“A Different Sunshine”: Writing Jamaican National Identity through a Girl’s Coming-of-Age Story in Paulette Ramsay’s “Aunt Jen”

This article considers the ways in which Paulette Ramsay’s epistolary novel Aunt Jen (2002) dually chronicles the coming-of-age of its young protagonist Sunshine and the newly independent Jamaica through letters written to an absent mother in the 1970s. Amid the process of contributing to a national literature that reflects Jamaica’s cultural heritage of women figures and women writers, Aunt Jen promotes the search for and actualization of individual and national autonomy through the act of writing––an act of identity formation and reclamation.