One Country, One Book — Antigua and Barbuda

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid (1985)

Jamaica Kincaid falls under the most famous novelist from the country category. It’s easy to view Annie John as an autobiographical roman à clef. Like the protagonist, Kincaid had a difficult relationship after early childhood with her mother, although for slightly different reasons. Like the protagonist, Kincaid leaves Antigua as a teenager to live internationally — Kincaid as an au pair in America, Annie John as a nursing student in England. She said, “I write about my mother and her influence on her children and on me all the time. She’s dead now and I found that even that was a source of inspiration or something..”

Here, the fact that the setting is in Antigua is relevant to the way that Annie is raised and the kind of schooling and socialization she experiences, but it’s a background setting instead of the focus of the story. The focus is internal to Annie’s relationships and emotions. My first thought was that her ambivalence toward her childhood feels universal even though many of the details are strange. But what is universality? I think that often, when an American speaks of universality, she means a situation that an American can relate to despite its ostensible foreignness, since America is at the center of her universe. Perhaps the stories of war and loss from previous countries might be just as universal, but outside my own experience.

On the other hand, some of the stories have felt extremely specific to their place and time in a way that excludes universal experience. It seems unlikely that ongoing blood feuds between families is a universal experience. Let me instead say that despite the outward differences, I personally relate to this narrative of growing away from mother, peers and school, and this was the first book so far that I found thus relatable.