“Annie John is considered one of the best examples of the Caribbean bildungsroman or novel of development” writes Paravisini-Gebert in her critical companion to Jamaica Kincaid and continues: The eight chapters or stories that compose the text follow young Annie from the age of ten till she leaves Antigua at the age of sixteen, and recounts her maturation as a bittersweet process of alienation and loss. [...] Kincaid invites us to read in Annie’s physical maturation – her breasts develop, she begins to menstruate – and emotional growth – depicted primarily through her struggles to separate from her mother – a mirror to her island’s movement from colonialism to independence (29-31). The setting of Annie’s growth into maturity takes place on the small island Antigua . At the beginning of the story, when Annie was a child, “her early social connections are naturally filtered through her mother,” and she is “literally removed from social contacts” (Paravisini-Gebert 108). However, Annie’s social connections broaden as the story develops, according to Paravisini-Gebert: Her world, which is confined to the home and immediate neighbours at the beginning of the story, grows progressively wider – the scope of Annie’s friendships and acquaintances, as well as the geographical space she occupies, broadens as the story progresses, until at the end she has turned back on Antigua and looks ahead at a seemingly limitless and foreign social horizon” (108). Annie’s mother, also …show more content…
In a game we were making up on the spot, I took off all my clothes and he led me to a spot under a tree, where I was to sit until he told me what to do next. It wasn’t long before I realized that the spot he had picked out was a red ants’ nest. Soon the angry ants were all over me, stringing me in my private parts, and as I cried and scratched, trying to get the ants off me, he fell down on the ground laughing, his feet kicking the air with