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. That worked out well for me, but now it’s time to return to my original itinerary.
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Bahamas
Before I read my way there, what I knew about Bahamas could fit in a Beach Boys song. When, in anticipation of my Bahamas read, I looked it up online, I came as close to craving a resort vacation as I ever have because wow, is it ever pretty. The Bahamas are just northeast of Cuba, much closer to the US than the other Caribbean countries I’ve read – Barbados and Antigua & Barbuda.
Like the rest of the Americas, Bahamas has a history of colonization. After the Spanish annihilated the indigenous population, the island became a British colony in the 1700s, and after the American revolution, received an influx of British Loyalists and their slaves from the United States. Slavery ended in the Bahamas in 1834, more than 25 years after England. Bahamas became an independent Commonwealth country in 1973. Today about half of the residents are employed in tourism, which generates about 70% of the national economy.
Choosing the Book
For my Read the World challenge, I look for novels written by female authors who are both from and resident in the country in question. Where there is an indigenous/colonizer dynamic, preference goes to indigenous authors. It turns out that’s a tall order, and I think my choice for Barbados was the only challenge book I’ve read so far that has checked all the boxes. Would I be able to do it again for Bahamas?
The original Read the World Challenge used Garth Buckner’s Thine is the Kingdom, which honestly sounded like a very good book. The list of Bahamian books on the Read Around the World Challenge page skewed strangely toward YA and short stories. Lately I’ve been avoiding YA books because it seems like all the protagonists think and act like white, middle-class suburban American teenagers regardless of what story they are in. I know that developmentally, adolescents have yet to fully develop their impulse control. But no teenager who grew up in imperial China would sass the emperor. No one who has established a secret double life would out themselves at the first criticism of their alter ego. People in all times and places know when they are treated unfairly, but it doesn’t follow that they would automatically expect to overturn the world order to resemble contemporary ideas of equality. End of rant.
Uncertain Kin was very promising; linked short stories and a female author of color with a local-to-me connection (she studied and now lives in Vancouver, BC, so we’re practically neighbors). On Goodreads, The Orphan Sky and How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House were listed under “Readers also enjoyed.”
But my library didn’t have it. They did have two YA novels by the same author, though, so I picked the one where place seemed to feature most prominently in the plot.
Facing the Sun
Facing the Sun is the second novel by Bahamian writer Janice Lynn Mather, who earned her MFA at the University of British Columbia. It’s a young adult story that follows four friends who live Pinder Street, on the Caribbean island of Nassau, where the last stretch of publicly accessible beach has just been privatized to build a fancy hotel.
Each of the four girls is a point of view character with complex family relationships, crushes and secondary friendships, resulting in a large cast of characters and a sense of the entire community that is impacted by the change.
The book is written in standard North American English, rather than British English or Bahamian dialect. But Mather diverged from standard English in the dialogue enough to convey local speech patterns without making the dialogue hard to read. Everyone uses the British “mummy” instead of American “mom,” and the teenagers use more standard grammar in their conversations with authority figures than they do among themselves.
Conclusion
I really liked this book!
Mather’s teenagers are believable as teenagers while their actions make sense within the context of their world. They each have distinct personalities that do not feel like reader inserts. The world, too, feels very real, with the strong sense of place that I especially want when I’m reading around the world. The central conflict of plot is about place; is it necessary to sacrifice an environmental and cultural community asset in order for the community to survive economically? And if so, is community cohesion still possible when the asset is gone?
As each of the main characters faces her own personal and familial challenges – finding her voice, finding her space, standing up to a parent, connecting with a parent – the book beautifully illustrates their world through incidental details.
The way everyone washes their armpits before leaving the house because a shower doesn’t last all day in the heat. The teenagers wear uniforms to school and keep makeup hidden at the back of dressers. There’s a very conservative Christian culture with its double standards and emphasis on feminine purity. But unlike every other story I’ve ever read or seen, the girl with the best, most supportive father-daughter relationship is the one whose father is the pastor. Her kindly father also has the most accepting view of the neighborhood woman who wears skimpy clothes and hands out free condoms (and rather than a skank, she’s presented as a thoughtful, progressive, sex-positive woman with a pretty clear-eyed view of the world).
In a community where poverty makes everyone vulnerable, we see how even people who don’t really like each other lend a hand when things go wrong. We also get a realistic view of poverty that differs greatly from American images of starving children. People spend months looking for work or live on marginal incomes from part-time gigs or selling access to a washing machine. But some teenagers still have cars, and most of them have cell phones, even if the car breaks down and the cell phone screen is cracked.
Facing the Sun was a Reading the World success. It introduced me to a place and a culture that I didn’t know much about before. As a novel, it introduced me to a talented young writer I might not have discovered otherwise. Mather created a complex cast of flawed, believable characters that I cared about in a story that made me rethink and examine that coveted resort vacation. I will read more of her books in the future, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend her books to anyone looking for something new to read.
Details
Facing the Sun
Janice Lynn Mather
English
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
432 pages
About the author