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WORK TITLE: How to Love a Jamaican
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://alexiaarthurs.com/
CITY: Iowa City
STATE: IA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Jamaica.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Hunter College; graduated from Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Iowa City, visiting assistant professor, 2018.
AWARDS:Plimpton prize, Paris Review, 2017, for short story “Bad Behavior.”
WRITINGS
Contributor of stories to periodicals, including Small Axe, Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, Sewanee Review, and Granta.
SIDELIGHTS
Alexia Arthurs was born in Jamaica and, at twelve years old, moved to Brooklyn, New York. She later moved to Iowa to attend graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book is titled How to Love a Jamaican: Stories. It “might sound like a slightly salacious instruction manual, but thoughtful readers will find a book that defies every dreadlock-lovin’, Usain-Bolt-cheerin’, ganja-smokin’ stereotype,” noted Guardian Online contributor Leone Ross. Arthurs presents eleven stories in which the common thread is the protagonists’ connection to Jamaica, whether it be their current or former home or the country that their parents come from. “When I was writing these stories, I was really just writing and not thinking about an audience,” Arthurs noted in an interview with Paris Review Online contributor Abigail Bereola, adding: “And then, when I realized these stories were going to be a book, I felt this strong desire that it be for Jamaicans.”
In the collection’s first story, “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” Arthurs tell the story of two college friends in New York. An issue arises between the two, who both have Jamaican parents, when one questions her friend’s true racial identity since her friend grew up in Northern California. In “Bad Behavior,” which won the Plimpton Prize, the story revolves around three generations of women in a Jamaican family. When fourteen-year-old-Stacy is caught giving oral sex to one of her classmates, she is sent by her mother Pam to live with her grandmother, Trudy, in Jamaica. Pam hopes that the experience will provide Stacy with a lesson about just how harsh life can be, unaware that her daughter has already faced difficult times. The “story, for me, challenges the expectation that the grandmother would discipline Stacy in this old-time, grandmotherly Jamaican way—she doesn’t,” Arthurs noted in her interview with Paris Review online contributor Bereola, adding: “She listens to her granddaughter, and she reasons with her.”
“Mermaid River” is another story featuring a child living with his grandmother in Jamaica. The child’s mother has left the boy with his grandmother until she gets settled in the United States. The story goes back and forth between the boy’s time in Jamaica and his arrival in New York at the age of sixteen when he joins his mother and her husband. In addition to “Mermaid River,” mermaids or references to them appear in several stories, including “Slack,” which looks at what led to the tragedy of two young girls drowning in a water tank. The tragedy is related to one of the girls awakening sexuality and her older lover, who only has three teeth. “Basically, the mermaids in the collection are an evolving metaphor,” Arthurs told Bereola, adding: “In ‘Slack,’ they’re about what lures a person.”
Arthurs addresses peoples’ relationships with their mothers in “We Eat Our Daughters.” The story is made up of a series of short vignettes in which Jamaican women ponder their relationships with their mothers. In the story “Island,” a woman who has recently come out as gay returns to Jamaica for a wedding. “Her masterful handling of women’s sexual selves—those secret spaces where the urgency to feel loved is everything—is reason enough to read this sensual, funny, sad book,” wrote Guardian online contributor Leone Ross. “The Ghost of Jia Yi” features a young Jamaican woman named Tiffany who is studying in Iowa and sleeping with the boyfriend of her roommate. When another international student at the college is murdered, Tiffany begins to wonder why America is such a dangerous place for women. Calling How to Love a Jamaican a “strong debut collection, which beckons the reader back, again and again,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor went on to write that the book is “a lovely collection of stories that rewards subsequent readings.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of How to Love a Jamaican: Stories.
Publishers Weekly, May 28, 2018, review of How to Love a Jamaican, p. 68.
ONLINE
Alexia Arthurs website, https://alexiaarthurs.com (October 13, 2018).
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (August 29, 2018), Leone Ross, “How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs Review: Sad and Sensual Short Stories.”
Paris Review Online, https://www.theparisreview.org/ (August 7, 2018), Abigail Bereola, “Mermaids and Transgressive Sex: An Interview with Alexia Arthurs.”
ABOUT
photo by Faith Avery
Thank you for your interest in me and my writing. A little about me: I grew up in Jamaica and New York, and moved to Iowa City for graduate school. I’m the middle of three, cats are my spirit animal, and I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was twelve. A good cup of tea is one of my pleasures. I have fiction published and forthcoming in Small Axe, The Paris Review (story here, interview here, podcast feature here), Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, Sewanee Review, and Granta. I was awarded the Paris Review’s 2017 Plimpton prize for my short story “Bad Behavior.” My first book, a short story collection called “How to Love a Jamaican,” is available in bookstores on July 24, 2018 in the U.S. and August 9, 2018 in the U.K. During fall 2018, I will be a visiting assistant professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. If you’d like to say hello, you can write me at sayhello@alexiaarthurs.com. I am represented by Jin Auh at the Wylie agency. Xx –Alexia
Mermaids and Transgressive Sex: An Interview with Alexia Arthurs
By Abigail Bereola August 7, 2018 AT WORK
How to Love a Jamaican, Alexia Arthurs’s first book, is a short-story collection that delves into the lives of people who have Jamaica in common. Whether it’s the place they currently live, the place they left, or the place their parents are from, Jamaica always forms some notion of home. And How to Love a Jamaican explores, in part, what it means to make and remake that conception of home. In this book, there’s no single way to be Jamaican—the definition of the word itself expands to encompass each person who claims it. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Arthurs has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Granta, among other publications. A story from the collection, “Bad Behavior,” first appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of The Paris Review and was awarded the 2017 Plimpton Prize. Arthurs and I spoke on the phone two days after the collection was published, about invisibility, the idea of “a better life,” mermaids, and more.
INTERVIEWER
When you were writing these stories, what did you want from them?
ARTHURS
That’s such an interesting question. What did I want from them? I think I was working through various things and, intuitively, I was trying to make peace with things that had happened or were happening, and with myself. My stories are really personal, so even though it’s fiction, the stories, in different ways, feel as though they’re about me. At its essence, perhaps I just wanted to feel less lonely. These stories allow me to feel heard and maybe even understood.
INTERVIEWER
In “Mermaid River,” the mother “watches on the news the ways in which America can swallow black sons,” and in “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” Tiffany’s mother recognizes the U.S. as “a place that … took daughters and later spit out their bones.” America can be a barbed wire, and yet people continue to come here. What do you think about that dichotomy, of knowing the U.S. might break your children—and maybe you as well—and yet believing in the promise of a better life anyway?
ARTHURS
I think about that a lot, especially in my life. It’s something that my immigrant friends and I talk about—the fact that our parents came for a better life but resent the fact that we’ve become so Americanized. A lot of us aren’t religious. A lot of us don’t have the values that our parents tried to instill in us. And it’s a conflict for me personally because I want to understand why so many immigrant communities or families think they can create this sheltered bubble in a place like the U.S. But in terms of your question in a larger way, I feel that because of the way the world is set up, with these major powers and these other countries that were colonized, many feel that the only option is to immigrate. I think a lot of people leave for the U.S. or leave for Europe or wherever it may be and they wrestle with that fact—the fact that they’re leaving for what they hope will be a better life, but one that will take and take and ultimately lead to unrecognizable lives.
INTERVIEWER
A feeling of invisibility comes up a lot for your characters. In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” the protagonist thinks, “When you’re invisible to a white person, you can almost get used to that, but when it’s a black person, you can’t help feeling hurt.” Among black people, there are differences between those who are from Africa, and those who are from the West Indies, and those who were born in the United States and whose families passed through slavery. And there are differences in how we all perceive each other. I wonder about that greater sense of invisibility, not just as in, We’re walking the same campus and I see you, but about how some Jamaicans might have the idea that black Americans are lazy—or as a Jamaican might say, slack. In one story, a Jamaican character is shocked that black Americans would allow their yards to look bad. And yet we all want to be seen and recognized by those who look like us, even if they don’t have the same background. Does that make sense?
ARTHURS
Yes. That does make sense. I grew up in New York, in Brooklyn, in a very Caribbean neighborhood. Those were the people I knew at church, and all of my friends were the children of immigrants. Even though we were in the U.S., I was very much a part of a Caribbean community in Brooklyn, and when I was in high school, I met this guy—I think I had a crush on him—and he was a black American. I found that shocking. The fact that his family had lived in this country for generations was really surprising to me. He had a black experience that I’d read about in American textbooks.
I was really interested in exploring that invisibility in the story “The Ghost of Jia Yi.” When I moved to Iowa to go to graduate school, it was a culture shock. A lot of my classmates were from backgrounds unlike mine. And Iowa City in itself is very middle-class. It’s very white. There had been black people from Chicago who’d moved to Iowa City, and there was a lot of aversion to that. So invisibility in New York is one thing, but invisibility in Iowa is another thing. I remember I met this black man from Chicago, and he was talking to me for a while, and eventually he looked at me in a strange way and asked, “Where are you from?” I think the assumption was that I was black American.
When it comes to blackness, I feel seen by black people of all backgrounds, but when it comes to understanding, I feel understood by people who are from my background—who are from Jamaica or who are from the Caribbean. There’s a difference between being seen and being understood, which I wanted to explore. When I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I had two classmates who are also from the islands—Naomi Jackson, who wrote this beautiful book called The Star Side of Bird Hill, and Stephen Narain—and this made a tremendous difference. Without them, I would have been very lonely.
I’ve heard Afro-Caribbeans say very condescending things about black Americans, which is always bizarre to me. We all have the same background. I was interested in exploring that tension.
INTERVIEWER
I’m also wondering about differences across generations. For example, in “Bad Behavior,” there’s the idea that the grandmother in Jamaica can straighten out Stacy, her granddaughter who’s lived in the U.S. What do you think is lost in the journey from Jamaica to the United States? Why is it the grandmother who can straighten Stacy out?
ARTHURS
That story, for me, challenges the expectation that the grandmother would discipline Stacy in this old-time, grandmotherly Jamaican way—she doesn’t. She listens to her granddaughter, and she reasons with her. They have a traditional grandmother-granddaughter relationship, but there’s also an understanding there that I think is really evident toward the end. They both confront this boy who has less than desirable expectations for Stacy. For me, that story is about what it’s like to be an immigrant mother and what is sacrificed to mothering. I thought a lot about my own mother, who came to the U.S. in her midthirties with three kids. She sometimes talks about regrets, about the things she wishes she could have given us. I think it’s a profound loss in her eyes. There’s a line in “Bad Behavior”—I think it says, “Not all mothers could afford to be kind.” And to me, that’s what that story’s about. I do think that unfortunately, some mothers are more available and have more to give. I think that’s a privilege some immigrant mothers may not have.
INTERVIEWER
In many of the stories, mermaids appear in some form. They feel like a symbol of “elsewhere” and emblematic of a kind of lost freedom. I’m thinking of the twin girls with their mermaid dolls, allowing their dolls to let them do things they couldn’t, or the grandmother who used to swim in Mermaid River when she was a girl. What do mermaids mean to you?
ARTHURS
I had written two stories with mermaids—“Slack” and “Mermaid River”—when a friend, the writer Stephen Narain, sent me Kei Miller’s poem “The Law Concerning Mermaids.” I was thrilled—here was a poem that was in conversation with what I had been thinking about. Basically, the mermaids in the collection are an evolving metaphor. In “Slack,” they’re about what lures a person. That story is really interested in Pepper’s cravings. And eventually, her cravings become dangerous once she becomes a teenager who desires a man. I was thinking about young female sexuality, but also, I think of mermaids as being this metaphor about transgressive sex, which to me is a part of the appeal of their mythology. I thought about this when I was writing the story “Island”—the narrator, a woman, sleeps with women. But in a larger way, I think of mermaids throughout the collection as challenging what people believe to be true about Jamaica. People tend to see Jamaica in such polarizing ways. Some think of Jamaica as being this paradise, and others think only of the high murder rates. I think of mermaids as being revelatory in this reckoning.
INTERVIEWER
Who do you write for?
ARTHURS
When I was writing these stories, I was really just writing and not thinking about an audience. And then, when I realized these stories were going to be a book, I felt this strong desire that it be for Jamaicans. I do hope that everyone reads it and likes it, of course, but I hope to write about Jamaica in a way that honors its people. So much out there about Jamaica, and marketed as Jamaican, has been appropriated and hasn’t really been in service of the culture. I’m really excited about this collection, which to my mind reflects a diversity of experience, because so much that is known about Jamaica doesn’t yet allow for that.
Abigail Bereola is a writer and the books editor at The Rumpus. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Arthurs, Alexia: HOW TO LOVE A
JAMAICAN
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Arthurs, Alexia HOW TO LOVE A JAMAICAN Ballantine (Adult Fiction) $27.00 7, 24 ISBN: 978-1-
5247-9920-5
Jamaican immigrant and return-migration stories told with unsentimental honesty.
Eleven short stories examine the immigrant experience through the prism of place, food, gender, and
generations; in this collection, the home lands are Jamaica--where the author spent her childhood--and the
United States. Far from pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap mythology, and thankfully devoid of violinswelling
nostalgia, these stories unravel the knot of being in a place but not quite belonging and the sense of
missing but not quite understanding what was lost. In "Bad Behavior" (winner of the Paris Review's
Plimpton Prize for Fiction), what could have been written as a contest of wills turns out instead to be an
examination of three generations of women in a Jamaican family. The "bad behavior" belongs to the
youngest, 14-year-old Stacy, who was caught giving a boy a blow job in school. Delivering Stacy to her
granny Trudy in Jamaica, Pam, the girl's frantic mother, hopes Trudy will love her granddaughter "enough
to show her some of the harshness that the world was ready and able to give her." In reality, Stacy, like her
mother and grandmother before her, has already experienced several harsh realities. In "Mermaid River," a
mother leaves her son with his grandmother while she settles in the U.S. This story artfully swings back and
forth between the boy's childhood in Jamaica to the time when he finally rejoins his mother and her husband
as a young teen in Brooklyn. Other stories feature young adults, long detached from but not quite severed
from their Jamaican roots, with various levels of self-awareness. "Only now does the history of that river sit
on me," says the narrator of "Mermaid River." The same can be said of this strong debut collection, which
beckons the reader back, again and again.
A lovely collection of stories that rewards subsequent readings.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Arthurs, Alexia: HOW TO LOVE A JAMAICAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538293941/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f8db97fd.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538293941
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How to Love a Jamaican
Publishers Weekly.
265.22 (May 28, 2018): p68+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
How to Love a Jamaican
Alexia Arthurs. Ballantine, $27 (256p) ISBN 9781-5247-9920-5
Arthurs's enticing debut collection examines the lives of Jamaicans both in their homeland and abroad in
America. "Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands" is a sharp study of two college friends in New York.
Both are Jamaican, yet one's Northern California upbringing causes the other to question her racial identity.
The devastating "Slack" begins with two young girls drowning in a water tank, and then rewinds the
narrative to fill in the events that led to the tragedy. Other standouts include "We Eat Our Daughters,"
comprised of short vignettes of Jamaican women discussing their relationships with their mothers; "Island,"
concerning a recently uncloseted woman returning to Jamaica to attend a friend's wedding; and "The Ghost
of Jia Yi," in which a Jamaican woman studying in Iowa struggles with the murder of a fellow international
student. Between these successes, however, are narratives employing similar, yet drab, scenarios. "Mash Up
Love," about a man who spends his day reminiscing about his twin brother, rambles, while "Mermaid
River" employs a predictable frame to recall one character's upbringing on the island. Arthurs shoehorns in
reoccurring faces sporadically to create a shared universe, yet only some of it sparks with life. Nonetheless,
there are enough hits to make up for the misses. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"How to Love a Jamaican." Publishers Weekly, 28 May 2018, p. 68+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541638774/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b2a01bee.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541638774
How To Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs review – sad and sensual short stories
Pride and racial prejudice in a visceral portrait of the Jamaican experience – ‘at home’ and in the US
Leone Ross
Wed 29 Aug 2018 07.00 EDT
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Shunning stereotypes … Alexia Arthurs.
Shunning stereotypes … Alexia Arthurs. Photograph: Kaylia Duncan
This debut story collection might sound like a slightly salacious instruction manual, but thoughtful readers will find a book that defies every dreadlock-lovin’, Usain-Bolt-cheerin’, ganja-smokin’ stereotype. Alexia Arthurs takes two subset communities – Jamaicans who live “at home” (or return there) and Jamaicans who live “in foreign”, in the US – and presents their stories with compassion, tenderness and an unassuming complexity.
For a start, she compromises nothing, including the perennial way that race informs everyday life. The collection is a visceral portrait of the subtler costs of social inequality – how, as minorities, we are watchers of ourselves and others, “code-switching” or swapping language depending on who we’re talking to, with a self-consciousness that becomes habitual. Many readers in the UK will relate to it.
Arthurs' masterful handling of women’s sexual selves is reason enough to read this sensual, funny, sad book
In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands”, two NYU students with Jamaican parents test the fragile limits of friendship, class and skin-shade privilege. Arthurs’ characters regard the lives, morals and experiences of white and black people as different (“It wasn’t that Jamaican children were perfect – it was that when they made mistakes, they knew how to be ashamed”). Frequently, they do not expect to be fully understood unless they are “home”. In “Bad Behavior”, winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton prize, parents take their “force-ripe” teenager back to Jamaica, hoping the pit toilet and her grandmother will fix her, and of course they do. Arthurs explores an ambivalence, too: however nostalgic we are, the island is a source of redemption and worry. It breeds both guilt and pride.
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Her masterful handling of women’s sexual selves – those secret spaces where the urgency to feel loved is everything – is reason enough to read this sensual, funny, sad book. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi”, a depressed Jamaican athlete sleeping with her roommate’s boyfriend is haunted by the ghost of a murdered international student. Whether you relate more to teenage Pepper, ashamed of her older lover with three teeth hanging outside her school gate in the heartbreaking “Slack”, or to the protagonist in “Island”, contemplating the easy rightness of her first lesbian kiss, this is a hymn to women: stoic and pained and lyrical. My surprise favourite might be “Shirley from a Small Place”: in a story obviously inspired by singer Rihanna, we see a pop star who is deeply human - contemplating her period or her hair weave, purple as star-fruit; running home to cry into her mother’s chicken-foot soup. Arthurs gives men a tender complexity, too: the quiet twin forever condemned to live in his gregarious brother’s shadow in “Mash Up Love” and the tender ruminations of an older man in the titular story, sitting on a rotten tree stump, both sorry and glad for the son only possible through his infidelity.
If you’re not Jamaican, what you have here is a special opportunity to see who we actually are: we’re not at all like you, but absolutely the same. Mostly, Arthurs has written a love letter to Jamaicans, and it feels so good. Yes, iyah. Bless up.
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