652 Kincaid, Jamaica
family’s envisioning of her future, of her identity—
her sexual identity, among other things.
Sophie Croisy
innocence and experience in Annie John
The young Annie John’s innocence loses ground
little by little as important life experiences become
crucial sites of knowledge for Annie, who is becom-
ing a young adult. The first noteworthy moment of
knowledge is Annie’s first encounter with death,
the death of one of her schoolmates: “until then,
[she] had not known that children died.” Not only
does she find access to knowledge about this uni-
versal and omnipresent concern for humankind,
and thus slowly departs from the self-centered and
careless world of childhood, but she also comes to
know death on a more physical level: She goes to
funerals to witness death and try to understand its
implications for the dead and the living
School is also the place where her own knowl-
edge of life gets expanded and exacerbated through
sharing knowledge with others. It is with her class-
mates that Annie regularly goes to the churchyard
after a week of school: “we would sit and sing songs,
use forbidden words, and, of course, show each
other various parts of our bodies. While some of us
watched, the others would walk up and down on
the large tombstones showing off their legs.” Social-
izing with schoolmates is the occasion for breaking
the rules of language and behavior, which implies a
loss of innocence: no more blind acceptance of the
rules of life at home and life in school when these
rules limit the acquisition of new knowledge. School
is the place where knowledge is produced, where
experience happens. There, Annie learns about
pleasing others, specifically teachers, in order to have
what she wants. She learns about playing “the good
student” and she performs her misdeeds knowing
that this protective veil of quasi-perfection will take
her out of many uncomfortable situations. She thus
learns hypocrisy, but whatever she does, her actions
get redeemed by the fame she manages to acquire
through excellence in school: “I was soon given
responsibility for overseeing the class in the teacher’s
absence . . I would never dillydally with a decision,
always making up my mind right away about the
thing in front of me. Sometimes, seeing my old frail
self in a girl, I would defend her; sometimes, seeing
my old frail self in a girl, I would be heartless and
cruel. It all went over quite well, and I became very
popular.”
Starting to listen to and observe her close sur-
roundings is also an important aspect of knowledge
production for Annie. The people closest to her
are her parents, and her growing up leads to her
questioning the validity of her parents’ teachings:
“Often I had been told by my mother not to feel
proud of anything I had done and in the next breath
that I couldn’t feel enough pride about something
I had done.” The rejection of her parents’ many
double standards and their hypocrisy leads to Annie
dismissing their authority, disobeying them on
every occasion she gets, manipulating them, and
even stealing from them. Her realization that her
father had other women and other children before
her mother and herself came into the picture, her
witnessing her parents having sexual intercourse, her
listening to her father’s stories about his harsh child-
hood, all these elements render mother and father
less perfect and more human, and Annie’s observa-
tions give birth to an emotional distance between
parents and daughter.
This witnessing of their imperfections marks
the end of Annie’s innocence and the beginning of
her involvement in the complications proper to the
world of adults, a world she learns to know and live
in, and at the same time rejects because of its false-
hood. It is a world that focuses on appearances, on
the way you look and behave in public (Annie both
uses this knowledge for her own good and rejects
it when she sees it in others); hence her mother’s
rough reaction when Annie, then 15, only briefly
talks to a boy she used to know when she meets him
in the street on her way back from school. Their
innocent conversation is interpreted by her mother,
who saw the scene, as improper behavior: “it had
pained her to see me behave in the manner of a
slut (only she used the French patois word for it) in
the street and that just to see me had caused her to
feel shame.” Annie, when old enough to do so, will
decide to leave her island and its strict rules in order
to live a less static, less restricted life and not have
to play the hypocritical game of perfection anymore.
Sophie Croisy