Nicole Dennis-Benn


Nicole Dennis-Benn is an award-winning Jamaican novelist. She's known for her award-winning novel, Here Comes the Sun, named a "Best Book of the year" by the New York Times and her Best-selling novel, PATSY, heralded by Time, NPR, People Magazine, Oprah Magazine, and more. She lives and works in Brooklyn. She is a notable out lesbian and feminist author who explores themes of gender, sexuality, Jamaican life, and its diaspora in her works.

Life

Nicole Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Her family lived in Vineyard Town, where she spent most of her childhood before moving to Portmore, St. Catherine. When she was 11 years old, Dennis-Benn won an academic scholarship to the prestigious St. Andrew High School for Girls in Kingston.
She left Jamaica at 17 due to her displeasure of race and class inequalities on the island and the very little opportunities for upward mobility. Her mother sent her off to New York to live with her father after she expressed her feelings of hopelessness in high school. She became ‘a new woman’ in New York, eventually feeling like a true New Yorker, though she still considers Jamaica home. Growing up in Jamaica, Dennis-Benn said ‘I had felt as if I were the only lesbian in a country in which police turn a blind eye to mob violence against gays and sex between men is punishable by law.’
In America, she went on to attend college, receiving a bachelor's degree in Biology and Nutritional Sciences from Cornell University in 2003. She wrote throughout her college years to cope with her homesickness and found that she enjoyed writing more than her pre-med courses. In 2004 she pursued a Masters in Public Health, specializing in women's reproductive health, at the University of Michigan's top ranking MPH program in Ann Arbor, graduating in 2006. Dennis-Benn then went on to work as a Project Manager in Gender, Sexuality and Health Research in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health for four years before finally deciding to pursue her passion as a writer.
While working at Columbia, she completed her MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from Sarah Lawrence College in 2012. Nicole Dennis-Benn is on faculty with the Creative Writing program at Princeton University and is a Kowald Visiting Faculty member for City College's MFA program.

Marriage

Nicole married her wife, Emma Benn, in May 2012 in Jamaica. Their wedding became a viral sensation on the island, making national news. It became such a big deal as “the media has played it out as the first lesbian wedding” on the island. Despite fears about having a ceremony outside and attacks on same-sex couples on the island, they were able to find an open venue. She describes parts of Jamaica as safer for same-sex couples and has committed and engaged LGBT friends on the island. They were married one year after same-sex marriage became legal in New York. Friends and family joined to celebrate with many curious and excited hotel staffers, all taking pictures of the ceremony.

Awards and writing recognitions

In 2016 Dennis-Benn published her much acclaimed debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, with W.W. Norton/Liveright, launching Dennis-Benn as a writer to watch by Publishers Weekly. Dennis-Benn followed the success of her debut novel with a highly-acclaimed bestseller, PATSY, which became a Read with Jenna Today Show Book-club pick. Nicole Dennis-Benn is a two time Lambda Literary Award winner for her novels, Here Comes the Sun and PATSY. Dennis-Benn is a recipient of the National Foundation for the Arts Grant. She was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize; and long-listed for The Pen/Faulkner Award in Fiction and short-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her novels have appeared on several must read and best of book lists.
She has written for The New York Times, ELLE Magazine, Catapult, Red Rock Review, Kweli Literary Journal, Ebony, and the Feminist Wire.

Writing

Nicole Dennis-Benn's work challenges issues of “homophobia and sexualization of young girls, race, class socioeconomic disparities” In 2010, while bringing her partner to visit Jamaica, she was confronted again by all of these issues and her own identity. This solidified her decision to focus on becoming a writer rather than continue her medical career. Her writing is described throughout reviews as harsh, striking, and engaging. Her tone does what she intends and exposes the controversial underside to Jamaica's flashy tourism. Dennis-Benn hopes that her writing can “contribute to the greater good” and teach people important things about the places and people in her stories
The dialogue in her stories and novel is written in the patois dialect. Jennifer Senior describes it as “one of the book’s incidental pleasures, its own melodious tune” It gives insight into Jamaican culture and Dennis-Benn's “internal speech”

Novels

Here Comes the Sun

Her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, has garnered positive critical attention and praise as it explores many of Jamaica's controversial issues. Dennis-Benn hopes her novel will get “people talking and thinking” as she explores “themes of love, identity, sexuality, and belonging” that all readers may be able to connect to. Readers tell her “I want through that” as they read about the over-sexualization of girls and the hustle to thrive. A goal of the novel is to give a voice to the ignored issues and complacency in the working class. Redi Eddo-Loge describes the novel as “an engaging debut about exploitation and racial prejudice, as seen through the eyes of three women” that shows the “creeping colonialism of the hotel industry” and the “effect of displacement” on local peoples.
The novel seeks to show the racial, social, and economic disparities on Jamaica that are often covered up by the government's emphasis on unity. Poor and working class Jamaicans are exploited “by the tourism industry to repay our debt” Naive Thandi, hotel worker Margot, and tourist-trapping Dolores show in three generations the struggle that average Jamaicans face on the daily trying to survive and get opportunities for success. According to Jennifer Senior, the novel shows “the ugliest legacy of colonialism,” the “self-hatred, passed down from one generation to the next” as Thandi tries to lighten her skin and her sister and mother remain caught up in the sex and tourism trades.

Patsy

Her second novel, Patsy, was released on June 4, 2019. An excerpt was published in the Feminist magazine, Lenny, in 2017. The excerpt reveals a similar use of the patois dialect and themes of identity, motherhood, gender, class, and immigration.

Themes

Dennis-Benn's works cover a number of themes including race, class, colonialism, self-acceptance, self-hatred, homophobia, love, and sexualization.

Sexuality

Her works address two sides of sexuality, the issues of being LGBT in Jamaica and the sexualization of young girls, especially by older men. Dennis-Benn was motivated to write by these issues and her experiences with them. Like the author, Margot in Here Comes the Sun lives a closeted life on Jamaica. According to Rosamund S. King, there is an increase in portrayals of same-sex couples in Jamaican literature. She explains that “the publication of Dennis-Benn’s...first with major US publishers—and major marketing budgets... mark a sea change in the literary landscape” and a possible resulting change in the self-identification of more Jamaican women as LGBT.
While there is more openness and literary portrayals of same-sex Caribbean characters, there is still violent signs of homophobia. Dennis-Benn explained the ability to write only once she was in America and other LGBT Jamaicans have had similar experiences. King writes that “the homophobia that made immigrate are taken up by the media to become an integral part of the story of the entire region”./ While laws in Jamaica still tend towards homophobia, Jamaicans themselves are less overwhelmingly homophobic according to King's study. Dennis-Benn's novel gives Jamaicans an entry point to discussing a same-sex character because while they may not understand her sexuality, there are other relatable parts to Margot's life, which humanizes the issue.

Working Class Jamaican Life

Nicole Dennis-Benn describes being Jamaican as being “an ambassador” to the rest of the world. She says it feels like it is the job of working-class people to “sell the fantasy” of what the tourists expect Jamaica to be like to them. She wanted to show who the people behind the fantasy are because working class Jamaicans and women “are invisible.” It is important that visitors can see the working class and see the real Jamaican culture. In an interview with LAFB, she describes how “upward mobility in Jamaica is extremely difficult, which is why a lot of working-class Jamaicans leave.” A small number of Jamaicans, especially lighter skinned, own the resorts and profit from tourism, but many people are stuck in a rut of poverty. It is her hope that as Jamaicans read her novel and connect to themes that they will “realize that we are free — free to love, free to be, and most importantly, free to change.”

Stigmatization and Danger of Sex Work

In Here Comes the Sun, Margot works as a prostitute at the hotel in order to save up additional money for her younger sister, Thandi, to be able to go to private school and then college. Like many Jamaican sex works, Margot works because she has to and is often afraid that her coworkers at the hotel will find out and turn her in. Sharpe and Pinto explain that “Caribbean women see sex work as a legitimate way to raise money for...sending their children to private schools.” There is also an underriding current of sex tourism that brings both men and women in Jamaica to explore their own sexuality and fantasies of being with someone ‘exotic.’ Nicole Dennis-Benn shows this instantly in her novel and Margot explains how the men so often just want to see her black skin and what her body would look like. Sharpe and Pinto confirm that studies show “Tourists often extend the romance of their vacation on an island paradise to the sex workers themselves.” in Jamaica works towards helping decriminalize sex work in Jamaica and advocate for the rights and safety of sex works along with ending stigma and health care discrimination.

Racial Prejudice and Skin Whitening

Thandi, in Here Comes the Sun, struggles with her identity and popularity as a teenage girl because she is very dark skinned. She spends some of the little money they have on cream and to see an old fish wife to try and lighten her skin. Skin lightening has actually become a huge industry in Jamaica, making the sellers huge profits. She hopes if it is lighter that the boys will like her, calling her a browning, and she will be popular at the party she is invited to later in the school year. In an article exploring the skin bleaching culture in Jamaica, Rebekah Kebebe interview Jody Cooper who explained “When you black in Jamaica, nobody see you”. Christopher Charles notes that the bleaching culture comes out of European ideals and Colonialism since brown Jamaicans were often half-white and “often received greater access to land and resources as a result of their white ancestry.” Dennis-Benn's story “Growing Up with Miss Jamaica” writes “Though they were strangers, our community seemed to love them more than they loved us” solely for their lighter skin. Being darker results in insults like “blackie” and though some people bleach for self-esteem or due to self-hatred, it has become such an ingrained part of Jamaican culture.

The Destructive Force of Tourism

Tourism is a huge part of the Jamaican economy though the money it brings in is tempered by the damage it causes to local communities and the environment. In Here Comes the Sun, Margot earns decent money at the local resort and Delores earns her money by conning tourists into buying her souvenirs. Nicole Dennis-Benn shows how people use the tourists in order to survive, but she also shows the terrible living conditions that her characters deal with as they struggle to buy enough food and the small fishing town crumbles down outside of the sight of the resort. Margot reflects on her poor school friends who are mothers and struggling even more without the chance to work at the hotel, but the only reason Margot seems to make good money is because she also does sex work. Dennis-Benn explains that as tourism picked up, “the developers and government alike became ravenous, indifferent” to the struggles of their people in the quest for profits. Tourism creates tremendous pressure on people to sell and perform.

Novels