This debut novel was named “Best Book of the Year” by the New York Times when it was released in English. We meet three women in a small fishing village in Jamaica: Delores, the mother, and her two daughters, Margot and Thandi, born 15 years apart, from two fathers both absent.
Thandi, who will soon be turning 16, is the only one with the potential to ‘become someone’ and her family are placing all of their hopes on her thin shoulders, expecting her to be her, through her studies, who manages to get them out of the miserable hut where they live.
Her older sister pays the school fees of the private Catholic college she attends by satisfying, in the evening, the sexual desires of the guests of the hotel where she works by day as a receptionist. However, while their mother sells souvenirs to tourists at the market and the ambitious Margot seeks to climb the social ladder of the hotel to no longer have to prostitute herself, while leading a double life, Thandi dreams of being an artist and neglecting his studies. Obsessed moreover by the idea of bleaching her skin, she multiplies the treatments to become as pale as the girls of her school – and thus to guarantee her future within a society where professional advancement is linked to color.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, who has been teaching in the United States since leaving her native country, gives a voice to these beings invisible to the eyes of tourists who see only the white sands of the beaches, ignoring the misery and destruction that the hotel frenzy sows in its path. Behind these brightly colored walls, moreover, hides a society which continues to suffer from colonialism and which, through its homophobia, in particular, is capable of unbounded violence towards its own people. An unforgettable reading that only makes our impatience with the translation of the author’s second novel all the more lively, Patsy.
Make me proud
Nicole Dennis-Benn
Editions of the Dawn
413 pages