Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

In the year I turned fifteen, I felt more unhappy than I had ever imagined anyone could be. It wasn't the unhappiness of wanting a new dress, or the unhappiness of wanting to go to cinema on a Sunday afternoon and not being allowed to do so, or the unhappiness of being unable to solve some mystery in geometry, or the unhappiness at causing my dearest friend, Gwen, some pain. My unhappiness was something deep inside me, and when I closed my eyes I could even see it. It sat somewhere--maybe in my belly, maybe in my heart; I could not exactly tell--and it took the shape of a small black ball, all wrapped up in cobwebs. I would look at it and look at it until I had burned the cobwebs away, and then I would see that the ball was no bigger than a thimble, even though it weighed worlds. At that moment, just when I saw its size and felt its weight, I was beyond tears. I could only just sit and look at myself, feeling like the oldest person who had ever lived and who had not learned a single thing. After I had sat this way for a while, to distract myself I would count my toes; always it came out the same--I had ten of them.

Annie John is a young girl coming of age on the island of Antigua. As a child she clings to her mother, but as she grows older, as they often do, tensions flare. Annie goes to school, where she becomes gifted, popular, and smug; she grows close to a girlfriend named Gwen, and though Annie does not perhaps have the vocabulary to articulate it, we understand her ardor for Gwen is romantic, and then, as puberty continues its march, sexual. Annie grows rebellious; stealing things and hiding them under the house--setting up a comic and intense moment when her mother crawls beneath the house to root out her stash of illicit marbles--doing things to flout her mother simply because she can. She briefly drops Gwen for the companionship of a "wild" girl who doesn't seem to bathe, and though she barely understands her own attraction to her, we can see that it stems from the same impulse as the stealing and the marbles, the desire to have what is unorthodox, outside the limits one's parents have drawn around their existence.

Annie John is separated into titled sections that work both on their own, as short stories, and as pieces of the larger whole. The first, "Figures in the Distance," begins with the line: "For a short while during the year I was ten, I thought only people I did not know died." Young Annie yearns to see death, which, though she lives across from the cemetery, has been invisible to her. She goes to funerals uninvited; she is overjoyed when a girl in her class she doesn't know very well kicks the bucket. There's something counterintuitive, yet perfect, about this beginning: a coming of age book that begins with death. It makes sense, doesn't it, the thought that a process of growing up begins with the first understanding that the process leads toward this particular end? Understanding death, after all, is the shedding of our very first kind of innocence.

One thing that Annie John does very well is depict the way that coming of age is a process of separating oneself from one's parents. Annie's father is a rather distant figure, much older than her mother, and who seems to live a life aloof in his workshop rather than at home. Annie grows up both with and against the figure of her mother; she describes her first sense of separation, or disidentification, when her mother scolds Annie for desiring a dress made of the same pattern as her own. Eventually, she tells Annie, she'll need to become a person of her own rather than an imitation of her, but these are words that will rebound her. As she grows and becomes more headstrong, Annie finds herself hating her mother. What Annie John understands, I think, is that this loathing comes from something other than a place of reason. Yes, her mother can be strict, but more often she is loving. It isn't enough--becoming an adult means revolting, in a way that is secretive and inscrutable even to us, against the people who gave us life, and who hang over us with their obligations of honor and love. Annie John treats this with an attitude that's neither overly cynical nor overly sentimental. Though Annie comes to a kind of partial reconciliation with her mother, she still ends the book by embarking on a steamer headed to England, a place where she can get away from her mother once and for all, and create a new self.

Last year I made a resolution to read more widely from international fiction. Before this I'd never read a book or a novelist from Antigua & Barbuda--now my list of countries read is up to 56.