Antigua and Barbuda: Annie John

I am slowly working my way through countries that start with A in the Read the World (or Reading Around the World, depending where you look) Challenge. That means that after reading Transparent City from Angola, the next destination was Antigua and Barbuda. It’s another country I knew next to nothing about, so my homebound hide was excited to visit, even if it was only between the pages of a book.

Antigua and Barbuda

I probably would not have remembered its existence while trying to name all the world’s nations. But if asked about Antigua and Barbuda, I would have known it was in the Caribbean. And I could have guessed it was a small nation made up of two islands. And that’s as far as I would have gotten. But I have a soft spot for small island nations (see Japan, Iceland, Azores), so I welcomed the chance to find out more.

A British colony from the mid-1600s to the middle of the 20th century, Antigua and Barbuda only became a fully independent member of the British Commonwealth in 1981. Geographically, it is part of the West Indies, and includes a handful of smaller islands in addition to the nominal two. The population of just under 100,000 is overwhelmingly of African descent, and while the official language is English, Antiquan Creole is commonly spoken. The economy relies almost entirely on tourism, and like all small islands, they are particularly vulnerable to climate change.

Choosing the Book

The most famous writer, and probably the most famous person, from Antigua and Barbuda is Jamaica Kincaid. A Year of Reading the World chose Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy. Kincaid is an author whose name I recognize, but whose work I’ve never read before. Although, like the authors of most of the books in this challenge I’ve read so far, she does not live and work in the country, Kincaid is actually from Antigua and did grow up there. But Lucy takes place in the U.S. So I checked Kincaid’s bibliography and spotted her first novel, Annie John. This one ticked all the boxes: a novel that takes place in the country, written by a woman who is from that country and not a member of the colonizer class. My local library had a copy of it. This was actually the easiest country to select a book for so far.

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Author

Elaine Potter Richardson was born on Antigua in 1949 and moved to the United States at the age of 17. She changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973, around the same time she began writing. She wrote for the New Yorker and other magazines, published her first collection of short fiction, At the Bottom of the River in 1983, and her first novel, Annie John, in 1985.

Her books are known to be loosely biographical and to explore colonialism and racism through a deeply personal lens with stories that often focus on the mother-daughter relationship. Her writing style is described as deceptively simple and lyrical.

Annie John

Annie John is the story of a young girl growing up on Antigua, told in the first person from the perspective of the girl many years later. The stories are told anecdotally, not quite in chronological order, just the way they are when older folks sit around the table with snacks and talk about what things were like when they were growing up. As a very young child, the title character was intensely close to her parents, her mother especially, but the relationship began to fracture when she reached adolescence. By the end of the book when she boards a ship for England, we get the sense that she never intends to see her family again.

Themes

Was this a queer book? It seemed to be. The book takes place in an almost entirely female world. Annie describes her mother as beautiful, and her father as just sort of there (his biggest role seems to be building things out of pine). She tells of falling in love with a classmate, and their intense relationship that followed (involving a lot of breasts and underwear). When that friend suggests Annie marry her brother, Annie is appalled, and when her parents mention that she might get married someday, she snorts derisively, “Never gonna happen.” But I’ve read lots of older books that talked about girlish attitudes in similar language. In eras when homosexuality was far outside the acknowledged realm of possibility, queer coding could be accidental.

It could also possibly explain the rift that formed with her mother around puberty. Except that the scene where her mom freaks out and calls her a slut for simply speaking to boys seems to tip the scale back towards “painfully old-fashioned.” About that rift. Like some other 20th century women writers (Colette for example) Kincaid’s macrophotographic focus on feelings could have distorted the subject. She describes her feud with her mother in terms of who will kill whom first, and her unexplained illness reeks of a mental breakdown. I started to wonder if I was reading a thriller. But then again, teens do tend to hyperbolize, and she could have simply been strongly describing the relatively normal conflicts between a mother and her increasingly independent daughter. Another theory is that the unhealthy parent-child relationship is a metaphor for colonialism. That would explain the mutual destruction, but paternalism and colonialism are imperfect cognates.

Conclusion

At the end of the book, I wasn’t sure what I had just read. The language is as direct and clear as promised, but the story is quite obscure. I can’t say I loved the book. But it was short, easy to read if not understand, and interesting enough that I would be willing to read more of Kincaid’s work. As a reading the world book, it served the purpose well. From Annie John’s uncritical, childish perspective, I learned about Antigua and Barbuda as a place where devout Christians follow traditional African practices and consider it an affront to science but not the church. I chafed at rigid gender roles where good girls don’t play marbles and a woman’s worth is measured by her housekeeping skills. I saw a place where schoolchildren come home for a teatime of tropical fruit, and cricket players are the top celebrities. I felt the hot, dry weather, except when the rains flooded everything.

Details

Annie John, 1985 (1997 reprint)
Jamaica Kincaid
English
‎Farrar, Straus and Giroux
160 pages