The Antiguan girl narrator in Jamaica Kincaid's 1985 novella, Annie John, announces her love for other girls and her plans to marry women when she is grown up in simple, straightforward terms seamlessly incorporated into the narration of her coming-of-age. The simplicity of the declarations of desire between girls, often expressed in the easily recognizable formulas" I love you/her" or" I am in love with you/her," align with the apparent simplicity of style throughout Kincaid's work. Kincaid's simplicity, however, is a foil: she uses th ordinary, the familiar, the commonplace only to subvert them through their own performance.

Appearing to conform to the conventions of the bildungsroman, Annie John is narrated in retrospect by Annie John herself. The first chapter begins" during the year I was ten"(AJ, 3) 1 and the last chapter relates" the last day I spen in Antigua," six years later (AJ, 130). Between the beginning and the end, Annie John recounts her struggles through adolescence as she confronts the expectation that she become a" young lady," negotiates her shifting relationship with her mother, expands her consciousness of colonialism, and forms erotic attachments to other girls. At the end of the book, after she has passed through several forms at school, entered puberty, and emerged as a young adult, Annie John finally waves goodbye to her island and her family. The classic bildungsroman traces the singular account of a universal (read: white, male) protagonist who progresses from childhood into adulthood, where marriage consummates his self-realization in community. Although he may take a few detours, his path is one of relatively straightforward development. The genre has been reworked in certain ways to make room for" other" identities; whence, for example," the female bildungsroman" and" the Caribbean bildungsroman." Annie John can be, and has been, fit into both of these categories. 2 However, Annie John undermines as much as it mines the bil-dungsroman, in a way that can perhaps best be understood as queer: it bends