Part way through my journey under the sun

I’ve completed 41% of Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes The Sun. She takes the reader over treacherous terrain, exploring, discerning, tenderly excavating Delores, Margot, Thandie, and Verdene, as they traverse Montego Bay, exposed under the sun.

It’s a story about women in whom Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” manifests. So far. Cyaan see how it can go otherwise…at this point. Delores has no dreams for herself, helped to kill Margot’s, and retains only a stringent hope for Thandie. Margot’s dreams mutated into a darkness she constantly fears will envelop Thandie. She has not recognised how she has become darkness’ agent. It’s a wretched cycle with no happy end in sight.

Mi still want the happy ending tho, God know. Nicole, do sup’m fi I and I nuh 😅😌?

Parts of this book evoke claustrophobic feelings. It’s like they’re living in the middle of an active volcano with the lava bubbling beneath and the sky visible but too far away. Maybe they are the lava. Maybe they are the volcano.

I love Thandie most of all, partly because she is the one I can relate to the most. (Hi, ego.) Your heart can’t help but ache for this sweet, artistic, high school student, still so young, who has to reckon with a mother and sister whose love is hard, scaly, oppressive, barely likkle juice left in the heart. Not because dem wicked but because of what humans have done to humans in paradise, whether it’s emotional abuse at home or sexual abuse everywhere else.

I don’t want to do a review now but I already plan to gift this book when my friend visits in a few months. There are so many things Dennis-Benn gets right about Mobay, making connections to different occurrences that never occurred to me–Mobay, born and raised–that I wanna place this book in every politician hand.

Yuh nuh tink dem know already tho? 🤔

Next section is entitled “Chicken Merry Hawk Deh Near”. I hope di chicken is Alphonso, one of those tired white Jamaicans, because hawk reach di rest already! Nicole, consider my heart.