ethiopienne:

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 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. Rather, 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’ specificity repeatedly throughout the text. Still, it’s never a blunt, overbearing message. The vignettes ebb and flow at different paces because Arthurs’s characters do. In this way, How to Love a Jamaican enters a larger canon of literature by immigrant or diaspora 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.

Following in a broader Caribbean literary tradition, Arthurs also infuses the book with familiar themes and motifs. Water both purifies and drowns. Mermaids are both warning signs and prizes. Arthurs immerses the reader, taking special care to recreate the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and feelings of the island she calls home. In some stories, the reader can practically smell curry wafting through the air. In others, oxtail gravy might as well drip down characters’ chins. Mangoes are ripe; the sun sits high and mighty. The scenes transport the reader: for those familiar with the world these characters inhabit, it’s a trip home (or something almost like it). Even for those who may never have cracked a coconut or sung an unruly prayer, Arthurs crafts an extra-sensory delight. How to Love a Jamaican is a world all its own—but it’s still connected to the one readers inhabit, to the country that birthed Arthurs.