IN HER DEBUT NOVEL, What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You (Virago, 2022), Jamaican author Sharma Taylor explores life in the poverty-stricken area of Lazarus Gardens, going beyond the poverty and violence to reveal characters with dreams, aspirations and disappointments that speak to their humanity in the midst of chaos, corruption and danger. Centered around Dinah, a poor woman from the slums who as a teen mother felt ill-equipped to keep her newborn child and gave him to the Steeles, a visiting American couple, Taylor reveals how class, corruption and violence figure in the socio-political landscape of Jamaica. She offers keen insight into the pecking order of that world, exposing the macabre parasitic relationship between politicians, police and local dons. Indeed, we are told that Simms, a politician, “can't do his job without Area Dons, like British, running the city. Dons need politicians like Simms to tell the cops to look the other way. The cops need Dons to keep law and order in the communities cops don't want to go to.”
Taylor prefaces the novel with a historical note in which she explains exactly how Jamaica has evolved into a nation known for its crime and the presence of dons. In this note, she speaks of the political divide in the island since the 1970s to the novel’s mid-1980s setting, when two parties, the Jamaica Labour Party and the People's National Party, vie for power and control, with the former courting the United States and the latter supporting Fidel Castro's communist ideologies. We are told that the leaders of each party arm their supporters with weapons in the fight for supremacy and that area dons are installed to wield power over the communities to ensure votes. The results are catastrophic, with the dons assuming a mafia type of control and gaining so much power that even the police and politicians fear them. In what is clearly a downward spiral, some police join forces with the criminals, and there is the assertion that in Jamaica “cops and crooks are sometimes on the same side.” This historical note is a fitting introduction to the novel, since it assists in understanding how the character British can wield the kind of power that he does.
The presence of the authorial voice is, however, felt with Taylor’s insertion of an old woman in the supermarket who provides a lengthy account of the role of the United States in Jamaican politics. This information is related to Celeste, the woman Dinah is certain is the same woman, Mrs Steele, who took her son eighteen years prior. Although the author’s explanation is helpful in elaborating on how the island’s economy was crippled by US embargos after Michael Manley as prime minister started courting world communist and socialist leaders, it seems forced. It seems unlikely that an old woman would tell a total stranger all about her island’s socio-economic and political past in a supermarket aisle.
It is the birth of Dinah’s baby who is taken away by the Steeles that heralds a series of events which lead to an intriguing plot that takes this yard fiction to a level of complexity and force that would make it work well on the big screen. Lazarus Gardens, where Dinah resides, with its drug use, exploitation of young women and GNN network (the gossip mill that gets information relayed throughout the slum), is juxtaposed with Jack Hills, the opulent neighborhood where the Steeles resided. We are given insight into two disparate worlds that collide when a mixed-race couple, comprising Celeste and her husband, Ray, whose initials are the same as the Steeles’, turn up in Jack Hills eighteen years later with a son the same age that Dinah's child would be.
This “reappearance” of the Steeles, presumably under different names, sets the plot in motion as their son, Apollo, raised to a life of luxury and ease in America, begins a quest for identity and belonging as a result of an earlier discovery that Ray, the white man he calls dad, is not his real father. Furthermore, the white upper-class world in which he was raised offers him no sense of belonging or identity. Apollo’s search for a sense of truly belonging leads him to Lazarus Gardens and a relationship with his supposedly real mother, Dinah, and the worldly young woman Regina, whom Dinah helps. Apollo’s fondness for Dinah and his consorting with Regina in the slums of Lazarus Gardens are a slap in the face of his nouveau riche African American mother and her white husband. Neither parent can understand their son’s affinity for this world of squalor, living on the edge and debauchery.
Taylor makes Apollo’s family believable, but provides background into the life of Celeste more so than Ray. We are thus led to understand that Celeste comes from an upwardly mobile black family, proud of their black roots, but marred by an allegiance to status and keeping the family both rich and black. They are therefore disappointed when she marries a white American, a man whose race has oppressed theirs for centuries.
Of the characters, Ray’s is the least developed, and we know little about his background. He simply appears to be wealthy, white, in love with his wife and wanting to be a good father to her son, Apollo. However, Taylor’s failure to explore his past as keenly as she does her other characters does not lessen Ray’s importance in the novel. In fact, it is his brush with death in a burglary gone wrong that heightens the tension in the story and leads to its climax.
Taylor illustrates just how far removed Lazarus Gardens is from the world of comfort and order of Apollo’s upbringing by showing how little girls are “broken in” at thirteen, long before they reach their prime, as happened to Regina and Dinah when they were that age. For her part, Dinah astutely sums up the Regina’s early foraging into a life of drugs and sexual promiscuity when she notes, “British turn her into a woman before her time.” The don was the one who summoned her to his house on her thirteenth birthday and took her virginity in an act that subsequently resulted in her resorting to using her body to get whatever she wanted and to a life of dependence on drugs. Dinah herself was raped by her boyfriend as a schoolgirl, resulting in the birth of the child she calls Son-Son, the baby the Steeles adopted.
The women in this novel are depicted as involuntary receptacles of men's brute force who somehow survive and manage to keep going. In Dinah’s case, the cyclical nature of the abuse is evident in her family, for her mother, the daughter of an obeah woman, was raped by Missa S, one of the old men in the yard, and this resulted in Dina’s birth. As Regina notes of living in the ghetto, the adopted stance is not to get too excited about life, since “life had proved you shouldn’t express too much excitement, in case the goodness got taken away.”
The Steeles’ taking Dinah’s baby and never making contact with her contribute to the fracturing of her psyche and her valiant battle to keep her sanity. She informs us that “the more the woman in white talked to mi, the more I forget. Is like she stealing the memories straight from mi head …. Whenever she come, mi brain start lose sense of place and time.” This deliberate and precise depiction of the harsh familial backgrounds of the characters and their placement in less-than- ideal living conditions underscore the extreme anguish of the inhabitants of Lazarus Gardens. We not only see Dinah’s mother, Mama, as an early victim of dementia, but Dinah, who is in her mid-to-late thirties, seems to be losing bits of herself in much the same way that a schizophrenic would.
The male psyche is also fractured in this novel. It is understandable why the men in the yard, in the absence of secure families as little boys, turn to guns, violence and sex to prove their worth. We see the effects of the absence of strong and positive father figures on the childhood and adult lives of British, Damian and Streggo. The damage to British’s psyche is evident from an early age: his father abandoned his mother before he was even born, and she beat him unmercifully as a child. He developed a penchant for inflicting pain on animals, lighting the tails of cats and dogs and watching them burn to death. It is not surprising when we are informed by the police officer who tried counselling British as a boy that he was a frightening case of utter indifference even then. Consequently, when his mother was killed in a vehicular accident during his childhood, the officer observed that he showed no emotion. This lack of emotion is again evident in his execution of Don Pedro, and in how he calculates murdering Apollo and his family.
In the case of Damian, his father abandoned his family as a baby, and his own mother was forced to abandon him in a bid to save herself from being killed by those who informed the politician of the area that she did not vote for him. His dreams of being a singer are dashed by his ill-fated decision to assist in the burglary of Apollo’s parents’ home in Jack Hills and his subsequent imprisonment. Even though he is a grown man, Damian is haunted by the abandonment of his mother. When he discovered that she had left him, we are told, “It was like a piece of his heart had chipped off, like part of a cliff collapsing into the sea.” The depth of that abandonment is further emphasized in the fact that he refuses to live anywhere else but the yard “so she’d always know how to find him.” He remains “untethered from boyhood.” In the absence of both father and a mother, Damian is forced to grow up before his time. His mother having left him all alone at twelve years old, he becomes a man the day that she leaves, making choices and decisions that move him toward a life of crime and, ultimately, incarceration.
For his part, Streggo, although he has a father, is deemed to be retarded by everyone and is shown little love. He resorts to criminal activity to prove his worth, and when he kills his uncle in an act of self-defense, his father stops speaking to him because he has killed his brother. Streggo spends the rest of his life trying to prove his worth as an accomplished criminal to British. The inhabitants of Lazarus Gardens, where squalor and promiscuity abound, thus seem little removed from the brutal colonial past that shaped the West Indies. In fact, it appears that they have merely traded places with that period, only, in this instance, the misery and violence are perpetuated by blacks themselves, who turn on their own in the quest for power and control.
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The author’s use of a multitude of narrators to tell her story works well for the novel, as this gives the characters greater depth and allows the reader to better understand them. We are not only privy to what the characters of Lazarus Gardens and Jack Hills think about each other, we are taken into the minds of the characters themselves. Mama, for example, is deemed to be mad by most, living in her own world and being disconnected from reality. However, she is accorded chapters where her voice is heard; we learn not only about her childhood, but about her dreams and desires and about her daughter, Dinah. The use of Jamaican Creole as Mama relates her life story adds to the authenticity of the piece, since the old woman speaks about her mother, an obeah woman who is consulted by the people and at the same time hated by them: “though she help dem, dem hate har. Hate har ’cause dem expose dem private, shameful, ugliest self to mi modda.”
Mama speaks of being raped by Missa S, an older man in the yard, when she was just a child, and of Dinah’s resultant birth. The impact this has on her is clear when she tells us that she sees the face of Dinah’s rapist father in her features when she looks at her. “Mi couldn’t stand to look at har face.” Be that as it may, Mama still feels love for her child, in whom she sees a softness that leads her to try to ensure that no one takes advantage of her the way she was taken advantage of. “Mi try mi best. Mi best amount to nothin’,” she feels, “’cause she still give weh har pickney.”
This makes it clear that, for Mama, Son-Son was more than a mere grandchild, he was her chance “to try again,” and she resorts to the magic arts learned from her mother to feel her grandson’s spirit and find him. She also tells us the impact that the loss of Son-Son has on Dinah: “is like a light get turn off inside Dinah head and when mi look inna har eye is like nothing not in there.” That the novel ends with Mama committed to an institution but having the last say is telling. It is as if nothing will take the fight and will to survive from within her. She returns to the world that she knew with her mother, where bush baths are a panacea for all ills and an act of cleansing. She relates exactly how she wants to be bathed, stating that it will “wash off all these worries and crosses” and that, once that is done, then she will “start to sing.” This implies that the old woman, even in her supposed demented state, is whole deep within.
Ultimately, there is a sense of closure and triumph for Mama’s grandson and Dinah’s seed when Apollo leaves Jamaica and Lazarus Gardens behind to return to the United States with the people he knows as his parents. He appears a lot less naïve about life and more focused. It is Dinah, in spite of her struggles with her sanity and poverty, who manages to instill in him the understanding that his parents’ money cannot make him a man and that there are indeed some things that she cannot teach him, things which only life itself can teach him. She tells him: “No matter how much she love you, there are things a mother’s love don’t teach you. Yuh have to learn dem yuhself. One of dem things is being decent. I don’t mean how to talk nice or dress fancy. I mean treating people right. With forgiveness and with love in yuh heart.”
For her part, Dinah is satisfied to set “her” son free, assuring him that she is like sand which can take a lot of pressure and has to be heated to thousands of degrees before it becomes glass. The woman in white, who haunted Dinah’s existence, seems to have made peace with her. She “kept Dinah’s company” and “lived in the house with Dinah now and Dinah knew only she could see her.”
Zoanne Evans was born and lives in Barbados. A three-time graduate of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, she holds a BA in English and French, an MA in English Literature and a PhD in Literatures in English. She is currently an instructor in the Foundation Language Programme at Cave Hill. Evans books include The Song Within Me, In the Shade of the Shak-Shak, The Kids in Action Colouring/Activity Book, Memory and Landscapes: The Works of Four Early Twentieth-Century Barbadians, and Tameisha's Adventure, which will be launched in December.
For more on What a Mother's Love Don't Teach You, please see https://jhohadli.wordpress.com/joannes-extra-ness/blogger-on-books-x-2022/blogger-on-books-2022-what-a-mothers-love-dont-teach-you-by-sharma-taylor/ by Joanne C. Hillhouse.
Last Modified: November 14, 2023
