come from provides an identity.  But when colonialism is part of that country’s past, and especially recent past, identity must be shared between the old ruling country and the newly-independent country, or one or the other must be wholly rejected.  Class distinctions play their part, with the educated and well-off under the old system more likely to identify with the colonial powers, and the newly-enfranchised (in every meaning of that word) rejecting the colonial culture and traditions. The immigration experience also alters identity; for Anna, it is not only a consideration of the mixed motives that brought her ancestors to her island in the first place (choice versus slavery) but also her own immigration away from her island and to the very different place of New York City.

Throughout the book, Anna is questioning her whole life, past and present and future.  Is she the way she is because she grew up under colonial rule or are her family’s strict notions of propriety and privacy a result of a Presbyterian grandfather on her father’s side and on her mother’s side, a desire to rise in class status?  How does she fit within the Caribbean experience, with her mixed background of chosen versus forced immigration (i.e. slavery)? Has she disappointed her parents by failing at being a wife and never becoming a mother?  Has she become American, as her mother accuses her, and if so, why do the Americans find her so foreign with her tastes for English literature and classical music?  She knows she could never make the compromises her mother made to have the life she has had, nor would she want to become the class-conscious, keep-up appearances at all costs person that her mother is, but what life does she have in New York, with only one true friend and a job based partly on her “Black” status and partly on bringing in profits with chick-lit and ghetto-lit?

Anna is one confused woman but her confusion is presented so surely and so genuinely by Nunez that we are not confused: we are with Anna every step of the way as she struggles to work out how she should move forward, how she can comfort her mother, assure her father, and find her own place in her family, on her island, and in her life back in New York City.  Identity is always in flux, and questions of gender, race, and class are constantly revised.  The best Anna can find is a connection made between herself and another person based not on an amorphous notion of “daughter” or “Black” or “Caribbean” or “Upper-class” but on a shared understanding of either respect (love within her family, finally expressed verbally and physically) or experience, as when Anna meets an ex-Islander who explains “Over there, in American, I’m Caribbean-American, but that hyphen always bothers me. It’s a bridge, but somehow I think there is a gap on either end of the hyphen.  I think if I’m not careful, I can fall between those spaces and drown...”, and she knows exactly what he means.

Nunez writes in a very straightforward manner, with no irony, no levity, and little subtlety, but with great truth. Nunez clearly believes in the power of the novel to convey inner truth — as Anna explains at one point, “good fiction takes one through the corridors of the heart” — and Anna In-Between takes that journey fearlessly.  It is a sincerely compelling and interesting novel, rich in its observations and powerful in its conclusions.