Book Review. Here Comes the Sun- Nicole Dennis-Benn
Dennis-Benn’s literary debut is unforgettable for several reasons. It weaves together a matriarchal lineage filled with pain and generational trauma, creating a captivating tapestry. She lifts the hood, revealing the hidden truth beneath a seemingly idyllic Caribbean beach. This sets the perfect stage for the conflict between a tourism industry that prioritizes profit over people.
It is the middle of the dry season in Riverbank, a small town in Montego Bay, Jamaica. As the drought persists, it intensifies the classism, sexism, racism, colorism, and homophobia that have been simmering beneath the surface. Beyond the idyllic beach umbrellas and suntanned tourists, there lies a community pushed to the edge. They provide land, cheap labor, and sacrifice their young women in service to the leisure seekers flocking to the sandy beaches of Riverbank.
In Denis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun, the women must each fight on multiple fronts in this beautiful tragedy. They battle against a painful past, a world that constantly changes the rules and makes survival more difficult, and family conflicts that aim to hurt them deeply.
Let’s meet Margot – she’s ambitious, driven, and industrious. She aspires to be more than just a front desk worker at a beach hotel in Riverbank. She was trained as a young girl to use her sexuality to get whatever she wants. Now, she must make a difficult decision between prioritizing herself, the plan she has for her sister, and the future she truly deserves. As an elder sister to Thandi, she is determined to go to any length to give her sister the best shot in life and protect her from the kind of childhood she had to endure at the hands of their mother, Delores.
Delores is the hardest-working woman in the docks, yet life has burdened her with endless challenges. She has an ungrateful child, a daughter who has been set on a destructive path since birth, and a mute mother who longs for her absent son. Not to mention the string of scheming men that fate has brought her way, as well as an evil neighbor who pollutes the very air she breathes.
Thandi sees her life as a work in progress, for one, the private school that her sister pays for has straightened her patois into a proper accent. All she has left to do is get rid of her dark complexion since ‘God nuh like ugly’ and lastly, get her mother and sister to appreciate that she wants to study art and not medicine as they have chosen for her.
As Thandi restrains against the loving cocoon woven by her sister and mother, she unfurls secrets and airs a litany of hurts that forces the women to confront both their pasts and their relationships with one another.
TW: sexual violence