Reviewed by Tara Betts
If you’ve ever heard Staceyann Chin’s poetry onstage or the storytelling in her one-woman shows, you would have been introduced to a woman with
indomitable spirit. In this memoir, readers aren’t introduced to Staceyann Chin as a poet, but they meet the people who forged Chin’s strong will and
insistent voice in her childhood home, Jamaica.
The Other Side of Paradise begins in Lottery, Jamaica, where Chin is born on the living room floor to her mother, who does not want a child. Eventually, Chin and her brother Delano live with and are cared for by their grandmother. As Staceyann and Delano get older and go to school for the first time, their needs become more than the elderly, nearly deaf grandmother can provide. This small family leaves Lottery to get help from Uncle Harold and the strict hand of Aunt June. It is while Delano and
Staceyann are at their aunt and uncle’s home that they see their grandmother become the family’s domestic and shushing the two new children, who are clearly not in favor like Aunt June’s own children.
Grandmother warns Staceyann to be quiet to avoid beatings from Aunt June, who eventually puts out Delano and Staceyann when their mother finally comes to visit with expensive, impractical gifts. The children are understandably excited, but the excitement is short-lived. Mummy, or Hazel to the rest of the family, implies that the children are too thin. Aunt June drops off the children at Hazel’s hotel in Montego Bay. She can only bear her children for a few days between naps and going out every night. Hazel abandons the two children on a cluttered filthy house on Blood Lane where Staceyann is deposited in the care of her grandmother’s youngest sister, Miss John. Her brother Delano ends up in the care of his father, a Chinese grocer.
Staceyann meets her father later, when she cannot pay for books and school uniforms. Miss John will not allow her to “beg” for anything from anyone.
With a few clues, Staceyann tracks down her father, Junior Chin at his furniture store. He denies that he is indeed her father, but other relatives recognize her mother’s features in her “slim and neat” build and offer to help. Her father softens enough to fund her education until she leaves for college. Even Miss John ousts Staceyann from the house for defying her and getting a perm, a symbol of neatness and status among her friends. This only continues a cycle of making her feel undervalued as a girl child and unwanted. In spite of this, Staceyann becomes self-reliant based on her intellect and tenacity.
Staceyann Chin is also adept at describing the early moments of sexual awareness. Her conversation with Miss John’s son Glen about the definition of “batty boy” is telling, as is her encounter with photos of nude women and touching what she calls her “coco bread” for the first time. This sexuality is not limited to Staceyann’s own discoveries. The book also tells the truth about male privilege when her frail grandfather, who once abused her beloved grandmother, talks to her about preserving her virginity. Staceyann describes the tense, covert gay community in Jamaica that barely speaks in public or delves into real relationships for fear of ostracism and brutality.
At times, young Staceyann strikes out as a precocious and defiant girl, yet whimsical as Pippi Longstocking. She does not back down, even as she shuffles from one place to another. Readers will want to see this determined girl succeed in school and thrive despite the absences created in her life by others. Her story illustrates how a person can make it if there are a few people who can encourage that person and if the person remains persistent, but this is no Horatio Alger story, nor is it a conventional narrative of coming to America from an immigrant’s point of view.
Instead, Chin complicates the story with clarity. There are fluid shifts in and out of patois and sentences that do not reinterpret the vernacular heard in the voices of many people in this memoir. Chin shows how girls are often held to different standards within a family and are sexually harassed. She explores sexual mores and the colorism that affects all communities of African descent through her own interracial Chinese and Jamaican heritage. Jamaica is not necessarily a paradise for those who live there, and the town called Paradise is a contradiction of what the name implies. She manages a clear timeline of poignant and sometimes triumphant moments that ends with her departure to the United States for an open life with more opportunities. Chin carefully sets up the possibility for a follow-up memoir. After all, the story has not ended for the young girl with the sharp tongue cutting its way toward the stage as a widely known poet and performer.