Kinky reggae

By Jonathan Ali

She’s Gone, by Kwame Dawes
(Akashic Books, ISBN 978-1-933354-18-7, 340 pp)

In the 1995 Pedro Almodóvar film The Flower of My Secret, Leo, a famous writer of novelas rosas, romance novels — literally, “pink novels” — brings her latest manuscript to her editor. It is not, to put it mildly, your typical romance novel, but a story full of violence and drugs and illicit sex; a novel more black than pink, Leo puns. To which the outraged editor replies by reminding Leo of the terms of her contract, which include “an absence of social conscience . . . And, of course, happy endings.”

She’s Gone, the first novel from Ghana-born Jamaican poet and academic Kwame Dawes (he published a book of short stories, A Place to Hide, in 2002), is not a dark tale of violence and drugs and taboo sex (though all three, in different measures, feature in the story), yet it also does not seem to be your garden variety romance. There is, on the face of it, a social conscience at work; as for a happy ending, if there is one, it can’t be said to be conventional.

What does seem to be becoming conventional, however — if it isn’t already fully established — is the genre. With She’s Gone, Dawes joins an ever-growing list of Caribbean or expatriate Caribbean writers penning, if you will, literary romances aimed primarily at the African-American market, lining up alongside such established writers as Trinidad’s Elizabeth Nunez and Jamaica’s Colin Channer, as well as newer names like Marie-Elena John of Antigua.

Channer in particular is worth mentioning. Not only are he and Dawes compatriots, but they are also co-founders of the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica, and both are now published by Brooklyn-based Akashic Books. Indeed, Channer and a couple of other Akashic authors provide some embarrassingly effusive blurbs for She’s Gone (“a work of incandescent genius”, “a masterly tour de force”) — a bit of incestuous behaviour that, to be frank, does no one any favours.

Also interesting is the fact that Channer’s breakthrough novel, Waiting in Vain, borrowed its title from a Bob Marley song, as does She’s Gone. Kwame Dawes has written extensively about reggae, on Bob Marley’s lyrics in particular, and once fronted his own reggae band. And in She’s Gone, Dawes gives us Kofi, a Jamaican reggae singer, Ghanaian by birth, who fronts a Grammy-Award-winning though financially not very successful band, Small Axe (another Marley title, and one already borrowed by the critical journal edited by Jamaican David Scott).

Small Axe are on an American tour in order to, as Kofi says it, “spread the word.” When they play to an almost all-white crowd in a South Carolina club, they open their set with some Marley numbers, because they’re guaranteed a portion of the bar take, and “Bob sell nuff Budweiser.” It is here that Kofi encounters Keisha, a black social researcher just out of an abusive long-term relationship. Kofi himself is involved in an on-again, off-again affair with an older woman back home. Keisha follows the band to New York for the last gig of the tour, and after they spend the night together Kofi invites her to return with him to Kingston. Throwing caution and her job to the winds, Keisha accepts.

Dawes knows he’s treading well-worn territory here. There are a couple of wry references to Terry McMillan’s wildly successful island romance How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and he does his best not to exoticise Jamaica, even if Keisha, the first-time visitor, can’t help but romanticise the place herself. Her visit extends. She gets a job teaching, while Kofi works on songs for his band’s new album — or so he says; he seems to spend his days idling rather than songwriting.

Soon enough, the bloom is off the rose. Kofi slowly becomes surly and uncommunicative, and Keisha begins spending more and more time with new friends. Through Kofi’s rich, thrice-widowed ailing aunt Josephine, a sort of creole Miss Havisham minus the stopped clocks, we learn about Kofi’s past: how his mother, Josephine’s sister, had Kofi in Ghana, then brought the infant alone to Jamaica and left him there to be raised by her sister, while she left for the United States. We also learn the putative source of Kofi’s mood changes: he suffers from mental illness.

Things deteriorate further. Kofi gets closer and closer to a breakdown, and when Josephine dies, he shuts himself off completely from Keisha. Instead of returning home, Keisha heads to the north coast and a resort in Ocho Rios run by Kofi’s ex-lover. When a drunken evening at a nightclub almost turns into rape, she returns to Kofi, who refuses to believe her story. It’s the final straw, and Keisha heads back to the States, taking a certain secret with her.

Kofi’s descent into madness continues, and after an episode where he attempts to climb Blue Mountain Peak and then wakes up naked on the floor of a country shop, he manages to pull himself together and takes off after Keisha, having discovered her secret. What follows is a protracted chase across North America, with Kofi falling in with Keisha’s extended matriarchal family — and sleeping with one of Keisha’s cousins (“If you made love to me then told Keisha . . . she would understand,” she assures Kofi) — along the way. At last the erstwhile lovers are brought together in a hospital in Toronto, and after a reconciliation of sorts they head back to South Carolina, not quite lovers again, but with a new, sacred bond between them.

It might be easy to say that She’s Gone is not a conventional romance novel. Yet to say what it actually is, and what — beyond a love story — Kwame Dawes is trying to tell us, is a bit trickier. One constant issue that Dawes handles well is the frisson between the Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean, the cultural differences between the two protagonists that divide them sometimes almost as much as they bring them together. Beyond that, themes are raised, only to be quickly dropped again. Kofi’s is a wealthy “brown” family, and race and class are made mention of, not gratuitously, but without them really becoming issues integral to the plot. Homosexuality is similarly introduced — one of the novel’s more important characters is gay, and there is a tantalising glimpse into the gay subculture of Jamaica’s tourism-fuelled north coast — yet the theme isn’t developed in any truly meaningful way. A pity, considering the homophobia for which Jamaican culture, and of late its reggae and dancehall artists in particular, is notorious.

The novel throws up more fundamental issues, however, than those of its themes. Characterisation is also a challenge. In short: Kofi is a difficult person to like. As sensitively drawn as he is, his mental health problems aren’t convincing (the possible reasons for his illness aren’t fully explored), and he comes across as more self-pitying and overly self-involved than actually alienated and troubled. The fact that Kofi never wants for anything, his and Keisha’s every need being met through Josephine’s largesse, is another stumbling-block to finding him sympathetic, though Dawes admirably declines from making the near-middle-aged Kofi the physically perfect specimen that is almost a sine qua non of the romance novel.

One puzzling thing about Kofi is how seriously we’re meant to take him. His privileged life makes his role as a socially conscious musician, agonising over the poverty-stricken masses, more than a little suspect. Keisha calls him out once over this hypocrisy, but nothing is said on the matter again. And when Kofi tries to persuade Keisha of how tortured he actually is, she retorts, “There is nothing screwed up about your life, Kofi. We all have some mess.” But we are told Kofi was clinically diagnosed with depression. So which is it? Is he screwed up, or not?

Keisha herself comes across more sympathetically, and the story of her family and her own life, of men who disappoint and women who have to pick up the pieces and carry on, is told with delicate restraint. Yet here too there is a puzzle. After Keisha extricates herself from the relationship with the abusive ex-boyfriend, and after making the decision to leave Kofi and his inadequacies, there is this:

Back in South Carolina, in the familiar landscape, she could feel herself slipping into old patterns. She had to fight the urge to call Troy. This is why she needed Kofi — to help her see herself as strong, as the one who had walked away from Troy.

What is the message here? That a woman’s measure of her worth can only be determined in the context of her relationship with a man? Add to this Kofi’s unpunished indiscretion with Keisha’s cousin — which stands in sharp contrast with Keisha’s near-disastrous attempt at liberating herself in Ocho Rios — and you really start to question the novel’s sexual politics.

Perhaps, though, after all is said and done, a romance novel is a romance novel is a romance novel: there has to be a man, there has to be a woman, they have to be together at the end, sexual politics and social agendas be damned. Certainly this bit of dialogue from the first time Kofi and Keisha make love is central Mills and Boon territory:

“You are warm,” he said.

“You are hard,” she said.

“Smooth, smooth, move smooth, like that,” he commanded gently.

“Like that?”

“Uhuh.”

“Like that?”

“Uhuh.”

“Like that, like that, like that, like that.”

Just like that. Accept things for what they are, not what you think they should be. As Bob Marley sang, “Kinky reggae, take it or leave it.”

•••

The Caribbean Review of Books, August 2007

Jonathan Ali lives in Trinidad and has written on books and theatre for the Trinidad and Tobago Review and the Trinidad Express.