The “Anti-beach” Read

My mother-in-law gave me this book for Christmas. I really appreciate it that she saw a novel about a lesbian who engages in sex work because it is an only way out of the horrors of a tourist economy in Jamaica, and she doesn’t shy away from it but gets it for me to read. I asked her today on zoom if she had read it yet, and she hasn’t which is good because maybe she would really disagree with my take on the book. My mother-in-law has a Phd in English so there’s no keeping up with her reading, and forget about ever beating her in Scrabble. Maybe she will read Here Comes the Sun after this review and let me know what she thinks.

I taught college Spanish for many years, and I remember trying to do an introduction to the impact of tourist economy on local residents in Mexico by encouraging my students to imagine what it would be like if Japan bought Florida. (Although to be fair given that Walmart is the largest private sector employer in Mexico…for this analogy to be accurate, you would have to imagine many more states than FL being Japanese)

Now imagine that everything in Florida is in Japanese, and everyone who comes there to stay in the fancy hotels and eat in the restaurants only speaks Japanese and you don’t. Imagine that you can never eat in these restaurants nor stay in the hotels and you get paid below minimum wage to be a third class citizen maintaining this luxuriuous fantasy for the rich…etc etc etc. You get the idea. A glimpse of how tourist economy hurts people that my students could latch onto only peripherally. They expressed feeling much more betrayed by learning that most Mexican restaurants in Mexico don’t serve a basket of tortilla chips with a meal because they don’t even eat those in Mexico.

Dennis Benn’s novel about the impact of international real estate investment and tourism economy is not a light little metaphor or analogy like the one above. It is a bloody Shakespearian tragedy about the annihilation of colonialism and if everyone is not actually spread out physically dead at the end of the novel…well, they spiritually are.

I dislike melodrama…in spite of a recent review where I owned up to liking soap operas, but that’s different because everyone knows they’re supposed to be a farce. Real melodrama rubs me the wrong way. One reviewer called Here Comes the Sun the anti-beach read. Another referred to it as Thomas Hardy in Jamaica. Although I haven’t read Jude the Obscure since 1992, I recall liking it more.

Margot is in love with a woman whom she can never admit to loving because Verdene is an out lesbian (because she was caught) who is so homophobically abused by her neighbors that there is a dead dog with its throat slit in her yard every other day, and she can’t buy vegetables from the market because people will spit on her and call her Satan. Margot works as a sex worker in the foreign owned hotel to try to pay for education and opportunties for her fifteen year old sister Thandi to go to a private school and get out and become a doctor. Delores is their abusive mother who sold Margot as a sex worker at the age of 14 to try to cure her of lesbianism. When Margot’s ambitions are spurned by the john who is her employer, she annihilates the woman he hired for the manager position instead by drugging her and filming a fake lesbian tryst and later agrees to be the madam for a high end prostitution ring in the hotel that exploits girls as young as 16.

I could say a bunch of stuff about my feelings about these plot points (and I have left other plot points out), but actually I think they speak for themselves. To be fair, it sounds like Dennis Benn did experience pretty horrific homphobia in Jamaica herself, but when she says in an interview she wants to write for the greater good, I worry about placing an undo burden of homophobia and misogyny on Jamaica.

Western countries can do some really messed up things in the name of “Gay rights” and “feminism” hence the fear of large sweeping cultural generalizations about homophobia and misogyny (as if we were free of these things in the US) Pinkwashing is international policy backing state violence in the name of supporting the state in question’s more lenient stance towards homosexuality.

An example of using “feminism” in a wrong way is when Laura Bush said we were bombing Afghanistan to “save the women”. So I get nervous when I see depictions of entire cultures being generalized as being completely homophobic or completely misogynist. No culture is ever completely anything. However, I do get that people are threatened and killed by individuals and the state for their gender and or orientation, and people should write about it.

I didn’t like the book, especially not the ending. I was so busy flipping the pages to try to get through the horrors of the melodrama as fast as I could that I didn’t notice what another reviewer commented on as all the loose ends and unfinished business for plot points that I can see now is true too.

That being said, I think the book is really important if you squint at it. Up close, I can’t take the moral questions and lack of sympathy for characters that have never really had any freedom or choices, but from a distance, if you squint your eyes, my god, it is a powerful and memorable masterpiece about the stark horrors of a tourist economy with all the accompanying economic, class, race, gender and orientational violence.

Jamaica at one point apparently had the highest murder rate in the world so the melodrama isn’t an exaggeration. It’s a calling out to look past the beach fantasy into what is actually happening to people’s lives. I can’t tell you where the title comes from because (spoiler alert) in the end, the sun definitely does not come.