Annie John 651between a childish attachment to the past and the
prospect of an independent life on the old continent,
the life of a young adult.
Sophie Croisy
identity in Annie John
Annie John, from the very start of the story, does
not show a personality that would compare with the
image her mother (and main caretaker) has of her as
a child. Neither, as she grows up, does she become
the young lady her mother wants her to become.
Through a series of trials, Annie John constructs
her own identity outside the frames of reference her
mother would like to impose on her (so that she can
become a proper young Antiguan lady with a good
education and a good husband to boot). As a girl
of 10, her attraction to beautiful things and beauti-
ful people and her desire to control them leads her
to show both kindness (mainly the type of kind-
ness that brings forth her intellectual superiority)
and violence (she hurts the thing she loves in an
attempt to control it). This behavior is made visible
by her relationship with Sonia, a school friend: “I
loved very much—and so used to torment until she
cried—a girl named Sonia . . . I would try to get to
school early and give her my homework so that she
could copy it . . . I thought her beautiful and I would
say so . . . At recess, I would buy her a sweet . . . Then
I would pull at hair on her arms and legs—gently at
first, and then awfully hard, holding it up tight with
the tips of my fingers until she cried.” This love-
hate relationship with beautiful girls her age is a
running motif throughout the novel (her schoolmate
Gwen and a wild girl she names “the Red Girl” will
be Annie’s adolescent crushes), as are the cruelty,
lies, and disobedient behavior resulting from an
unquenchable curiosity, an attraction to the forbid-
den, and a desire for independence and freedom fed
by an intelligence way above average. For instance,
still at the age of 10, she lies to her mother about
her whereabouts in order to go to a funeral and see
a dead body after having been forbidden to go. Later
on, she will “go to the lighthouse behind my moth-
er’s back” and experience the height, the danger, the
dizziness when at the top accompanied by her love,
the Red Girl, of whom her mother knows nothing.
In order to keep her mother and father happy, how-
ever, she lies and cheats so they will not know what
she thinks, who she is, what she really wants. She
constructs her true identity away from and outside
of her parents’ ring of control.
She puts her intelligence to good use as she
always performs wonderfully in the English school
system of Antigua, which makes her family really
proud. However, even though she takes in the
education received through that system and uses
the system for advancement, she has a mind of her
own and is critical of this system and its colonial
context: She knows quite well what England, the
motherland, did to her African ancestors, though
she keeps her critiques to herself. Among other
things, she secretly loves looking at the “Columbus
in Chains” picture in her history book “to see the
usually triumphant Columbus, brought so low,
seated at the bottom of a boat just watching things
go by.” Her intelligence also helps her become a
respected and feared leader among her girl friends
outside the classroom. She is the strong and bold
mind upon which the group relies, a group infused
with Annie’s love for independence, misbehavior,
and her dismissal of the rules, regulations, and
expectations of the adult world: “We were sure that
the much-talked-about future that everybody was
preparing for us would never come, for we had such
a powerful feeling against it, and why shouldn’t our
will prevail?” As she grows up, Annie continues to
refuse the intrusion of the inconvenient rules of the
adult world, but as always, in front of her mother
and family, she tries to “pass” as a proper young
lady. Nonetheless, she feels a secret love for other
girls and is happy with her secret wanderings and
her manipulative ways, so much so that even as she
grows into a young adult, she manages to preserve
and further develop this self-constructed identity
based on self-trust and the rejection of traditional
notions about life and expectations for women.
When Annie is 17 and about to leave for England,
she can hardly hide her feeling of repulsion when
her mother tells her, “ ‘you are a young lady now,
and we won’t be surprised if in due time you write
to say that one day soon you are to be married.’ ”
“ ‘How absurd!’ ” are the words of Annie in response
to her mother’s commentary, a response that fur-
ther emphasizes Annie’s clear departure from her