‘How To Love A Jamaican’: Short Stories Packing Powerful Punches To The Heart

When is the last time you had a serendipitous moment? A moment that defined getting out of bed that morning and putting on clothes? Have you ever read something so dear that it made you exhale alongside the character? How To Love A Jamaican is full of short stories just like those moments. Alexia Arthur’s debut How To Love A Jamaican is a tender compilation of short stories that are heartbreaking and vulnerable. The collection explores the lives of Jamaicans, both American born and from their homeland. These stories explore belonging in a myriad of ways. “Light Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands” is a story that takes its name from the Kanye West song Power from 2010. This particular story deals with two Jamaican college friends. One young woman was raised in Northern California in an upper-middle-class home and is more familiar with lattes than oxtails. The other, raised by her mother in a New York Jamaican community and would take an hour commute on the train to NYU each day. The story weaves in an intricate tale of friendship, racial identity and culture.

My two favorite stories are extremely different from one another. “Slack” is heart wrenching and devastating. The story begins with twin sisters who drown in a water tank in Jamaica, but the heart of the story goes back to their mother as a child and walks us through the cascade of events that lead to their death. Then comes “Island” and the story of a queer woman who recently came out to her best friends and finds herself…