Mind Picker: If I Survive You

You assume that, should you survive long enough to become a grandfather or great-grandfather, you will outlive winter; you will outlive glaciers and polar bears and snow. And it occurs to you now that, should you survive to see your progeny reproduce, you will outlive and thus need to explain Miami to these descendants — who in your mind’s eye split your features and Jelly’s — as the city, by then, like much of Port Royal and Atlantis before it, will have returned to the sea. It occurs to you that people like you — people who burn themselves up in pursuit of survival — rarely survive anyone or anything.

I like reading fiction because I am very interested in learning how other people live. And with If I Survive You, author Jonathan Escoffery writes about a community — Jamaican-Americans in Miami — that I’ve never seen explored in this way. In a series of short stories (that definitely reads like a novel), we meet Trelawny (born in America to Jamaican immigrants) and his older brother Delano (their father’s favourite), and the pressures that this family — and especially Trelawny — endures was definitely eye-opening to me. The writing is polished (this does not feel like a debut), the small moments are touching, but although several stories end on big shocking scenes that made me gasp in the moment, I was left with the feeling afterward that these scenes were unwarranted and gratuitous. The bottom line: The small moments engaged me and truly gave me a sense of how a family like this might live, but the big moments, and the overall storyline, didn’t feel authentic. This felt like a 3.5 star read to me and I’m rounding down.

“Are we Black?” you ask your mother.

Agitation grips her. A shudder takes her bright, freckled flesh and wiggles it over her bones as she quickly finishes the family genealogy, down to the last shaky details. “Your father’s father’s mother was Jewish. Your grandmother’s mother was Irish,” she says. “Your grandmother’s father,” and she lowers her voice to a whisper when she says this part, “may have been an Arab.”

You stare at her blankly, noting, “You haven’t answered the question.”

Her agitation inflates to ire. “Chuh. I was never asked such stupidness before coming to this country. If someone asks you,” she says, “tell them you’re a little of this and a little of that.”

The first story, In Flux, introduces Trelawny as a young boy in search of an answer to a question he hears frequently at school: What are you? He’s too white to fit in with the Black kids, too brown to hang with the whites, and as he doesn’t speak Spanish, he’s not welcome around the Cubans and Dominicans either. Trelawny’s parents and older brother speak in a Jamaican patois (which most people don’t recognise as English), and the boy’s naive insistence that he should just be thought of as “American” means that he doesn’t fit in very well with his family either. Trelawny is a very likeable and sympathetic character, and as events like Hurricane Andrew and the 2008 Recession play out in the background, the unique pressures that Trelawny and his family experience as outsiders are well explored.

These are also the stories of absent fathers and microaggressions and economic failure. I don’t know if I understood why, after graduating college, Trelawny was too overqualified to get any job and needed to live in his car (or why, years later, he and a girlfriend — who each had a fulltime job by then — couldn’t have qualified for an $11 000 mortgage to buy his father’s house?) I’ve never tried to make a quick buck by answering CraigsList ads, but I didn’t understand what the white people were willing to pay for over the years. I really liked the story of cousin Cukie reconnecting with his own absentee dad in Splashdown, but as dramatic as that ending was, I saw it coming (and I thought that it detracted from the integrity of the book overall). On the other hand, I didn’t see the ending coming in Under the Ackee Tree, and I thought it was perfection. Again: I was moved by small moments but put off by several of the big plot points.

My parents came to the U.S. not for economic advancement but to escape the violence the U. S. government funded in Jamaica throughout the 1970s as part of its war on socialism. But when I say Jamaica to non-Jamaicans, no one thinks of CIA operatives, or puppet prime ministers, or historical continuity. Instead, they break into free association, as if they’d been tossed into a rap cypher: Bob Marley, irie, ganja, poor people, Sandals, ‘ey mon! At best, they believe our history began the moment they purchased their all-inclusive vacation package. Of course, the difference between exiles and my parents — in fact, the difference between me and my parents — is that my parents have a homeland to which they can return.

This disconnection — Trelawny’s feeling that he’s truly neither American or Jamaican; that he doesn’t fit in with his family or community (he’s never even had a girlfriend who wasn’t fetishising him or rebelling against their parents by being with him) — is the crux of If I Survive You, and Escoffery does a wonderful job of exploring the experience. I certainly did learn something of how someone in this position lives, I just wanted to believe in everything that happens.