Haunted Houses and Ghostly Homes: Kacen Callender's Hurricane Child as a Rewriting of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John

Abstract

This essay responds to the dearth of analysis of young adult literature in postcolonial scholarship by placing Kacen Callender's LGBTQ+ middle-grade novel Hurricane Child (2018) adjacent to Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John (1987), a foundational text of contemporary Caribbean literature. I employ Homi Bhabha's reformulation of Sigmund Freud's unheimlich, or "unhomely," to interrogate how both novels complicate ideas of literal home and island home as places of fun, comfort, and safety. Just as the nostalgic image of the adoring mother discombobulates Kincaid's Annie, the figure of the physically absent mother plagues Callender's Caroline. Both characters live in symbolically haunted houses. Additionally, shame lurks in the corners of Caroline's psyche as she comes to recognize her budding same-sex desires, which put her at risk of being ghosted, or erased, as a valued member of her community. Extending the psychic trauma from the narrators to the histories of their islands, and relying on critical work on the Gothic by Avery F. Gordon, Maisha Wester, and others, this essay excavates politically charged depictions of landscapes for signs of literal spirits and evidence of haunting by slavery, colonialism, and the neocolonial systems of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.