Estrangement, Alienation, and Vulnerability in New Short Fiction by Jamaican Women Writers

In “Pig Head,” the opening story of Zalika Reid-Benta’s Frying Plantain, Kara, the protagonist, laments “the great misfortune of being Canadian-born” (14). The lament is a partial explanation for why she embellishes a story about her summer vacation in Jamaica, and it captures one of the major themes of the book—estrangement. Kara is estranged from the two nations that have shaped her (Jamaica and Canada); she is estranged from her family—an absent father, a philandering quasiabsent grandfather, and a mother and grandmother who, though physically present, keep Kara at a distance emotionally. Central to Reid-Benta’s stories is also Kara’s estrangement from her peers—both the neighborhood first- and second-generation Caribbean Canadian kids, for whom she is not Jamaican enough, and the White Canadian kids at school, from whom she is separated by race and class. The alienation and estrangement Kara experiences in the world around her is also a theme explored in Wandeka Gayle’s Motherland, and Other Stories and Alexia Arthurs’s How to Love a Jamaican. Neither Gayle or Arthurs are as concerned with the contours of second-generation diasporic longing as Reid-Benta, perhaps because both Arthurs and Gayle were born and raised in Jamaica, while Reid-Benta was born in Toronto and of Jamaican heritage. Still, Arthurs’s and Gayle’s stories, too, feature characters who are often required to perform double-voicedness to navigate their social and professional lives. And sometimes even this is not enough to save them from a sense of otherness.

These collections are filled with stories about subjectivity and the ways (mostly) young women navigate a sense of self as they move between the intimate sphere and a globalized world. Some of the terrain covered is familiar to readers of an earlier generation of Caribbean women writers—Lorna Goodison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Olive Senior, to name a few of the obvious forerunners—and Arthurs, Gayle, and Reid-Benta now offer their versions of fraught mother-daughter relationships and romantic liaisons gone awry. But they also chart refreshingly new paths that follow the depth of influence that springs from friendships, especially those between women. Some of these new paths include encounters that never rise to the level of relationships proper, yet they are meetings that change the lives of the characters involved. Many of these stories come back to how Arthurs, Gayle, and Reid-Benta are willing to make their characters face a pool of loneliness that is murky at best and painfully inescapable at worst.

How to Love a Jamaican

In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” the opening story in Alexia Arthurs’s How to Love a Jamaican, themes of friendship, colorism, race, class, and diaspora clash as the main character Kimberly negotiates life as a college student at a predominantly White university in New York City. The Jamaican-born Kimberly migrated to New York at age six with her mother. When the story opens, she is living at home in Canarsie and commuting to school (a fact that already marks her as lower-class among many of the other students who seem well-to-do). When one of her professors compliments her work, she finally gains the notice of the other Black girl in the class, Cecilia, who also happens to have Jamaican parents. Unlike Kimberly, Cecilia is confidently middle class, the child of professors. She is an all-American girl whom Kimberly recognizes is pretty despite her dark skin. This is how Kimberly comes to label Cecilia a “Kelly Rowland.” Here Arthurs engages in a bit of clever borrowing from Kanye West’s “Power,” in which he refers to “rolling . . . with some light-skinned girls and some Kelly Rowlands,” highlighting the colorism and so-called pretty privilege that pervades the social ecosystem Kimberly and Cecilia navigate in college and the wider world.¹ Kimberly contrasts her own immigrant, working-class identity with Cecilia’s seemingly better life, and the friendship develops on the shaky ground of their shared racial and gender identities and common interests. They find that both their mothers had difficult relationships with their own mothers. They sense vaguely that there is something Jamaican about this fact. But where Jamaica is central to Kimberly’s sense of self, Cecilia has rejected many of her mother’s attempts to introduce her to Jamaican foods. There is always a bit of competition underlying this friendship, and we can sense Kimberly calculating the different ways Cecilia has advantage over her.

Beauty standards rooted in colonialism are also part of the title story, “How to Love a Jamaican,” where Arthurs explores moral ambiguity around fidelity in romantic relationships and the deceptions that are necessary to keep relationships happy or at least functional. Wally and Jacinth, the story’s main characters, discuss their old neighbor in Jamaica, a man named Ugly. They question whether Ugly, being older and lacking teeth, deserves the “pretty little coolie girl” he lives with. Jacinth determines that Ugly has “ruined” the young, light-skinned woman who has had his baby (160). This exchange between Jacinth and Wally provides a way for Arthurs to stage questions around how postcolonial Jamaican society adopts colonial beauty standards, using them to mock and disparage figures such as Ugly. Arthurs also draws attention to how these standards may be applied across gender as well as how the structural inequalities in Jamaica play a role in how some people are constructed as “ugly” in public discourse.

In “On Shelf,” the ways these standards are turned on men are again examined. The protagonist, Doreen, is complicated—both progressive and problematic in her views. She has casual sex on her office desk with the building janitor, and she refuses to disclose the number of sexual partners she has had to Glenroy, her latest romantic interest. But she proved herself classist and dabbling in internalized colonialist hierarchies when she dismissed Winston, her high school boyfriend, deeming him unworthy of a serious relationship because he was the son of a farmer, “with dirt under his fingernails” (174). Winston was not the right social status for the vision of upward mobility she had for herself.

In “On Shelf,” Doreen is a striver with her sights set on a husband in a profession like medicine (175). After immigrating to America, she entertains the attention of Glenroy, a macho, light-skinned Jamaican with “hazel-green eyes.” But even Glenroy’s fair complexion and pretty eyes cannot save him from Doreen’s judgement. She is put off by his use of Jamaican patois and laments that “his English [is] horrible” (170). While on the shelf—or on shelf, in Jamaican English—is usually a term used to describe women who remain single past the time that society deems the “ideal” age for marriage, (on shelf meaning on display and presumably with an expiration date), Arthurs complicates the idea so that while Doreen is aware of herself being “on shelf,” her attitude to the men in her life places them “on shelf,” too. Here on shelf also suggests that Glenroy may be available, but Doreen views him as an imperfect match.

Arthurs is expert at depicting the tension between the glimpses of freedom her characters create for themselves and the ways the world around them responds, sometimes supporting that freedom (temporarily) or at other times moving to encroach on it. The opening lines of “We Eat Our Daughters” (a title that serves as an echo of a line from earlier in the collection) demonstrate the breathless beauty of a moment where a sense of emancipation is temporarily shared between the narrator, Corrine, and her mother:

The morning of the day my mother left my father for the first time, she played her Bob Marley records on his beloved record player. . . . We played and replayed our favorite songs, my mother adding the coffee cups in the sink, and after lunchtime, she threw the record player and her wedding ring out the window, and finally, we got into a cab with the suitcase she packed. What is it about first times? (181–82)

The image of the wedding ring tossed out the window along with the record player is tempered by the knowledge that at some point Corrine’s mother goes back to her father. This fact does not make this scene of self-actualization any less heroic, but it does allow Arthurs to reframe the stakes of such a gesture and the meaning it takes on in the memory of Corrine.

Motherland, and Other Stories

The stories in Wandeka Gayle’s Motherland, and Other Stories center people who are marginalized because of some aspect of their identity, be it race, nationality, age, gender, or some combination of these. Several of Gayle’s protagonists grapple with the pain of coexisting with others who refuse to truly see them. Sometimes this sense of invisibility stems from their lack of social standing in the broader society, but at other times the people who refuse to acknowledge Gayle’s protagonists are their own families or lovers. In the case of the latter, the close-cut rejection stings more than the indifference of invisibility that develops between people of different class positions. Gayle is not shy about making her readers sit with the dis-ease of unresolved alienation and rejection.

In “The Blackout,” Jamaicans struggle to improve their social and financial circumstances but are unable to overcome the burden of neocolonialism. For most of these characters their failure to break through is not for lack of trying. Many of them are up against structures that are not quite visible to them in a concrete sense, but the tension of oppositional force infects their day-to-day lives. Mavis, a bitter middle-aged woman, criticizes her fellow villagers: “Some of you in this community content to be in one state all your life. That was not for me and if I’d had a little good fortune, things would have been different” (141). Mavis has not enjoyed much fortune, and worse yet, she has faced racial and gender discrimination. The weight of these challenges, coupled with single-parenting, has broken Mavis. She is known in the village as “Mad Mavis,” a nickname revealing how callous her neighbors have been in evaluating her challenges and the pressures life has placed on her. It becomes clear why Mavis, in turn, judges her fellow villagers so harshly.

Mavis also curses Paboo, her child’s father, frustrated that he never stepped forward to claim their daughter, Pet. Mavis has raised Pet herself, even traveling to America to seek employment and a better life. But in America, Mavis still cannot not catch a break. She rails against the world, to anyone who will listen:

House? We don’t own anything here. You think it was easy over there, Pet? I work until my fingers were raw—and for what? I work any job I could get because I find myself in another man country who don’t want the likes of me with my black skin in him big office-them, even though I type faster than most anyone I know and have a good head for figures. (138–39)

Gayle does not show us these scenes in America, but she does not have to. She trusts that her readers understand the racism and misogyny someone like Mavis would experience as an immigrant. The aftermath of these experiences is also evident in her circumstances back in Jamaica. Gayle is interested in this aftermath and the unwieldy mess of emotion created by years of bitterness in Mavis’s life. A keen observer of the damage neocolonialism can cause in intimate contexts, Gayle emphasizes how victims of neocolonialism turn on each other in the absence of a clear enemy target.

While Mavis had been able to travel abroad, Paboo remained in the village, unable to do much with his life. When he was young, a schoolteacher told him he would not amount to anything, and he takes that discouraging word as truth, leading a life of “skylarking and mischief” (132). When Mavis returns to the village with an adult Pet and Pet’s family, Paboo is a gravedigger squatting on church property. “Now he stood two feet from the grandchild he would not get to know because of his own spinelessness,” he fears (141). Paboo loathes himself, unable to parse the difference between his so-called “spinelessness” and a society that is hostile to his humanity. Feelings of worthlessness prevent him from attempting to establish a relationship with his adult daughter and his grandchild.

Gayle also takes up the theme of searching for opportunity abroad in “Finding Joy,” a story about Ayo, a young Jamaican woman at college in Louisiana. Ayo discovers dating and sex with an older White postdoc she meets on campus. This relationship allows her to deviate from the strict dictates of her religious upbringing. When she gets pregnant, however, she realizes that her boyfriend is not reliable. Gayle uses Ayo’s predicament to reflect on the unfulfilled promises of life in foreign, as well as the complications of racial politics in Louisiana—something Ayo was not prepared to deal with. “Things were different back home,” she thinks. “There people prided themselves on being black, East Indian, Maroon, or Chinese. There she rarely thought of her black skin as now she did in America” (48). While she admits the specter of colonialism was always present in Jamaica, Ayo laments the racial binary of White/Black that she confronts at her college and that seeps into her relationship with her boyfriend, filling her with uncertainty about his intentions. This racial binary runs parallel to the moral binary presented by her aunt Gene, who imagines there are only two types of people in the world—saints or sinners. Ayo struggles to find her place outside either of these binaries, wanting to be seen for who she is, rather than for her skin color or sexual choices. She also wants to live free of the judgement of her family’s evangelical Christianity. The titular “joy” that Ayo seeks can be found only when she insists on locating her emergent self, independent of the value systems of racism and evangelicalism.

The search for an emergent self is also evident in “The Wish,” where Gayle introduces Beryl, a forty-six-year-old man living in Jamaica and dreaming of his beloved grandmother who appears to him as “river mumma,” a kind of mermaid in Jamaican folklore (63). He decides to join a singing competition after seeing a flyer at the grocery store. He believes his dreams of his grandmother are also pointing him in this direction. His optimism is crushed, however, when his younger girlfriend tells him the deadline is past. Beryl did not read the poster properly, since he is only partially literate. As it turns out, he also cannot sing very well, but where he is from, becoming a famous singer seems as realistic a way out of poverty as anything else.

As with some of Gayle’s other protagonists, Beryl is sensible enough to know that doing an honest day’s work is not the answer to his life’s most pressing issues. He has artistic talent for shaping bushes into sculpture, but in a twist of irony he is too poor and poor-looking to get steady work with the uptown Kingston crowd that has disposable income to pay for this kind of service. The first real break Beryl gets is when his girlfriend offers to help him improve his reading. In this relationship Gayle slowly creates the possibility that someone will actually see Beryl for the first time since his grandmother passed away. Readers are left to imagine how that kind of loving recognition may transform Beryl’s life.

Unlike Beryl, Delvina, the protagonist in “Help Wanted,” is determined not to do an honest day’s work. Delvina is a trickster, and she makes no bones about it. Gayle has fun exploring this character’s creativity and deviousness. “Listen, is no secret that I don’t too much like work. . . . I hate domestic labor and minding other people’s children even more,” Delvina thinks on her first day in America, where she has arrived from Jamaica to take a job as a domestic worker (94). Using her wiles to disrupt the power imbalance of her situation, Delvina is soon trying to seduce the husband of the woman who has hired her. When the seduction does not work, she cusses both husband and wife before taking her leave. As readers we cannot help but to root for her, despite her unscrupulous tactics. She commits her energy to scamming, which turns out to be a kind of work in and of itself, Gayle makes clear. Underlying Delvina’s resistance to the traditional conventions of work is her refusal of the terms of her migration. “Being in the US without papers is no joke,” she tells readers. “Always I have to make myself invisible” (93). As with other characters in Gayle’s stories, part of what Delvina resents is not only the narrative that everything in foreign is better but also the ways in which Jamaican immigrants are asked to make themselves small or invisible in order to survive abroad.

Frying Plantain

Zalika Reid-Benta’s Frying Plantain is unique in this collection threesome, in that it features connected short stories, all but one of which is focused on following a single protagonist, Kara, from adolescence into early adulthood. In this way it is almost a bildungsroman in short story form as Kara tries to figure out who she is as a Jamaican Canadian in contemporary Toronto. The influence of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (1978) and Annie John (1985) can be felt in the way Reid-Benta develops Kara; her mother, Eloise; and her grandmother Verna, known affectionately as Nana. The care and detail with which Reid-Benta sketches Toronto’s Eglinton West, known as “Little Jamaica,” calls to mind Dionne Brand’s early writing about Black pockets of Toronto in Bread Out of Stone (1994).

One of the conflicts in the first story, “Pig Head,” arises when Kara creates multiple versions of her encounter with a slaughtered pig during her summer vacation in Jamaica. She shares one version of the story with the White kids and another version with the Caribbean Canadian kids; the dis-ease Kara feels between her multiple identities is evident in the way each version of her story is designed to make her legible to her different audiences. In the version for the White kids, she imagines herself at the center of a violent fantasy of animal slaughter in rural Jamaica. The version she paints for the Caribbean Canadian kids is more subdued, and she pitches it to showcase herself as an insider to rural Jamaican life, proving her authenticity by allegedly observing the slaughter and helping her aunt jerk the pork. Neither version is anywhere close to what really happened, but the fact that Kara brings both stories to life in the playground and after school illustrates one of the cultural divides that prevents her from ever feeling comfortable with herself or with either peer group.

With great sensitivity Reid-Benta represents the stressors of childhood relationships, especially the hierarchies that develop among children and their friend groups and the tensions among teens as moods shift within the group. With her Caribbean friends Kara faces “the great misfortune of being Canadian-born” (14). She is obsessed with proving her Caribbean bonafides to them. Much of this authenticity is judged in the context of language, with Kara and her friends trying to one-up each other in showing off their knowledge of patois: “After that, whoever I hung out with mentioned fruits like skinup without asking me if I knew what they were, not asking me if I even knew what the Jamaican name for them—guinep—was, and they yelled ‘Wah gwa’an?’ when they saw me instead of ‘Oh, hey’” (14). As Canadian teens of Caribbean descent (or recent Caribbean immigrants, in some cases), Kara and her friends represent a group constantly engaged in the practice of translation—carrying meanings across varied contexts in the diasporic landscape of Toronto. Kara might be at a predominantly White school during the day and then liming among mainly Caribbean friends in the afternoon. The book is about how identities are constructed in diaspora, and Kara and her Canadian Caribbean friends show that language is an important part of how they stay connected to the Caribbean and, more important, how they create Caribbean community in diaspora. The competition between Kara and her friends in the way they police each other’s performances of Caribbeanness, however, counters some of the community-building effects, as those who cannot perform with the requisite authenticity are mocked and denied a sense of real belonging.

In “Lovely,” Kara tries to prove herself independent by having a boyfriend and keeping him a secret from the overprotective Eloise, who emphasizes the importance of academic excellence for Kara. Despite managing to land a boyfriend, however, Kara never allows herself any real sense of vulnerability. “One time the boyfriend told me that he didn’t really know me,” Kara narrates (164). Reid-Benta keeps this story in the first person, communicating Kara’s distance from her boyfriend by refusing to name him. For the entire story he is known only as “the boyfriend.” Kara avoids his questions and, at times, his gaze. Her efforts to keep him at an arm’s length suggest that Kara has become comfortable with a certain level of loneliness and alienation. When she refers to the friends she has made at her predominantly White high school, she notes that they “aren’t weekend kind of friends” (162). There does not seem to be anyone in Kara’s life with whom she can be truly vulnerable. Some of this alienation comes because of adolescence and some is a result of the tensions created by her split national/diasporic identity.

In “Faith Community,” Kara tries unsuccessfully to insulate herself from her family’s messy dynamics; she ends up caught between her grandparents arguing and the “bickering” between her mother and grandmother (180). The patterns of communication between her family members are mostly toxic. Her grandfather George is unfaithful to Nana, and Kara feels somewhat implicated in his infidelity one afternoon when he makes her wait in the car while he visits a girlfriend. The title of the story refers to Nana’s church community, but it also serves as a reminder of how Kara struggles to feel a sense of community. It also signals her lack of faith in her family’s ability to provide her with a consistent sense of emotional safety.

Voicing Vulnerability

Arthurs, Gayle, and Reid-Benta represent new voices in Caribbean literature, willing to stare alienation and estrangement in the face and even allowing some of their characters to succumb to despair. While the publication of each of these collections predates the Covid-19 pandemic, the writing seems prescient in its representation of the sense of isolation the pandemic magnified. What makes these authors and their stories compelling is their insistence on the vulnerability of their characters. Strength is not a virtue for any of the Black women characters in these stories; indeed, in some of these characters any insistence on a stiff upper lip and carrying on through life’s difficulties without a moment’s pause is actually an Achilles’ heel. It says something about this moment in Caribbean literature that each of these Caribbean women authors reject the trope of Black women’s strength so completely. Some of their men are also allowed vulnerability and softness. Read as a measure of the current literary imaginary, the works of Arthurs, Gayle, and Reid-Benta are a welcome invitation to let one’s guard down in the company of these well-crafted stories.

Laurie R. Lambert is an associate professor of African and African American studies at Fordham University, New York. She is the author of Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2020).

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[1] Kanye West, “Power,” Roc-A-Fella Records, 2010; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L53gjP-TtGE (accessed 20 June 2024). On “pretty privilege,” see Janet Mock, “Being Pretty Is a Privilege, but We Refuse to Acknowledge It,” Allure, 28 June 2017; https://www.allure.com/story/pretty-privilege (accessed 20 June 2024).