Patsy

Nicole Dennis-Benn won the Lambda Literary Award https://www.lambdaliterary.org/  for her debut novel, "Here Comes the Sun," setting herself up as a courageous spokesperson for queer women of color. In her new book, "Patsy," Dennis-Benn elevates the conversation to an even more inclusive level, exploring bisexuality, mother-daughter relationships, the nature of desire, and the boundaries that societies place on so many of us. She's also created a searing indictment of the immigrant experience.

This is a brave story about a Jamaican woman, Patsy, who is in love with her childhood girlfriend Cecily, but who is forced by cultural pressure to bear a child from an unwanted pregnancy. How Patsy responds to her daughter, Tru, and to the physical and psychic bonds of motherhood will inflame some readers. Others, perhaps more honest or compassionate, will feel a gnawing despair for Patsy's seemingly untenable situation.

Cecily has long since left Jamaica behind to settle in New York City from whence she writes glorious letters of life in her new home, always reminding Patsy that she is Cecily's one true love and encouraging her to escape the confines of her religious and homophobic Jamaican community.

And Patsy does finally manage to get the exit visa, engaging Tru's father and his wife to take on the raising of the five-year-old girl just for a short time, until Patsy can land a job in that promised land and save enough to send for Tru. Of course, the best laid plans, as we all know, seldom come to fruition and what Patsy discovers when she arrives at Cecily's elegant Brooklyn brownstone will take even the most intuitive reader by surprise. 

Dennis-Benn's writing is a joy to read. Gorgeously detailed, she brings to life the sounds and smells of the New York boroughs, the Jamaican patois of the other immigrant men and women with whom Patsy bonds in her strange new city, as she bounces from one demeaning job to another. Without papers she is never able to call upon her education, her penchant for numbers. Illusions destroyed, Patsy sinks into a deep shame and depression, unable to pick up the phone. Unable to admit failure to her judgmental, evangelical mother or to her distant daughter.

Yes, I know this sounds too depressing to be enjoyable but actually, not so. The heart of the story lies in young Tru whose arduous road to young adulthood we are privy to in chapters that alternate between Patsy's life in New York, and Tru's burgeoning understanding with her father, stepmother, and brothers. 

Dennis-Benn knows the hardship that she writes about. I have heard her speak at conferences about her love/hate relationship with her home, Jamaica, and the difficulty of being a gender fluid person of color in that place. Now living in the states with her wife, she has found the freedom and joy to write openly and honestly about the life that Patsy and Tru could only dream of. Her work is eye-opening.