Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women's Literature

2: Sins of the Mother? Ambivalence, Agency, and the Family Romance in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John

2 / Sins of the Mother? Ambivalence, Agency, and the Family Romance in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John When asked why she crafts iconoclastic characters that often exhibit a sort of “negative freedom,” Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid explains, “Perversely, I will not give the happy ending. I think life is difficult and that’s that. I am not at all—absolutely not at all—interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite” (“Jamaica Kincaid” [Snell]). Kincaid’s insistence on being “perverse” to readers and reviewers in search of trite happy endings reflects her ongoing interest in creating challenging, unsettling work. Throughout her oeuvre, her obsessive reworking of mother-daughter themes troubles normative notions of family in favor of pursuing what she sees as darker, but more relevant, truths. In texts such as At the Bottom of the River, My Brother, and The Autobiography of My Mother, for example, Kincaid depicts vexed family dynamics that exemplify “negative freedom” and that consequently reveal as much about conflict and alienation as they do about familial affection and loyalty. Thus Kincaid, like other contemporary Black women writers from the Caribbean such as Erna Brodber, Michelle Cliff, and Merle Hodge, invokes a hermeneutics of suspicion toward normative notions of respectability and Black family life and foregrounds the ambivalent connections at the center of many families as a result. Kincaid’s semiautobiographical first novel, Annie John (1985), part bildungsroman and part searing indictment of the dissolution of a motherdaughter relationship, is likewise a case study in “negative freedom.”1 The 46 / CLOSE KIN AND DISTANT RELATIVES novel, set in colonial Antigua in the middle of the twentieth century, traces the young protagonist Annie’s life as she experiences childhood and adolescence under the watchful eye of her domineering mother, Mrs. John, and her close-knit community.2 Like other novels of education , Annie John reveals the various rites of passage Annie experiences in school, at home, and throughout her community. Much of the novel’s most pointed action, however, involves Annie’s growing discomfiture at her changing relationship with her mother and her (in)ability to reconcile her desire for autonomy with her desire to have an unchanging relationship with her mother. Annie John paints a largely vexed portrayal of family, and of motherhood in particular. Mrs. John is a protégé of Victorian sensibilities who is a bit of a domestic tyrant, colluding with colonialism and other forms of kyriarchy. Annie’s ultimate disconnection from her mother, much as in a typical bildungsroman, reveals a heroine poised to maneuver the world on her own terms, away from the stifling confines of her natal home. Yet inasmuch as Annie John is about Annie’s ambivalence toward her mother, the novel also takes part in a larger discussion of women’s roles in families within Black women’s literature in the Caribbean and the United States. Like Praisesong for the Widow, and other Black women’s literature in this tradition, Annie John compels us to consider ambivalence born of the chafing restrictions of respectability politics as a defining feature of many Black women’s social conditions, particularly in the wake of colonialism. Annie John draws attention to respectability politics through the notion of “young lady business,” or the training Annie receives in art, domestic duties, etiquette, music, and general education that will make her “fit” to be a bourgeois wife and mother someday. The novel also invites us to consider respectability politics through the portrayal of Annie’s mother, who, though not the architect of the “young lady business,” which is an institutionalized social construct, is a most ardent convert who zealously seeks to indoctrinate her daughter into its ideology. This chapter’s analysis of Annie John contends that Kincaid’s novel illuminates the role of the paradox of respectability, in which some Blacks aspire to be respectable according to the ideals of respectability politics but also find it difficult, if not impossible, to live up to their professed ideals—a tension that often provokes ambivalence in familial relationships. This ambivalence is a complicated confluence of desire to be close with one’s family and dread of such closeness. More specifically, ambivalence —in the form of Annie’s desire to be close to Mrs. John alongside SINS Of ThE mOThER...