In Nicole Dennis-Benn's stunning new debut novel Here Comes the Sun (Norton/Liveright), the women own the story, if precious little else. What's invaluable to them is reliably taken away, only most conspicuously their sweet little Jamaican beach town, where meager meals are never finished off with an aromatic cup of Blue Mountain. It's a rum life, and they are the ones who have to live it, until the developers get their way and, with their bulldozers, reduce the place to a dull memory.
Most of the locals are stripped of their innocence before their eyes are fully open. It's a world in which money is everything and sex is a fungible currency. There's a long tradition of novels about the sexploitation of the poor, the current twist on the genre being the implication that if you tut-tut it while reading, perhaps on the beach, you're pre-redeemed for any infractions after dark. What Dennis-Benn's novel does to a degree I've not encountered before is chronicle that particular circle in hell on earth where mothers knowingly, and not always reluctantly, sell their pubescent children into sexual bondage �" often, unsurprisingly, "just this once," as if there were seconds on a child's virginity.
In a remarkably assured authorial voice from which every last molecule of self-pity has been atomized by a profound compassion, Dennis-Benn looses an unforgettable cast of characters, including some men. One of the morally least compromised of all �" despite committing a murder before our very eyes �" is Charles, a poor local boy who loves the teenager Thandi so ardently that his sole concern is not pushing her sexually faster than she should go. (There are, of course, things he doesn't know.) His counterweight is Alphonso, an affluent second-generation hotelier, spendthrift and debtor whose unflagging interest in women and girls lacks anything resembling such patience. If the other men seem shallow, so they are: crude facsimiles of human beings.
All of Dennis-Benn's women, however minor as characters, command attention and reward forbearance. Most are caught in the grinding cycle of sexual exploitation that, like everything else in the tropics, rots at a rate you can watch. They're also individuals who, whatever their circumstances, cling to the primacy (or illusion) of choice in their lives until it is finally torn from their grasp.
Chief among them is Margot, who convinces herself that she has sacrificed her life, body and soul, to give her younger sister Thandi a better one. To that end, she has become a sex machine who knows how to keep her coif in place between jobs, servicing men. She's a human flame in a hotel uniform, and everyone who comes near her gets singed, sooner, later or routinely. She's also the kind of scrappy fighter who gets and keeps you in her corner. You get uneasy every time she's gone for more than a few pages.
Her mother, Delores �" yet another of fiction's mothers to end all mothers �" is a ball of far less focused or sublimated rage. Her black self-hatred, common coin in this culture, plays out on the war zone of Thandi's defended, terrorized body. Rumors fly that the girl is pregnant, but her baggy clothes conceal strata of oils and emoluments to bleach her ebony skin, her entire trunk wrapped in Saran Wrap to increase their potency �" this in a climate whose withering heat, and the rages it can induce, is invoked with Dantean specificity.
Since childhood, Margot has, in various ways and to varying degrees and ends, been in love with Verdene, who is of this place (where she is a "known" dyke) but also has seen an alternative world through an education in England. Margot feeds their mutual fantasy of some future "gated-community" love nest, where they will escape hate and retire in splendid isolation. To realize that, Margot brings ruin on the only other no-doubt-about-it new dyke in town �" a former beauty queen who is brought to the hotel as an "ambassador" to wealthy foreign tourists �" to get the professional position she is convinced she has sacrificed her own sexuality for. In this community the only thing worse than being a dark-skinned black is being a lesbian, which is to be a devil, or from one. The town's tomboy peepers conduct an unrelenting witch-hunt, and even the two lesbians with the means of escape are harried out of home and office.
Let me be the first to say that Nicole Dennis-Benn is not "the lesbian Marlon James," referring to the Jamaican-born gay novelist whose A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Booker Prize, and whose earlier novel, The Book of Night Women, takes a similarly unblinkered look at the defilement of women in Jamaica. Both writers make musical use of the local patois in written dialogue, but the fact that they even transliterate it differently shows how individual their powerful voices are.
Dennis-Benn knows better than to conjure this geographical "paradise" realistically; rather, she presents it like a photographic negative: we see what a beautiful place it is by witnessing its rape. The only beach described is of the ocean's claw variety, and there are no Technicolor sunsets. Sunny Caribbean art plays a role in the story, but Dennis-Benn does not daub silver linings onto the impending clouds.
She deploys an art of an altogether different kind, one that allows her to tell this unrelievedly unsentimental story in an un-excerptable language of cumulative, almost radiant beauty. It's the sheer, unornamented beauty of real, sweating people getting through unimaginable hardships, yet showing up, just as they are, for another shitty day in paradise.