Book Review: Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez

“Over there in America, I’m a Caribbean-American, but that hyphen always bother me. It’s a bridge, but somehow I think there is a gap on either end of the hyphen. Sometimes I think if I am not careful, I can fall between those spaces and drown” (347).

Paul Bishop, the speaker in this section of Anna In-Between, voices the apprehension of many Caribbean-Americans about the lack of rootedness they encounter in North America and it is one of the themes in the latest novel by award winning novelist, Elizabeth Nunez. But to limit any reading of the novel to yet another treatise on Caribbean alienation in a metropolitan country would be to miss the intricacies of Nunez’s storytelling. For Anna In-Between is a novel filled with intriguing characters written by a author with a catholic literary imagination.


It is tempting to think of Anna In-Between as merely the story about a Trinidadian woman, Anna Sinclair, who returns to the island for a vacation only to discover that her mother, Beatrice Sinclair (with whom she has never been close) has breast cancer, and to watch how the family members cope with the disturbing change. But in this aptly named novel, Nunez explores nearly every variation of Anna’s in-between-ness through highly charged scenes and with characters perfectly suited to explore the ideas that Nunez presents in the novel.


As a highly literate protagonist, Anna Sinclair, a senior editor at Equiano Books and who is fast approaching mid-life, is caught between the limiting stereotypes of African-Americans, “For in America she is black, and in America the ways of black people have been defined, set in stone,” and Caribbean-Americans, “Is a true West Indian woman one who plasters her face with make-up, layering her cheeks with rouge, her lips with bright red lipstick?” (75). Anna bristles at either definition, for she is in many ways a crossroads figure and as such possesses a Janus-like capacity for being able to comprehend disparate points of view.


As a member of a privileged class in Trinidad, Anna is also caught between the democratic ideals of North America and the old colonial values that are preserved by compliance with unspoken rules of privacy and “knowing one’s place” (26). In her discussion with Singh, the family gardener, the social inequity is placed in stark contrast:

“How casually she accepts that. He knows his place. Her friends in America would be shocked to hear she thinks this way, her African American friends especially… but having a place and knowing where others are in relation to one’s place is to have the comfort that order brings, the reassurance of stability” (26).

Anna is able to parse the difference between privacy and intimacy in the relationship of her mother, Beatrice Sinclair, and her father, John Sinclair, another theme that Nunez explores throughout the novel. “This obsession with privacy” (73) is carried to absurd lengths when Anna’s father, John Sinclair, becomes aware of his wife’s cancer: “I saw blood on my vest, he says,” (57), yet John Sinclair does not say or do anything to violate his wife’s sense of privacy.


 When Anna confronts her father, whom she had always adored, she is flabbergasted by his response:

“You saw blood on a vest she wore. Blood, Daddy?”
“I knew she would tell me when she was ready.”
“But you must have known…?”
“Yes.” It is a simple acknowledgement of information he has kept to himself” (57).

Nunez’s prose cuts through many of the social hierarchies that still divide post-colonial Trinidad and the West Indies. The characters “know their place” and do not want to disturb the boundaries. Anna, on the other hand, while cognizant of the social constraints tries to break through her parents’ frame of reference because of the limits they place on her connection with her mother, who enforces colonial mores in nearly every social interaction: “In my day,” she says, “mothers did not do that; they did not hug and kiss their children. The queen…” (317).


To which Anna counters:

“She was protecting her progeny.”
“I don’t know what you mean.’
“Lust,” Anna says.
“Lust?"
“They weren’t as lucky as we are. They didn’t have birth control. So no hugging or kissing relatives. Not even your children. It was one way to prevent pregnancy, to keep bad thoughts out of the minds of relatives” (318).

I usually develop an immediate disdain for books in which the main character is a writer or editor, but in the case of Anna Sinclair, Nunez has found a character perfectly suited to deconstruct ideas about class, race, and socio-economic relationships in the Caribbean and North America. Anna’s knowledge of literature (from Shakespeare to Derek Walcott) and music (from Bach to Nat King Cole and calypso) doesn’t seem forced and her musings place the action within a historical and cultural context. With Anna In-Between, Elizabeth Nunez, the author of many other award winning novels such as Prospero’s Daughter, has written the quintessential Caribbean-American novel.

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