Annie and her (m)other in a paradise lost

Maria Aparecida de Oliveira

doi:10.18468/letras.2019v9n2.p07-14

Abstract

In general, Jamaica Kincaid’s fiction is a reflection on gender relations, sexuality, power and motherhood including the bonds between mothers and daughters, adults and children, men and women, colonizer and colonized. The aim of this paper is first to analyze the novel Annie John written by Jamaica Kincaid in 1985, bearing in mind the main character’s relationship with her mother, with her motherland and with the colonial education imposed by the British Empire. Afterwards, the goal is to investigate the colonial discourse and its relation with the canon, by observing in which ways Kincaid subverts the imperialist discourse to develop her own sense of justice and injustice in a world of powerful and powerless.

Highlights

Kincaid’s work has been labeled as autobiographical, as she told in an interview, maybe they are based on the personal odyssey of a girl who began life as Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 on the tiny island of Antigua, a girl who adored her tall, beautiful, intelligent Dominican mother, but who somehow lost that mother’s love, a girl who left the Caribbean island to work as an au pair for an American family, and who, nurtured by anonymity and freedom of New York city in the 1970’s reinvented herself as the writer Jamaica Kincaid
In the article “Jamaica Kincaid’s New York” published in the Rolling Stone magazine, she said that reading Milton’s Paradise Lost gave her the notion of what would become her own central theme, the relationship between the powerful and the powerless. It was a way of articulating her own pain, as Lucifer did, she felt as a child that she had been cast out of her own paradise. It will be discussed the conflictive relationship between Annie and her mother, her motherland and the colonial education she was imposed to
It can be noticed that Kincaid’s fiction writes a historical revision, a feminist one, because it is written on a woman’s point of view trying to shake the values of the patriarchal society

Summary

Introduction

Kincaid’s work has been labeled as autobiographical, as she told in an interview, maybe they are based on the personal odyssey of a girl who began life as Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 on the tiny island of Antigua, a girl who adored her tall, beautiful, intelligent Dominican mother, but who somehow lost that mother’s love, a girl who left the Caribbean island to work as an au pair for an American family, and who, nurtured by anonymity and freedom of New York city in the 1970’s reinvented herself as the writer Jamaica Kincaid. I was sent to someone who knew all about manners and how to meet and greet important people in the world This woman asked me not to come again, since I could not resist making farting-like noises each time I had to practice a curtsy, it made the other girls laugh so. It is important to notice that the Red girl represents the return of the repressed, she is the extremely opposite of what Annie’s mother does not want her to be By doing that she is subverting the obvious and the ordinary coming of age in a colonial racist society. The only problem is that the separation between them will be an inevitable and agonizing process

Annie and the Paradise Lost

Final Considerations