Here Comes The Sun How and We Fight for Our Lives

By Vaughn Frantz Miller

Here Comes The Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Here is a novel: a story which will introduce a family of characters who orbit around — and occasionally collide with — each other, each with their own pasts which have shaped them, and each with the fierce determination to do what it takes to survive.

Taking place in River Bank, Jamaica in 1994, Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes The Sun is a novel which rotates between the perspectives of four different women: a mother, her youngest daughter, her eldest daughter, and the eldest daughter’s lover. The mother, Deloresand her eldest daughter, Margot are breaking and bending their backs to ensure that the youngest daughter, Thandi is given access to an education through which her success can propel them out of poverty. But within the family are unspoken resentments and bitterness which mount and eventually come to a head.

This book viscerally displays the degree of poverty this family struggles with, and the choices they are faced with in demand of survival. More than anything, Delores and Margotboth want to be free of poverty — they have spent their entire lives struggling. The question of the book becomes: what is the real cost of material wealth? What might a person be willing to abandon, who might they be willing to sacrifice, to achieve that wealth?

“We build our own destiny. Didn’t nobody tell you?”

And in the background, but eventually in their backyards, is the looming promise of colonial development. Jamaica, as I’m sure many readers are aware, was and is a hot spot forwealthy tourists. Most of the characters, the people who have lived in the area for generations, are seen as an obstacle for colonial developers to profit.

This book will break your heart, and it will not put it back together. Though I pride myself on being a sucker for a gay happy ending, I had trouble putting this book down. It was published in 2016, making you feel as if you are watching a slowed collision which happened long ago, and you are all the more helpless to help or protect anyone in the story. I’d still recommend this book, especially if your knowledge of Jamaica is limited like my own. Studies have shown one of the most profound effects of reading fiction is that readers develop a greater ability to empathize with people they’ve never met. With a piece of realistic fiction such as this novel, you learn the forces which have shaped a real area and gain an idea of the many costs which come with the tourist industry colonizing Jamaica’s lands (an articlepublished the same year as this book noted that 80% of the income from tourism in Jamaica does not circulate into the local economy, but floats away into

the pockets of those who own the multinational resorts).

I challenge you to expand your horizons, learn the lives of this family, and marvel at thebeautiful and heartbreaking images Nicole Dennis-Benn paints of her home country. There are about ten copies available through San Diego Public Libraries.

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

If you’re looking for an honest memoir by a poet, here’s the book for you.

Saeed Jones takes us through his childhood and coming of age in this personal recollection entitled How We Fight for Our Lives.

This book had me hooked with the introductory poem, and while I wish I had seen a littlemore of that poetry in the general work, I still loved this book and am planning to pursue more writing by Jones.

What I appreciated most about this book was his unflinching honesty with aspects of hisstory that I think many would shy away from admitting. Jones talks about the multi-faceted self-discovery of his sexual orientation, and then the sexuality he is eventually able to express as he grows up.

But is what Jones chooses as a young man what is actually good for him? “It’s possible fortwo men to become addicted to the damage they do to each

other.”

This memoir, though short and a quick read, explores Saeed’s journey of growth as a gayman as well as his relationship with his mother. Their closeness and the pointed ways Jones illustrates their relationship left me teary-eyed on a few occasions.

How We Fight for Our Lives is available at a handful of San Diego Public Library locations.