How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs

How to Love a Jamaican: Stories is a promising debut collection that focuses on the Jamaican diasporic experience, highlighting cultural and generational differences and providing us with some wonderfully realized vignettes. Alexia Arthurs’ prose is engaging, unsentimental yet lyrical, and she’s fully able to bring the places she’s writing of—be it America or Jamaica—to life. Many of her stories hone in on familial relationships, depicting the misunderstandings and differences between Jamaican-American children and their Jamaican parents. While the parents are often shown to be more traditional than their children and are vocal in their disapproval of their lifestyles, their professions, their sexuality, their ‘Americaness’, Arthurs allows them to be dimensional individuals, without resorting to one-dimensional stereotypes.

‘Light Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands’, the first story in the collection reminded me of Danielle Evans’ novella, The Office of Historical Corrections. Both stories explore the relationship between two Black women who are unable to bridge the gap created by their different upbringings and financial situations. In ‘Bad Behavior’ a despairing mother sends her misbehaving teenage daughter back to Jamaica to live with her own mother (the girl’s grandmother). While the stories depict different situations and people they are united by their shared themes (of acceptance, guilt, self-divide). Within these 11 stories, Arthurs underlines the difficulties experienced by those who are dealing with family expectations and pressures or living in predominantly white spaces or feeling torn between Jamaican and American customs & cultures.
I appreciated and could relate to the nostalgia and homesickness that affects many of these characters and how sometimes they view their ‘new’, in this case, American, environment as ‘alien’.
Easily, my favourite was ‘Island’. This isn’t all that surprising as it follows a lesbian who has become more and more aware of how her best friends are visibly uneasy at any mention or confirmation of her sexuality. It was sad but this particular story really spoke to me.

While I loved the author’s breezy prose, the authentic flow of her dialogues, her rich examination of Jamaican and Jamaican-American identities (the stories follow people who are united by their heritage but are ultimately living very different lives) as well as her realistic explorations of parenthood, siblinghood, and queerness, only two or three stories really stood out to me. This is one of the cases where less would have been more (to me, of course). I would have found this to be a stronger debut had it had fewer but longer stories. Nevertheless, this was a solid collection with some real hits. If you enjoyed Zalika Reid-Benta’s Frying Plantain or you are a fan of Danielle Evans’ short stories. I look forward to whatever Arthurs publishes next.

my rating: ★★★¼

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