Reading Barbados: How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

After Azerbaijan, the next country in my literary journey around the world should have been The Bahamas. But I ended up taking the wrong figurative plane and landed in Barbados instead. However it happened, it worked out in the end, because I very much enjoyed the trip.

Barbados

Well, obviously, I am completely ignorant of Barbados, since I didn’t even notice until I finished the book that I was reading about the wrong country. All I know is “Caribbean Island where they make rum.” A quick Google search tells me that it is an island of about 280,000 people in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies with women in the offices of both the president and prime minister. Additionally:

Bridgetown, the capital, is a cruise-ship port with colonial buildings and Nidhe Israel, a synagogue founded in 1654. Around the island are beaches, botanical gardens, the Harrison’s Cave formation, and 17th-century plantation houses.

The cave formation was relevant to the book I read, but afternoon tea and cricket, also mentioned as significant, were not.

Choosing the Book

I’m not sure how my search for Bahamian authors led me to find this Bajan book, but aside from being from the wrong country, Cherie Jones’ debut novel ticked all the right boxes for a Read the World challenge. Jones is a woman of color who was born (the same year I was!) in the country and currently lives there. How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, set on a fictional beach in Barbados, was shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

The story peeks behind the tourist curtain to look at locals’ generational trauma left in the wake of colonialism: poverty, domestic abuse and criminal violence experienced. The story centers on Lala, a stubborn 18-year-old married to a violent criminal. They live in a shack at the end of a beach lined with expensive vacation houses. When Lala goes into early labor on the night one of her husband’s burglaries goes wrong, the ensuing violence has devastating repercussions for locals and tourists alike.

While most of the story occurs in 1984, flashbacks reveal pivotal moments that have led the characters to their current situation. The POV shifts with each chapter, allowing the reader to experience the perspective of most of the main characters as the story unfolds.

Conclusion

I can wholeheartedly recommend this book, despite having some criticisms. The story was full of so many improbable coincidences that the messiness of the ending came as pleasing surprise. A tidy ending would not make sense for such a chaotic cast of characters. But it was also unsettling because there was no sense of justice – legal or poetic. The worst characters got off a little easy, some of the best characters ended badly, and the few relatively happy endings felt unearned. True to life, but not entirely satisfying, especially since few if any of the characters seemed to have much internal growth over the course of the story, despite events that would shake the very foundations of one’s personality. I especially wanted more from Lala, who should have had more agency.

Those are harsh criticisms, but ones that only occurred to me after I finished the book. While I was reading it, I was completely absorbed in the story. Every character felt real (even the psychotic ones) and their actions were believable. I loved that even the gold-digging second wife was rescued from stereotype; she genuinely cares for her stepchildren and grieves her husband’s death without thought to how it affects her finances.

The language of narration was almost completely transparent, allowing me to inhabit the story undistracted. The dialogue was imbued with enough local color to create a sense of place without challenging reader comprehension or becoming condescending to the characters. (I think I’ll end up adopting “own-way” to describe stubbornness). I will absolutely read Jones’ next book.

“The One-Armed Sister” made me realize the central flaw in my approach to the Read Around the World Challenge. I have been thinking of these books as a way to virtually visit the countries through literature. But if literature gives one a taste of life in a place, it does so only incidentally. Literature asks hard questions and explores difficult subjects, which means that we rarely see normal people doing normal things in books. We meet the extremes of society when we read, and it’s not fair to draw conclusions about an unfamiliar culture from its novels.

I’m going to keep reading around the world, though. It might not count as visiting a place, but it will keep me inspired to keep exploring, on and off the page.

Details

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
Cherie Jones
English
Little, Brown & Company
276 pages