Reviewed by Mireille A. L. Djenno
She’s Gone is the story of the relationship between Kofi, a Ghana-born Jamaican reggae musician and Keisha, an African-American woman born and raised in South Carolina. Although the novel at times reads like a laundry list of stereotypical African-American problems–the main characters grapple with indigence, mental illness, incest, unplanned pregnancy, domestic violence and unemployment–first-time novelist Kwame Dawes creates memorable and authentic characters where caricatures might easily have been.
Kofi and Keisha initially meet at a concert featuring Kofi’s band, Small Axe, in Columbia, South Carolina, the kind of engagement that is a necessary evil in the quest for stardom: “…the mainstay of the tour were college towns where rich white kids crowded the show to hear music that spoke to them only of sun, sand, and weed.” This conflict between doing what is necessary to survive while trying to hold on to dignity that is tested at every turn, is at the heart of this well-written novel.
Subsequent to their meeting, the two characters, both mired in romantic and family dramas of their own, develop an unavoidably vexed relationship that defies novelistic convention. The pleasant idyll that characterizes the beginning of most fictional romantic relationships is short-lived, and the complex emotional backgrounds from which they respectively arise soon manifest themselves in their own complicated relations with one another.
The story takes place both in South Carolina and in Jamaica. Dawes painstakingly describes their beauty, creating in the serene geographical origins of these characters a backdrop that is at odds with their messy lives.
This international backdrop, created by Kofi and Keisha’s travels to their respective places of origin, allows them to inhabit each other’s cultural spaces and thereby experience first hand the displacement the other has felt abroad. This has the effect of demystifying problems that might otherwise seem exotic. Keisha: “There is nothing screwed up about your life, Kofi. We all have some mess, you know? Nothing so special about your life at all.” This may well be the novel’s central argument—fortunes, both good and bad, are more or less the same all around and none of our circumstances are in that sense, “special.” Dawes’ characters find in this assertion an important basis for solidarity which underscores another of the book’s underlying themes—the primacy of culture over color in our personal elective affinities.
While they may share some physical and vestigial cultural traits, much separates them. As expressed by those close to the characters, this cultural interface produces its own symmetry of distrust. To wit, Dorothy, an important part of Kofi’s past is unequivocal about what Keisha represents:
“I like you, Keisha, but whenever I look at you, I have to think that you Americans here to exploit us, you know? It is as simple as that.”
In turn, Keisha’s cousin explains:
“Them island guys sound sexy and all that, with their accent and shit, but they think they better than us. You have to understand that. You know that now, right?”
The combined emotional baggage of all of the major and minor characters is at times a staggering load for the reader to bear. While it may well be an instance of art accurately imitating life, escapist it isn’t. Life is messy and Dawes makes no effort to rehabilitate the messiness of life for the sake of weaving a more palatable tale.
The novel is at its best when the author’s poetic vocation is evident: “The sky was bleeding red and bright orange into the plate of blue above. Everything was crumbling into flame–the stern stability of the afternoon replaced by the dappled disquiet of sunset.”
Ironically, the only cringe-worthy moments in terms of narrative technique come when the poet-turned-novelist attempts to wax poetic with his tormented protagonist’s lyrics:
You wince, take the pain
Like you take your sorrow
You wince, take your pain
Like you take your sorrow
Or worse…
She was a friend of mine
Selling her soul for a lickle money
She was a friend of mine
Selling her body for a lickle money
Despite, these forgivable flaws, this novel is worth reading if only to see Kwame Dawes try his hand at novel writing.
Though the storytelling does not suffer for it (and in the end, that is all that matters), the novel is infused with a sense of hopelessness that lingers after the last page is turned.