ABSTRACT
The text of The Autobiography of Annie John's mother is accompanied by a single illustration of a Caribbean woman that covers the cover of the book, suggesting the mother. Obviously, the autobiography of her mother is a term of impossibility or of paradox, and here, in this story of the woman whose mother remains forever unknown to her, but whom she continually seeks to tell her life story, though each has been denied the mother's body. At the end of the book, there are two meditations that reenforce the continual, persistent, and unfinished nature of her quest. One is about the primal and generative nature of this attachment - "spiritual and physical, that a mother is said to have for her child, that confusion of who is who, flesh and flesh, that inseparableness which is said to exist between mother and child". The second focuses on the pastness of the past, on what has gone before us.
