Annie John.

By Jamaica Kincaid. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985, $11.00.

Antigua in the British West Indies is Kincaid's home of origin and the setting for this coming-of-age novel about Annie John, a girl growing into young adulthood on an island wounded by a history of colonialism. Annie's loving early childhood home is transformed when she enters adolescence into a hostile place where her mother sees it necessary to simultaneously push Annie out of her circle of love and exert control over her life. Annie's struggle for independence from her family is similar to Antigua's move from colonialism to independence.

This past summer Annie John was the bildungsroman in my "Life Passages: The Female Experience" course at William Paterson University in New Jersey. The course is a 200-level Women's Studies and General Education elective. Diversity--ethnic and racial, class, sexual orientation, age, ability/disability, and sex/ gender--is a major theme in the six-week course. Students also read Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen, Lucky by Alice Sebold, The Good Mother by Sue Miller, and Memory Board by Jane Rule. Four two-hour class sessions were spent on Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid, and issues relating to girlhood and colonialism. Reading and discussing the Columbus controversy in the text, as well as exploring Annie's relationship with her mother, was an opportunity to address domination issues in class. Annie's relationship with her powerful domineering mother was the focus of many of the class discussions, and the issue of Columbus and colonialism came up as a parallel theme.

Annie John opens with Annie's experiences with death. She is ten years old when she is confronted with the death of Nalda, a younger girl. Her father makes the child's coffin and her mother prepares the dead girl's body for her funeral. Annie is fascinated by death and starts to attend wakes for people that she doesn't know. In order to encourage my students to explore the issue of death, I asked them to write their earliest death memories. I wrote with them and later we shared our writing.

Katherine wrote about the death of her great grandmother in Puerto Rico. Katherine reported that she never feared death. Later, in a response log, she wrote: "It is so weird how we are all scared of death at one point, death is just a part of life." Christina, whose ex-boyfriend died at age twenty-one in a car accident, wrote about fearing death, stating that his death was "the worst experience of my life." Laura tearfully stood up and left the classroom after writing. When she returned she talked about the death of her clearly loved grandfather. Gina wrote about losing several high school friends in drunk-driving accidents. Lindsey wrote about being devastated by the death of a seven-year-old childhood friend and the silence in her home about his death. Writing awakened memories for these and other students. Talking about death memories had the surprise effect of making the class a safe space for future discussions about topics ranging from rape to lesbianism. I shared a story about photographing both my paternal grandmother and my mother after they had died and were laid out in coffins. This led to a discussion of cultural differences surrounding death. I showed the class The Harlem Book of the Dead, an exquisite collection of sepia photographs of African Americans for whom it was "quittin' time" according to the text written by Camille Billops. James Van Der Zee and others took the pictures of infants, children, and adults of all ages in their coffins. I wanted to read the class Alice Walker's story "To Hell With Dying" in the context of our death discussion, but we ran out of time.

Some of the richest discussions were around the issue of mother and daughter relationships. Annie John's words about her menarche encouraged the students to share menstruation stories. Katherine, who had a keen understanding of and appreciation for cultural differences, shared stories that had similarities with Annie John's life. Katherine talked about getting her period at age nine and her mother's engaging the services of a witch doctor. Annie John's mother calls upon an obeah woman, an alternative healer, for her daughter when she becomes ill during her teen years. Katherine referred to a "spiritual mother" in her log and recalls her saying, "En tu vida va ver gente que te quieren y otros que te odion." Katherine translated this as meaning "In your life there will be people that are going to love you and there are people who are going to hate you." Annie John's mother was convinced that one of her husband's former mistresses put an evil spell on her daughter and she seeks spiritual and herbal help from an obeah woman, Ma Jolie. Annie's grandmother, Ma Chess, an obeah woman who lives in Barbados, also tends Annie during her illness. The chapter dealing with Annie's illness led to a discussion about alternative religions, and Katherine, a practitioner of Santeria, talked to the class about this traditional religion of the Yoruba peoples, a religion brought from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas.

Other students, including Evelyn, the mother of three children, shared stories about their relationships with their own mothers. Evelyn reported that she and her mother, who is from the Dominican Republic, "always dashed," just as Annie and her mother dashed. Gina connected Annie's rebelliousness with her own rebellious behavior when her mother remarried. Krista related to Annie's strong childhood bond with her mother. Lara, a student from Argentina, said that her mother was an "inspiration," just as Annie is also inspired by her mother, in spite of their growing differences.

Annie is a spirited girl with the courage of her convictions. The chapter "Columbus in Chains" gets its name from a picture of Columbus in chains in a textbook, The History of the West Indies. Annie knows about her people's history of enslavement and colonialism and about Columbus's murderous treatment of the inhabitants of the islands, and loves this picture. She enjoys seeing "the usually triumphant Columbus brought so low, seated at the bottom of a boat just watching things go by." Beneath the picture she writes, "The Great Man Can No Longer Just Get Up And Go." In class I led a discussion of multiple views of Columbus's "discovery of America." Most of the students hadn't thought about looking at the "discovery" from the perspective of the inhabitants of Hispanola.

The final day of discussion, a guest speaker came to class. Helene, who had written a major paper on Jamaica Kincaid and had spoken with her several times while in graduate school, discussed Kincaid and Annie John. Helene talked about Kincaid's anger about the colonization of her country. She also read "Girl" from At the Bottom of the River, a collection of short stories by Kincaid, and talked with the class about how the story relates to both Annie John and Kincaid's girlhood. I connected Helene's talk with Donna Perry's interview with Jamaica Kincaid as reported in her book Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. Perry asked Kincaid to comment on the autobiographical aspects of Annie John. I told the class that Kincaid replied, "There isn't anything in it that is a lie," but she also talks about tinkering with time in her autobiographical novel.

Annie John is a rich text for bringing to the table issues relating to race, class, gender, and colonialism, as well as mother and daughter relationships and a host of experiences in the life of a child growing into adulthood. Students enjoy reading this novel and are easily wooed into exploring issues of domination and subordination in the context of reading Annie John. In their end-of-thesemester course evaluations, all of the students commented favorably on the novel. One student wrote, "Loved it! Love this author--liked her even more after our guest speaker came and talked about her."

Arlene Holpp Scala

William Paterson University

Is there a book, film, essay, poem, or story you've found particularly useful in the classroom and want to share with other Radical Teacher readers? We are especially interested in Teaching Notes on new materials not widely known, but we would also like to hear about newly rediscovered older works as well as new ways of teaching familiar ones. Contributions should be 500 words or so and should include the following kinds of information: school, course, kinds of students, how you taught the work, difficulties as well as triumphs. Also, please supply the title, author, publisher, and current price (or comparable data for a film). Send a hard copy to Bob Rosen, Department of English, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, New Jersey 07470--and also an e-mail, with the header "Teaching Note," to: [e-mail].