650 Kincaid, Jamaica
The following themes—coming of age, identity,
innocence and experience—all offer perspectives
from which to reflect upon Annie’s journey toward
adulthood, a journey paved with many obstacles that
acquaint or reacquaint the reader with the difficul-
ties a smart and unconventional young girl encoun-
ters when confronted with the high expectations of
a traditional family and community.
Sophie Croisy
cominG oF aGe in Annie John
The term coming of age implies a series of changes
in the life of a child or adolescent. Generally, these
changes are synonymous with upheaval. Annie John
goes through a series of transitional moments (she
grows from child to young adult) that greatly modify
her self-image and destabilize her relationship with
her surroundings. The text takes her through a series
of realizations that come to deconstruct the truths
she had relied on as a child and leave much room for
uncertainty in her life.
Her first real intrusion from the world of
adulthood happens through death. The death of
a schoolmate—Nalda, 10 years old—forces Annie
to depart from her childhood world of carelessness
and ignorance when she realizes that “until then, I
had not known that children died.” Even if it is a
consciousness-raising event, her attitude toward that
death is rather detached as she turns drama into a
subject of gossip: “At school, I told my friends about
this death. I would take them aside individually,
so I could repeat the details over and over again.”
Though she is confronted with death, she does not
express any real sensitivity to it and intellectualizes
the experience without feeling for the dead and the
mourners. It is only when death gets close, and when
her father tells her the story of his grandmother’s
death that she merges knowing and feeling in her
reaction to death. Her slowly developing ability to
know and feel at the same time shows maturity in
Annie John, though this union of logos and pathos
in dealing with life events will remain, throughout
her growing up, a difficult process for Annie.
On an anatomical level, Annie’s growing up
implies bodily changes that lead to a mis-recogni-
tion of her own self in the mirror: at 12, “small tufts
of hair had appeared under my arms, and when I
perspired the smell was strange, as if I had turned
into a strange animal.” Anatomical disturbances
highly perturb Annie, who often comes to feel
“too big and too small at once” as if the constant
changes that come with growing up leave her in
a middle place between childhood and adulthood
where nothing is familiar, recognizable. This lim-
inal position gets so disturbing and damaging that
Annie falls sick. While bedridden and feverish,
Annie looks at the pictures around her room: “none
of the people in the wedding picture, except for me,
had any face left. In the picture of my mother and
father, I had erased them from the waist down. In
the picture of me wearing my confirmation dress, I
had erased all of myself except for the shoes.” Her
sickness is without a name, but it is a symptom of
a transition that involves a mis-recognition of her
body and surroundings. The erasure of parts of the
people from the pictures she looks at symbolizes this
mis-recognition: Annie is not as she used to be, nor
is her life, nor are her parents’ attitudes toward her.
This new state of things materializes in her mother’s
change of attitude toward Annie from the moment
she turns 12 onward: no more dressing in a fabric
similar to her mother’s, and no more “childish” ritual
of looking through an old trunk full of things from
the past. Thus, Annie experiences the end of a har-
monious relationship with her mother and reads her
mother’s change of attitude as a complete rejection,
which plays a role in Annie’s developing her “transi-
tion sickness.”
Annie’s unclear position between childhood
and adulthood is exemplified through her constant
change of attitude toward life: She goes back and
forth between feelings. She is a child when she hates
her mother for breaking their strong bond and thus
betraying Annie’s love, but she is an adult when she
begins to see her mother as a woman with a life of
her own—not just as the object of Annie’s affec-
tion. She can reject the present and the unavoid-
able march into adulthood by sometimes wishing
that “everything would fall away . . . no future full
of ridiculous demands,” but she can also welcome
the future as she dreams of leaving her family and
friends behind and traveling to Belgium. She will
eventually accomplish her goal of going abroad
though she remains, when she departs at 17, torn