These paintings, which attempt to describe the complexity of structures, serve as psychological portraits of the people of Baltimore, Maryland, and Nagasaki, Japan. Boarded up doors and windows trap the dark secrets of these poor dwellings. Degraded humans and distraught ghosts wander through these dark places. Inferences to the human psyche are enmeshed in each gash, hole, and sloppy patch.
This series of photographs examines the abandoned prison cells of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Penitentiary subscribed to a theory of rehabilitation that proscribed confinement and a lack of interaction with other inmates. This ran counter to the prevailing system in the United States at the time where harsh physical punishment was the norm. Ideas of church and religious experience are embodied in the building and served as a guide for how prisoners should be rehabilitated: hallways looked like that of a church; low doorways required one to bow and seek penance from a greater power; and a single small skylight, acting as the “eye of God” lit each cell.
Ten days later, after the mandatory
state waiting period, I pick up my gun.
The dealer gives me shit, says I didn’t bring
the right kind of second i.d. “A gas bill,”
he says, as if I’m stupid, “an electric bill,”
or a “house cable bill. Nothing else.
Repeat it.” I repeat it like a jackass.
My wife emails me the cable bill and he
still won’t accept it. Ambles to the back
to ask the owner. At this point, I know
he has it in for me. Something he doesn’t
like—I’d bet it was my wife having to
help me. I sniffed the misogyny on him.
Finally, his boss says it’s a go and he
halfheartedly slides the sword-silver box
to me, my dummy rounds, my box of ammo.
I’m thinking people like the gun dealer
are the reason I’m walking out of the store
with my new gun, a Beretta PX4 Storm,
people, who for no reason gave me shit.
People who just knew they could and so
they did. But it’s mine now, and more,
my gun-hating wife helped me buy it.
I place the bag, as if it were groceries,
in my trunk, merge into traffic, relieved.
I never shoot on weekends, always on weekday afternoons.
It’s too busy on Saturdays, and busy at the range means
danger—at least to me: the slim, pretty girl on a date
who has the “shakes,” the worker warning her, “I can’t let you shoot
unless you calm down, okay?” She says she’s okay, looks back
at me because I’m staring. I am staring because I’m evaluating.
She can’t stop laughing. Her date is a clueless hipster
who had asked the worker earlier if he could he plug in his cellphone.
The worker said no. The hipster was lucky he hadn’t asked
one of the meaner workers; “lucky bastard” I think. I’ve
faced down the mean ones before, who made you feel stupid
for asking something basic about guns. But this guy was young
and cool and his girl was hot, so I guess he can get away
with appearing detached. His date continues to laugh.
She’d laugh even in the range; I’d later hear her through
my earmuffs. But until then, I wait and watch the large
Filipino family come in and take a lane. I hear them plan
a pig-hunting trip and a visit to Arizona to buy more guns.
They’d also laugh really hard inside the range. I look at the boy
with his father, a blonde boy, like my own son. No more than
ten; the youngest they allow. I’m thinking of bringing my
own son in. So I watch the boy who seems very relaxed.
I want my son to stop playing video games. I don’t want him
to turn into a man who loves video games, a man who can’t
tell the difference between the screen and real life, a man
who needs to ask where he can plug his cellphone in
at a gun range. At last, I get my lane: #9. I shoot three
boxes of ammo. My hands feel unsteady. I am nervous around
so many flaky people, but if shooting teaches you one thing
it’s how to ignore the world, how to violently separate
yourself from others—not in the literal sense of course,
but in a spiritual plane. Number nine is my lane.
Novices go hunting
in the lining of true pockets,
the airplanes that breathe air
like human beings, if you know
enough, the copier flies American,
instinctually like a big bear
in the sky. Imagine that. Silently,
the stars make acquaintances;
they’re also new to the job.
And I do remember 1980
as a child, a young child.
The smell of my aunt’s Gremlin,
that hot, plastic scent of the
interior and the exhaust,
the thin palm trees that swayed.
Even then, always ruminating.
The smallish plot already
developing. And why should
it bother me? The inch-like
presence? No moon-landing
for me. No moon-lander. I guess
with every gun there’s an assault.
But this isn’t turning violent,
I have my dog with me
tonight, the kids gone, so why
write about that? The people
down the street have good
skulls, the people further
down the street have ugly
hearts. You can sense that
type of thing. Maybe it’s their
big ass house with no one in it.
Maybe it’s the fact I once
saw two tie-wearing men
playing b-ball in their front yard.
That type of thing doesn’t
make for close neighbors.
The holy place is here, crouched before the fan of white plastic. Morning coolness stirs the tiny hairs on your legs, the ones you forgot to shave in the shower last night. You can stand the heat of your hot coffee right now, you can almost stand the heat of your memories and the bruises they show.
You have a tiny house in a West Coast town. The name matters only a little. Your waist is still a small one; your body remembers the shapes of love. Your body may. Your mind cannot.
Once you thought of fame.
The thought has not penetrated your fog for years now.
Four years? Five?
How do you count the aftermath? In friends forgotten because you cannot bear their happiness? In jobs lost, opportunities floundered? Maybe in towns you tried and failed, or in classes you can’t attend, or in pancakes—tiny, or as wide as your face, stacked like fluffy amber coins with pools of copper syrup melting into the cresting waves of butter.
You do not think of violation. You do not think of it but it thinks of you. At night, before the coolness comes like a blessing, it thinks of you.
So now you crouch with the joy of morning on your face. You wonder how much longer, then you forget to wonder.
The holy place is here.
The house sits among a sea of crabgrass and dandelions gone to seed. Weeds choke beds once lined with neat rows of colorful tulips and daisies. Scarecrow fingers reach through cracks in concrete walkways. Everything browns, dying in the broil of the valley. It is what happens when the timed sprinklers shut down and the lawnmowers stop, when the regular applications of fertilizer and pesticides end. When the people leave.
Aaron knows he has arrived without checking the address. These neighborhoods are homogenous: white stucco ranches with red clay roofs, small trimmed lawns watered at 6 a.m. daily, boxwood shrubs under bay windows. They are the same house, pressed from a mold, the address numbers a sole identifying characteristic. The empty ones stand out, scabs on an otherwise flawless complexion.
He comes for the discarded. The foreclosed. This one, a ranch-style house with a patch of wilted rosebushes in its front yard, sits on a cul-de-sac wound deep into the suburban maze. Aaron parks on the street and climbs out of his pickup truck, a clipboard in his left hand. A man watering shrubs in front of the house on the right approaches as Aaron walks toward the front door. The man clutches the dripping nozzle of a green vinyl hose at his right side.
“Isn’t anybody there,” the man says as Aaron approaches. “They were long gone before the bank put up the notice.”
“I’m aware,” Aaron says. He hands the man one of the cards he keeps on his clipboard. “I’m here to inspect the property. Mind if I ask a few questions?”
“Not at all.”
“How long have they been gone?”
“Six months. Nice people. Moving van just showed up one day.”
It always does, Aaron thinks. Nobody publicizes giving up the house. Some just can’t afford the payments, because they lost jobs or the rates on their mortgages ballooned. Others simply decide to walk away after years of watching the value of their homes plummet. Either way, it ends the same: the moving vans arrive and drive away. The only question is whether they wait for the foreclosure notice—for the Sheriff’s deputies to arrive and escort them from the property—or slink away before it is hammered to their doors.
The neighbor frowns. “Seems like more and more houses have those notices posted. It’s not good for the neighborhood.”
“I’d imagine not,” Aaron says. “Does it seem like anybody’s messed with the property? Anything unusual?”
“Nope.”
“Animals?”
“How do you mean?”
“Did they have any pets?”
The neighbor shakes his head. “No. No pets.”
Aaron thanks the man, turns and approaches the house. The front windows are covered by drapes. There is no lockbox on the door, meaning the locksmith hasn’t come. This isn’t a surprise. His employer, First Western Financial, is drowning in repossessed houses. There are usually problems coordinating all the contractors needed to handle the properties—the locksmiths and cleaners, haulers and handymen, painters and realtors.
Aaron’s job is to scout the homes, to inspect for property damage and itemize any furniture, appliances, or other debris left behind. He catalogues couches and televisions, washers and dryers, desks, tables and chairs. He finds bicycles, books, paintings, children’s toys and hundreds of other flotsam and jetsam that people see fit to leave behind. Today, inside the house on the cul-de-sac, there will likely be more to add to the list. He first needs to get in.
He tries the front door. Locked. The front windows and garage door do not budge. A tall wooden fence frames both sides of the house, blocking his view of the sides and rear. If there are any weak spots—a window left unlatched or a hidden key the owners forgot—they’ll be back there.
Aaron finds a gate along the fence on the left end of the house. He reaches over the top to dislodge the latch and peeks inside before moving further.
He knows to be cautious. Surprises lurk behind these fences.
The first window he tries after entering the yard is unlocked. He removes the screen and lifts himself in, stepping into an empty bedroom. Aaron finds nothing as he walks between rooms aside from empty picture hooks on the walls. There are vacuum marks in the carpet. Sometimes they clean, unable to leave behind an untidy home. Others abandon houses in shambles: holes in the walls, junk strewn across the floor and yard, stinking of cat urine and other odors. Aaron wonders whether these people live in such conditions or simply trash the place as a final insult toward the bank.
He’s always thankful for clean ones.
There is a dollhouse in a small pink bedroom. It is about five feet long and as tall as Aaron’s waist. Three levels of tiny white rooms sit below the house’s powder blue roof, each stripped as bare of furniture as the larger house in which it sits. He guesses it didn’t fit in the truck. He imagines a father kneeling next to a little girl, surrounded by boxes, both clearing the dollhouse of its contents. The father promises the girl they will come back for it or that he will build her a new one for her new bedroom.
He lifts the clipboard, clicks his pen. Writes dollhouse, large under Miscellaneous Items. Moves on to the garage.
—
One house is abandoned. Then another. Then two more, three, four. Each foreclosure devalues the neighborhood. Homeowners watch prices plummet, stare at the balances owed on their own mortgages, calculate how long it will take to break even. Whether it is worth paying anymore. Too many owe too much for properties that won’t fetch a fraction of what is needed to sell. Desperate sellers unload million-dollar homes for $500,000 or less. The panic spreads. The banks print more notices.
Before the crash, there is the boom. Stockton is a crumbling port in the middle of a wide, dry valley, sitting an hour’s drive east of San Francisco. The coast is flush with money from the Silicon Valley, but land is at a premium. People look inland, where acreage is available and housing inexpensive, to erect castles displaying their wealth. Builders descend upon the region, buying up land, drawing blueprints, planning subdivisions. Orchards and pastures disappear, paved over, covered with houses, houses, houses. Prices rise with every property sold. Home values double, triple. Owners borrow against this newfound wealth, put in pools, take vacations, buy luxury cars. Houses become investments, part of a portfolio.
Aaron works with granite, installing kitchen countertops in new and existing homes. Business is brisk. Once one owner has the stone installed, everyone in the neighborhood follows. The pitch is easy: Granite is nearly as strong as a diamond, is scratch- and stain-resistant, non-porous. Instant equity. It sells itself.
He buys a house and a new car. Goes on vacations. Gets married and has a child.
Then the economy turns. Construction ends. People stop buying. Aaron stays afloat as homeowners remodel their kitchens in desperate attempts to sell. Those calls then stop coming. Granite becomes a luxury most can no longer afford. The business folds.
He goes to work for First Western to pay the bills. In the evenings, he takes classes at the local community college in search of a new career. The books sit stacked on the passenger seat of his truck so he can study between jobs: Introductory Statistics, Accounting, Ancient Civilizations. It is the last text he can’t keep away from. He takes the course out of a fascination that began years earlier, during a day-trip to the Mayan ruins on a vacation to Mexico. It’s a great puzzle to him: Societies rise, erect spectacular cities, develop customs and innovations, only to disappear. There are those with which he is already familiar: The Aztecs and Incas, the Romans and Mesopotamians. But there are also dozens of others, like Clovis, Nabta Playa, the Minoans. He daydreams about visiting the remnants one day, when each paycheck isn’t necessary to keep the lights on at home.
His wife returns to work, waiting tables during lunch shifts at a local restaurant. Anna is still in uniform when he arrives home after today’s inspections, a large red stain spread across her white buttoned-down shirt. She has dark circles under her eyes. The gray shows beneath her blonde tied-back hair. It reminds him of his own age, the lines deepening on his face, his dark hair thinning, the way his knees ache in the morning.
“Have an accident?” he asks, pointing out the stain.
“Marinara. I was covered in spaghetti.”
“Nice.”
“I wore it all day.”
“Good for tips, right?”
Anna shakes her head, pulls out a small fold of cash. Forty-seven dollars. Aaron kisses her forehead, tells her to take a bath and relax, he’ll get ready for when Robert comes home from school. He doesn’t tell her about the dollhouse. She’ll want to take and sell it. It’s not stealing, she says. They’re not coming back for them. He knows she’s right, but can’t bring himself to do so.
It feels like going through the pockets of the dead.
Forty-seven dollars. He’ll have to pick up some inspections during the weekend. There are times when they fall behind, when the notices and phone calls begin. He worries the bank will take his house as well.
He enters the kitchen, pulls bread, mustard and lunchmeat from the refrigerator and begins making sandwiches—one for himself, one for his son. He cuts the crusts from Robert’s sandwich directly on the granite countertop. No need for a cutting board.
—
There is a passage in Aaron’s textbook about a culture dead five thousand years . The Cucuteni-Trypillian society’s settlements stretch across a wide expanse of Eastern Europe, with some growing as large as fifteen thousand people. They plant and harvest agriculture and raise livestock, make tools and pottery and clothing, hunt for food, and develop a religion. Yet every six or seven decades—once a lifetime?—these enormous villages are mysteriously burned to the ground and built new. Is it a sacrifice to the gods? A ritual of renewal? Why build a home only destroy it?
—
The empty houses are an invitation to the lost, the addicted, the fugitive and forgotten. They break windows and nest, stripping the house of fixtures and anything else that can be sold. Liquor bottles and beer cans litter the floors, burn marks from cigarettes and crack pipes in the carpets. Remnants of meth labs: two-liter bottles, plastic buckets, and long tubes, countless emptied packets of Sudafed tablets.
Sometimes people are there when Aaron arrives. The first time this happens is in an impoverished neighborhood in city’s southern end. He enters the house and finds two men—ghosts, emaciated, covered in scabs—hastily disassembling a makeshift lab. One of the men pulls a knife and sneers. Aaron turns and runs.
There are others: Drunks who ask for change or offer Aaron a beer when he enters the home. Taggers who cover every inch of wall space, inside and out, with graffiti. In one neighborhood, a kid who goes by the tag SURGE! hits every vacant house—at least two dozen.
He now calls the police whenever he’s suspicious about a house. He now carries pepper spray. But they still sneak up from time to time. One day he finds a thin young man sitting with his back against the wall in the living room of an empty duplex. The man is unconscious, chin resting against chest, a syringe and blackened spoon lying at his side. The paramedics say he’ll be fine as they cart him away on a gurney. Aaron writes it up on his clipboard, itemizes the paraphernalia left on the floor.
—
The Harappan civilization has as many as five million people living in its cities and villages in what today is South Asia. Its borders are filled with complex brick-and-mortar buildings, its web of streets equipped with sophisticated drains that carry waste from homes to sewage disposal areas. It is a center of agriculture and astronomy, commerce and craftsmanship, pioneering technology that remains in use today.
It is all abandoned, nearly one thousand years before the founding of Rome. Only the streets and buildings remain.
—
He is called to an older neighborhood east of downtown. Aaron’s notes say sheriff’s deputies removed the owner a week before in anticipation of a foreclosure auction. He approaches the lock box at the front door. It is clear that someone is living there when he enters. A blanket and pillow lie on the carpet in the front room, along with a small radio. Empty soup cans neatly line the kitchen countertop. Aaron pulls the pepper spray from his belt and quietly walks from room to room.
She is in a closet in the back bedroom, an old woman, the tips of her short gray curls barely reaching Aaron’s chest. She winces when he opens the door, eyes on the pepper spray. He puts it away, helps her out.
Her name is Mrs. White. The home is hers—was hers, until the previous week, when the bank changed the locks and her daughter took her to a retirement home. The story is common: her son encourages her to take a loan on the home’s rising value, telling her she is sitting on a goldmine. She loses it when his investments fail and can no longer keep up with payments.
“I told the people at the home I was visiting a friend,” she says.
She’s hidden there for five days.
Aaron calls Mrs. White’s daughter. He tells her he won’t call the police on the condition that her mother does not return. He cleans up evidence of her stay, omits it from his report. He wonders how long the bank will sit on the place, how little they’ll eventually take to unload it on some investor looking to flip for a profit.
Whether it could have more value to anyone but the woman who has to be evicted twice.
—
The city of Petra is carved into the sides of desert cliffs in what today is Jordan. Its buildings are etchings, like sandcastles turned on their sides: columns, arches, friezes and pediments mirroring the architecture of ancient Greece, coupled with statues of various gods and beasts. These masterpieces are facades for a network of ventilated, underground tunnels and chambers. It is a city that takes lifetimes to build.
It is a work of art, a labor of love. Its people are gone.
—
The house is in a neighborhood where vacancies are a virus. Everybody’s gone. Entire streets in foreclosure, each house empty and abandoned, real estate signs advertising “Bank Owned” properties posted on browning lawns. This is most common in the new neighborhoods, the ones where investors buy up blocks of homes as rentals, or the developer can’t get rid of the properties once the market crashes. Aaron’s surprised at the lack of vandalism as he drives down the street—usually the taggers and squatters quickly claim such areas.
This house is at the end of the block. It is the white stucco-red tile design, the old standby. It appears to have been empty for months. No lock box. Of course.
He climbs a graying wood fence. The first thing he sees is the doghouse, sitting next to the side of the house near the backyard. It is wood with a black shingle roof. The name Buster is posted above the front door.
The moment his feet touch the other side of the fence he smells the decay, hears the buzz of the flies. To his right, in the corner between the fence and the house, lies a dog. Long dead. Picked apart by scavengers, leaving only dark brown fur and bones behind. That and a black collar, still around its neck, attached to a long chain leading from the doghouse.
Aaron presumes the tag he sees dangling from the collar also says Buster.
He turns away, covers his mouth and nose. Then he notices. The fence. The claw marks. The blood. They cover nearly the entire inner surface of the fence, cascading down from as high as five feet off the ground, some cuts as deep as half an inch. Inside one of the gashes, Aaron sees a single black claw, torn from Buster’s paw. He imagines the dog lunging at the fence, flailing, trying to climb or knock it down until his paws grow raw and bloody. Trying to rejoin his family. The chain tensing behind him, yanking him back with each attempt at escape. The dog’s eventual surrender, curling up in a corner, thirsty, hungry. Alone.
Aaron sinks to the ground, sitting with his back along the fence opposite the house, his eyes on the curled figure before him. There are bowls near the doghouse, presumably for food and water, long empty and dry. He wonders how long the dog lasted, how long Buster survived once he lapped up the water in those bowls. Days. A week. Longer. Howling prayers to an abandoned neighborhood. Dying steps from a doghouse built and personalized just for him.
The owners likely moved someplace that did not allow dogs—an apartment, perhaps, or a relative’s house. Aaron wants to find them, deliver their dog’s corpse to their doorstep, a housewarming gift for their new hearth. He wants to chain them to this doghouse in the summer heat, leave them with nothing but a fast-evaporating bowl of water. He wants them to see what they’ve done.
He contacts First Western about tracking down the former owners, pressing charges for animal cruelty. He takes pictures to the sheriff’s office, gives them whatever information he has. He is assured: We will do what we can. He knows what little that means.
—
The Olmec in Mexico build communities around massive pyramids, courts, monuments, and statues. The Aksumites in Ethiopia coin money and erect stone obelisks that stretch toward the sky. The Anasazi develop an agricultural society in the southwestern United States, chiseling their own settlements into the region’s red clay cliffs.
Empty. Empty. Empty.
—
The trip to Mexico often replays in Aaron’s mind when he lies in bed or drives from house to house, like a home video on a loop: There is the dusty gray bus, rumbling along a cratered dirt road running inland from the coast. He and Anna are younger, only just married, not yet parents. They sit near the front, taking pictures out of a cloudy side window. Eventually, the great stone ruins of Chichen Itza come into view.
Aaron walks in the shadow of the ancient gray structures, awed at their size and craftsmanship. He wanders through the Great Ball Court, once a gathering place for Mayan athletes and spectators. He examines the Temple of the Warriors, a tiered pyramid surrounded by long rows of carved columns honoring the bravest of the civilization’s people. He inspects El Caracol, the domed stone observatory offering a view of the starry night sky.
At the center of the site sits El Castillo, a massive four-sided pyramid stretching nearly a hundred feet above the ground. Aaron climbs the tall stairs that run up all four sides like wide waterfalls. He turns at the peak and sits on the top step, staring out at the sunbaked ruins below. He imagines this place in its prime: A bustling square filled with cattle herders, traders, farmers with baskets of grain and produce. The shouts of merchants vying for customers and haggling over prices. People playing games, cheering, laughing. He wonders why they’ll leave, whether it is war, drought, famine, or disease that forces them to leave their kingdom behind.
He asks: Where did everyone go?
It is this that now gnaws at him. Each empty house reminds him of those Mayan ruins. The homes are abandoned, just like those of the Anasazi, and Harappa, and Petra and so many others. Left to crumble.
Aaron imagines the Mayan ruins beginning with one or two vacant houses. People watch neighbors go and follow, sparking an exodus, emptying more and more homes. Fewer stay to reap the harvest, bake bread, hunt game. Those who remain die off or fade away. Only the buildings survive.
Where did everyone go? Aaron can’t stop asking the question. The houses he inspects each day no longer have minivans in the driveway and bicycles on the front lawn. The smell of Sunday barbecues and fresh cut grass is gone. The people have vanished. He wonders if the houses will ever again be filled, if the foreclosures will continue until there is nobody left. One home becomes three, streets turn to blocks, blocks to communities. All of it empty. Landscape erodes, dust gathers, wildlife returns. Hundreds, thousands of years pass. Archaeologists delicately brush dirt from plastic big wheels, DVD players, picture frames. From giant, empty dollhouses. Tourists come with cameras, snapping photographs, buying T-shirts and key chains. Vacationing in the suburban ruins, the remnants of America.
Aaron pulls up to the first of seven houses on today’s schedule. The front door is locked. He approaches the fence, unlatches the gate and slips inside, unsure what he will find on the other side.
Nicole Dennis-Benn was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She left her home country at age seventeen to attend Cornell University, where she earned a B.A. in biology and nutritional sciences. She then earned a master’s in Public Health from the University of Michigan, and went on to work for Columbia University as a project manager in the Department of Social Sciences. She wrote during all of these years and, while working for Columbia, completed an MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
We caught up with Dennis-Benn shortly after she published her first novel, Here Comes the Sun. The novel won a Lambda Literary Award and has been named a New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice, a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut Fiction, an Amazon Best Book, and numerous other recognitions. Learn more about her work at her website.
Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
Here Comes the Sun is a difficult book to read, not because of the writing–the writing is exquisite–but because the subject matter is difficult.
Nicole Dennis-Benn:
It’s a lot. It’s a lot that I dealt with in that book. Yeah, which I’m happy to talk about with you.
TFR:
Yes. One of the things I really loved about it was the centrality and complexity of the female characters. You know, there are male characters, too. And some of them are treating lovingly, like Charles. But it’s clearly a women-centered story.
Dennis-Benn:
Yes, it is.
TFR:
And Margot and Thandi are particularly compelling. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you inhabited those two different characters. They are obviously, clearly close and related. I wonder whether you feel that each of them takes up a part of you?
Dennis-Benn:
Right. That’s a good question.
TFR:
How do you feel about that?
Dennis-Benn:
Thandi, in all honesty, came into being when I went back to Jamaica in 2010. I moved to the US in 1999. And I never went back home because I feel like, yes, it would be only for brief visits, but I was in this self-imposed exile where I didn’t want to deal with the classism, the homophobia. All these other things. So I stayed away. But, upon meeting my wife, who was then my girlfriend, she said, “You know, you’ve never taken me to Jamaica, where you’re from. You have all this accent,” she’d say, but I didn’t even take her to the parts in Brooklyn that’s populated with Jamaicans. That was how, I think, traumatized I was.
And so, I finally made the decision to take her back home in 2010. And in going back home, a lot of the emotions that I was running away from came back. And I didn’t know what to do with them but just journal. And in journaling, I remember, Thandi came up. Because I was that girl, in high school, who felt ostracized because of our complexion. And also being working class. And so I was like, “Well, I’m not a non-fiction author, yet.” But, as a fiction author, how do I channel that? And Thandi, Thandi’s character came about ’cause she’s really me in that sense of going through that. In terms of… feeling insecure, feeling invisible. I wanted to document that through a teenage girl’s eyes. You know, because on the island itself they say, “Well, it’s vanity that would drive a girl to bleach her skin.” But she’s showing us that, no, it’s actually this whole context of feeling unworthy because of her darker complexion. And forcing people to say, “Well, look at me.” And so that’s really where I wanted to go, I hoped to have gone with that character.
TFR:
You did. You did. And I felt like you did a good job in the sense that you showed very well just the sort of myriad pressures on her, about that issue. One might think, “Why would anyone do that?”
Dennis-Benn:
Right.
TFR:
But you build them gradually, to just kind of show the pressure on her.
Dennis-Benn:
Yeah. And even her own educational possibilities. People want her… Margot and Delores want her to be a doctor. And she herself is saying, “No. That’s not what gonna get me that access. What’s gonna get me that access is lightening my skin.” And a lot of girls and boys that stay in Jamaica still feel the same way.
Margot is also a part of me as well. Because Margot, I call her my heroine. Because I feel like Margot is that person that I wanted to be, in that she was able to say, “You know what? I’m not given the things that I need to survive in life.” Like, she didn’t have the best education, like Thandi. Her mother sold her into prostitution very early. And Margot uses what she knows. And she’s kinda like that voice in society that’s saying that, “Well you know, this is what’s gonna get me that piece of that pie that I’ve been denied. And this is all I know. So let me use that to get ahead.” And so, people think Margot is a villain. I mean, yes, I can understand that.
TFR: But she’s heartbreaking.
Dennis-Benn:
But she’s heartbreaking. Exactly. The struggle with her being loved by her mother. The struggle with her own internal identity, or her sexuality. All these things are burdening Margot. And so, I think with that character, I kind of used not only what I’d experienced with homophobia, but also experiencing that anger. For a country that is so… Upward mobility is so hard there. And so, for Margot to say, “Well, it’s hard, but I’m gonna break it somehow.”
So I wanted to show the reader where that character is coming from. For her to have made certain decisions, though unpopular.
TFR:
Right. It’s interesting—I don’t want to get off the subject, but right now we’re living through a time in this country where rage seems appropriate, too. I think about the rage that how powerless people seem to feel here, and then you think about someone who has experienced what she’s experienced with far fewer resources, and…
Dennis-Benn:
Exactly.
TFR:
More discrimination. And you’re just like, “God, that rage… ”
Dennis-Benn:
Exactly.
TFR:
It just seems to grow. I found Margot really, really the most interesting. Because I couldn’t decide how I felt about her. It was, obviously, she was doing these horrible things to people that she supposedly cared about.
Dennis-Benn:
Right. I like that, exactly. And using her sexuality as a weapon.
One thing I wanted to talk about in the book was also the sexualization of our girls, and Delores, Margot, and Thandi have been victimized sexually. We have this conversation a lot, in terms of victims versus survival, in terms of the wording itself. And Margot, I feel like she’s that person that, if she were in this room, she would not say “I was a victim of anything, I am a survivor. I am gonna continue surviving.” So, taking that and putting it in that character as well, because Here Comes The Sun is about exploitation of the land itself but also the bodies of women. And, there was that parallel with Margot herself, kind of doing to those women what our government had done to us, in terms of the exploitation.
TFR:
This brings up something that’s masterful in the novel, your mastery of analogy and simile … and how often it was almost metonymic because there was this close relationship between the place and the bodies. You even talked about Margot and “the island of her body.” And then there was that wonderful one, “the red hibiscuses hang from their stems like the tongues of thirsty dogs.” And “they are as silent as caterpillars that rest on the leaves”, and then “Charles’s palms are dry and surprisingly warm like sun-warmed stones.”
Dennis-Benn:
Oh my gosh, I wrote that? [laughter]
TFR:
Yeah, you did! In fact, I had a whole list of them, that was like in the first half of the book, and then as time got closer, and I was reading this in the car and stuff, I was making a list of them in the back ’cause they go throughout the book. That kind of connection between bodies and place, and other phenomena, and the environment. Is that something that you did consciously?
Dennis-Benn:
I didn’t do it consciously! But I do have a passion, though. I feel that we are connected to our environment. We are… Everywhere we inhabit, we’re part of the universe, we’re part of the Earth, everything. So, I try my best not to overlook that in my writing as well, and I think it has come out.
TFR:
You could get somebody to go through your book with a highlighter and note all those, because I was thinking this would be a great literary criticism essay because they were just so close, and they were so predominant. You used the metaphoric language really well. They were always so apt, and yet they were thematic as well, which is really wonderful. Well, one of the things that Margot obsesses about is moving to another place on the island with Verdene, or even to London. But, Verdene tells her it wouldn’t really be different in those places.
So this actually reminded me… I don’t know if you’ve ever read Carson McCullers’ novelette, A Member of the Wedding, and it was written in the first half of the 20th century, and it’s kind of a pre-Civil Rights era story, but Frankie is obsessed about the North. And she dreams about moving to the North, which Carson McCullers ultimately did. She left her native Georgia and moved to New York. But it just reminded me of that kind of longing of this mythical place, where everything will be better. So, how do you think that the dream of a safe and accepting place influences the plot of this book, and to what extent do you consider that mythical other place an obsession in your work, in general?
Dennis-Benn:
Margot very much wants to escape, right? So, in her mind, she feels like escaping to Lagoons… That was gonna give her the safety that she wants, especially being a lesbian woman. I mean, she wouldn’t call herself a lesbian woman, but very much in love with Verdene. And I think that was her first step in acknowledging this love for Verdene. Of course, she ends up crushing it, but in her mind that place would signify happiness, it would signify abundance and love. For her, it was really important, but in one part Verdene would say to her, “Well, we’re still in Jamaica. It’s not like Lagoons is in the United States or in Canada. We’re still in Jamaica.” Even that dynamic of still not wanting to leave her own country… Even though, perhaps Verdene could take her to London, and Verdene herself is living in Jamaica, loving the country so much that they still don’t want to leave it. But still not being able to survive as themselves. And I wanted very much to capture that as well. In our country, a lot of people fantasize about heading up North, like heading to the United States.
TFR:
And you did that!
Dennis-Benn:
Yeah exactly! It’s like, what we see on the other side… The other side looks greener. And for a lot of us, it’s freedom, freedom to be ourselves. For me, it was freedom to be a lesbian. And I am sure if Margot had that freedom to come here too, she would probably would have said yes. If it weren’t for Thandi keeping her back, for example. But I had no such links, besides parents, saying, “Coming here, I could be also beautiful.” Because in my own country, it’s kind of interesting because yes, there is classism, there is complexionism. Here, there’s racism. But it’s more hurtful to be discriminated against by your own people, who are looking down on you because in their minds there’s a hierarchy of blackness. But here I’m like, “Oh, well… Okay, you expect it, so what?” It’s kind of interesting psychologically to…
TFR:
It’s not that it doesn’t exist here. It’s not that it’s the mythic perfect place.
Dennis-Benn:
Exactly, yeah. But it’s better than still working in a house of all people of color and being looked down upon by your own people who you’ve expected them to embrace you.
TFR:
That’s interesting. What do you think the pros and cons have been for you, of moving from Jamaica to New York? And I think again of this situation that we’re in in this country right now, where people keep saying, “I’m gonna move to Canada.” And I have the option. My husband’s a Canadian citizen, so… And he’s lived there before. He grew up there, lived most of his life there. He knows it’s not a mythic perfect place, but sometimes for me it kind of looms that way, other than the weather. So what do you think about this… I guess there are two conflicting urges that we have and one is to find a better place, and one is to stand and fight.
Dennis-Benn:
I think what’s going on with this country is that Americans are now experiencing what it’s like to be an immigrant because it’s not the easiest decision to move away from your home land. And so when that decision is made it’s definitely because you’re fleeing something and hoping for the better, but still not wanting to cut ties with your country. Period. And so it’s like that ambivalence that we feel and it’s gonna definitely… It’s a lifetime of feelings. Home-sickness is definitely not the easiest and I think I wouldn’t mock anybody leaving the United States, but at the same time I think it’s worth it to still fight, to still stay here.
Especially for those people who are voiceless. And I got emotional when I was at BEA in Boston because, while I’m here I’m free technically, I’m that immigrant living the “dream” whatever that looks like. For me it’s that published book that ended up here in the New York Times, and I felt like, “Wow!” But a lot of my friends, the Margots of society, they are back in Jamaica and I’m gonna get emotional… They can’t come here, they can’t escape. And so what do they do with their situation? Some of them wither, some of them just give up. I have a friend in Jamaica, she’s now a security guard and… She should be in this chair because she’s a writer, and yeah… But I made it… I’m getting teary-eyed…
TFR:
Clearly I think there is a way in which this is a social protest novel… Do you have a sense about what you think writer’s responsibility is in terms of writing for social justice and change, and how do you balance that with other concerns in your writing?
Dennis-Benn:
I use fiction as my best method of activism. Because it’s not didactic. People don’t know that they’re being fed certain things, ’cause it’s entertaining. So I try my best to balance that.
TFR:
Page turner. [chuckle]
Dennis-Benn:
I do it through characterization. Humanizing characters, or documenting the human experience. So, yes, a book could be set in Jamaica, or it could be set in Brooklyn, or Canada, or wherever. But people can still come to the table knowing that, “Well, this is what I’ve felt before in terms of relationships, or love and loss, or displacement.” Doing it that way, and then individuals can see how certain things affect people.
TFR:
And maybe relate to it in a way that they might not otherwise.
You mentioned just very briefly when we first sat down to talk that you haven’t written nonfiction yet. So is that something you’ve been thinking about?
Dennis-Benn:
I’ve been thinking about it, because I’ve been writing a series of essays and people have been saying, “Oh, this looks like a collection you’re starting here.” Or even I’ve gotten inquires about memoirs, for example. I think at some point I will, but I think for now I speak through my fiction. But I’m not knocking the idea of doing a nonfiction down the road.
TFR:
There are different thoughts about it in terms of, what you say, in terms of people sometimes, I think, have an easier time entering into the fictional world and absorbing that fictional world. And on the other hand there’s the urge to testify which you can do, really, a nonfiction as yourself, as, “This is my experience and it’s real.”
Dennis-Benn:
Exactly. Yeah…
TFR:
Okay, cool. Well, I’ll look forward to that. [chuckle]
Dennis-Benn: The thing with non-fiction, I think it’s also more brave… With fiction we hide behind our characters, while with non-fiction you say… You’re right, it’s you.
TFR:
Another question I wanted to ask you about has to do with secrets. Could you talk a little bit more about why… I kept thinking about secrets in this book and how harmful they are and how strange it kind of is that there’s such a wonderful plot device, and yet… I would just pretty much say most of the time in life they’re just awful. Do you think you could comment about that relationship between the fictional world and the living world where secrets drive fiction forward? Secrets are this thing that can be uncovered and can land surprises for people that change them. As opposed to in life where mostly they’re just a destructive element. I mean, in some ways they are in fiction too I guess.
Dennis-Benn:
I feel like we’re constantly evolving as human beings, and there are usually epiphanies that happen. It doesn’t have to be the deepest darkest secrets but something that we didn’t know before, that we just discovered, and we’re like, “Oh. Wow,” and the world suddenly looks different.
And using that device in fiction I feel like, for Thandi of course being a teenager, discovering that her mother is not perfect. And that discovery for a lot of us happens when we’re a little older, when we were like, “Oh, our parents are human beings as well. They’re not God.” And so, for her saying, “Oh, wow. Delores did this? Really?” And then Margot keeping that secret that would actually save her life, because if she ever discloses that, that could be the end of it for her. So that was important for her to keep. And then with Thandi, that secret of wanting to be an artist, and wanting desperately to… She wants more, but also what’s really ailing her is feeling invisible and knowing that she’ll still keep that as a secret and pretend to be that color.
TFR:
I wanted to ask which was about your use of dialect in the book. Dialect is so often criticized and you obviously made a choice to say “No. This is a part of the culture and I want to reflect that accurately.” So what… Could you talk a little bit more about your decision to write the dialogue in dialect so frequently?
Dennis-Benn:
My book is about working class Jamaican women. And they would not be speaking standard English unobserved. Language is a huge part of identity so I wanted to preserve that because forcing the reader to slow down because to see, to hear them speak and even… It’s to really see them as well. Live on the page with them just for a moment. And I find that that’s really important for me. Not only to preserve my language but also the authenticity of the characters.
TFR:
Any other last things that you would like to tell us about Here Comes The Sun or what you’re up to next?
Dennis-Benn:
So first of all I enjoyed writing this book. It was definitely a great purging in writing this book. There are still themes from Here Comes The Sun that will be in the second book, but it will be even more layered… I’m really excited now about that second project.
As Aquifer continues to expand its offerings into visual arts and new media, we are excited to announce a new call for submissions of film and video work!
We are looking for experimental works of film or video that are 15 minutes or less and utilize moving images as a means to poetic expression, formal exploration, or abstract and open-ended narratives. Compelling, personal works that push the boundaries of cinematic convention will also be considered for publication.
We recommend entries be works that have completed any intended festival screenings and do not have plans for future distribution, as they will be hosted on the Aquifer site and YouTube channel long term. Submit film or video works as Vimeo or YouTube links and include any passwords required for viewing. There are no requirements for year of completion or premiere status.
For more information please review the General Submissions guidelines. When ready, submit your film through our Submittable page for Short Film/Video.
after John Coltrane
The paraffin vapor trails from the heater,
and at the window, lilies and corn plants
slack like morphine-softened tongues.
Again, from downstairs the muffled sighs
rise from the neighbor watching porn,
and across the street the blue porch light
comes on, and the youth, like shadows,
slip in and out the cracked screen door.
The greasy sheen of the wartime-grey road
reflects the moon—a damp cigarette butt
orbiting the city slowly as if held by someone
tired from the day, someone who yet again
fades into his own, perhaps darker night.
The little blue urn with your mother’s ashes
sits by the spinning vinyl of Coltrane.
We stroke each other’s silence. You give. I take.
What we keep unsaid we taste on our tongues,
and we call that fate. You say, I’m crazy
about you, and in your blood-hot eyes I see
phone wires suspended over deserted miles,
a man sipping on one more glass of scotch,
the fluency of his tight lips, sleepless eyes,
keeping his and my shelved love
from crushing it by oxygen and sunlight,
the poverty of words, and I hold onto
what’s in my memory, and what’s in my hands.
In America, I imagine
Noah after the flood; see
his old hands burrow
into the land, the lost
parent finds his child. Dalida
and Fairuz and Imam all sing
of the land, but I know
not the difference between soil
and skin. Still, I swallow whole
that which does not love me. In New Cairo,
I lost God. In Old Cairo, I pray
to concrete and hanging wood. My mother texts me.
Today, it is 41 degrees Celsius
in all of Cairo. I ignore white people
who try to explain Fahrenheit.
Connecticut makes me
grateful for the weather
back home. I am puzzled
by New England
architecture. I have no windows
to pray to. February in this country
numbs my fingers, makes me
forget where my blood
flows. I spit extra hard
at the ground when it’s snowing
and I’m smoking just to spite whiteness
itself. I’m still around. I can leave
a mark. Even as I kill myself
I am still surviving
you.