The purpose of this paper is to analyse the mother-daughter structure presented in Annie John, Kincaid`s autobiographical novel as a metaphor for the relationship between the powerful colonizer and the powerless colonized. The representation of the mother in Annie John is ambiguous and ambivalent. On the one hand, the mother in the childhood, in its association with the Africanrooted Caribbean world before Antigua was colonized, is represented as a person who nurtures the daughter, and embodies a paradisiacal pre-oedipal union with the daughter. On the other hand, the mother at the adolescent stage, placed in the specific colonial context of the Caribbean, is represented as a scornful person/colonizer who dominates and controls the daughter`s behavior to keep her as a dependent and subjugated subject. Therefore, the two conflicting worlds, the African and the European, coexist in the contradictory figure of the mother. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Chodorow`s and Kristeva`s feministic psychoanalysis and Bhabha`s notion of "mimicry" and "ambivalence." Kristeva`s work on "abjection" is especially useful and helpful for contextualizing Annie`s individuation and separation from the mother who is represented as enigmatic.
