Women Loving Women in the Erotic-Pornographic Binary: Sex and Intimacy via Audre Lorde in Nicole Dennis-Benn's Here Comes the Sun

Nicole Dennis-Benn's debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (2016), follows the career of Margot, a young woman who works as a hotel receptionist by day and supplements this income, by night, by supplying male tourists with sexual services. Yet, it is such a body that is sacrificed in the service of t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of West Indian literature 2021-04, Vol.29 (2), p.62-155
Main Author: Rodriques, Janelle
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African American literature
Allegory
American literature
Bodily integrity
Caribbean literature
Conformity
Consciousness
Dennis-Benn, Nicole
Erotica
Eroticism
Homophobia
Intimacy
Kincaid, Jamaica
Literary characters
Literary criticism
Literary devices
Literature
Logic
Lorde, Audre
Love
Morality
Narratives
Nation states
Novels
Sex industry
Tourism
Trauma
Violence
Women
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Summary:Nicole Dennis-Benn's debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (2016), follows the career of Margot, a young woman who works as a hotel receptionist by day and supplements this income, by night, by supplying male tourists with sexual services. Yet, it is such a body that is sacrificed in the service of tourism, the industry that forms the bedrock of not only Jamaica's economy but also its internalized image of itself, which is exported in the language of sun, sea and sex. Dennis-Benn's characters remain isolated from themselves and each other in the nation-as-commodity of the 1990s, a period infamous not only for the Caribbean tourism boom-and the attendant privatization of the economy and deregulation of labour-but also for the campaigns against homophobia in Dancehall, so called murder music. While the novel does not directly concern itself with these discourses, they do direct its action; we find its protagonist in a community on the brink of extinction in the face of multinational capitalist (touristic) expansion and in a relationship that is explicitly abjured by cultural and economic imperatives. [...]zami is subversive, as it creates for women the time and space to act on our desires, even when we may be forced to satisfy the desires of others (MacDonald-Smythe 229).
ISSN:0258-8501