<em>How to Love a Jamaican </em>Complicates the Idea of Home
In Alexia Arthurs’s new short-story collection, How to Love a Jamaican, identity is fluid but not frivolous. The book follows multiple characters of Jamaican descent either on the island or in the American locales that have become an approximation of home—whether that’s Brooklyn or Iowa. Some characters are content to remain in Jamaica, others yearn for more. Some who leave the island have found solace in their departure, others nurse a persistent nostalgia.
Despite its cheeky title, How to Love a Jamaican isn’t a didactic text. Arthurs, who has had her fiction published in The Paris Review and the Virginia Quarterly Review, never makes sweeping pronouncements about who Jamaicans are. How to Love a Jamaican, her debut collection, is neither a guide to the island nor an instructional for how to assess its people. Rather, the book insists on the diversity of its titular population, partly through Arthurs’s choice of format: By offering a series of short stories rather than any single consolidated narrative—whether fictional or anthropological—Arthurs complicates the very idea of a unifying national identity. She paints a disparate but not disjointed portrait of a complex national and diasporic landscape. To love any one Jamaican, Arthurs implies, you must first learn them.
It is, perhaps, a startlingly simple reminder: Geography may forge a people’s destiny, but it also shapes individual human beings in concert with a whole set of personal characteristics. Arthurs makes the case for her characters’ enters a larger canon of literature by immigrant or diasporic authors whose stories function both as self-contained literary worlds and as mirrors of human ecosystems that precious few American artistic institutions invest in reflecting.
