Nicole Dennis-Benn

Nicole married her wife, Emma Benn, in May 2012 in Jamaica.[12] Their wedding became a viral sensation on the island, making national news because “the media [had] played it out as the first lesbian wedding” on the island. Despite fears about their high visibility as "out" lesbians, their desire to have an outdoor ceremony, and the history of attacks on same-sex couples on the island, they were able to find a safe venue. Dennis-Benn 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.[1]

Her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, 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 the "themes of love, identity, sexuality, and belonging" that all readers may be able to connect to.[23]

The novel seeks to show the racial, social, and economic disparities that are often covered up by the Jamaican government's emphasis on unity. Poor and working-class Jamaicans are exploited “by the tourism industry to repay our [national] debt.”[23] Naive Thandi, hotel worker Margot, her much older sister, and tourist-trapping Dolores, their mother, show, in three generations, the struggle that average Jamaicans face while trying daily to survive and find 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.[4]

Readers tell her "I went through that" as they read about the over-sexualization of girls and the hustle to thrive. One goal of the novel is to give a voice to the ignored issues and complacency in the working class.[9] Reni Eddo-Loge describes the novel as "an engaging debut about exploitation and racial prejudice, as seen through the eyes of three women" showing the "creeping colonialism of the hotel industry" and the "effect of displacement" on local peoples.[24]

Her second novel, Patsy, was released on 4 June 2019.[25] An excerpt was published in feminist magazine Lenny Letter in 2017.[26] The excerpt reveals a similar use of the patois dialect and themes of identity, motherhood, gender, class, and immigration.

Her works address two sides of sexuality, the issue of being LGBT in Jamaica and the sexualization of young girls, especially by older men.[24] Dennis-Benn was motivated to write because of these issues and her own experiences with them. Like the author, her heroine, 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 [novel] with major US publishers—and major marketing budgets... marks a sea change in the literary landscape” and a possible resulting change in the self-identification of more Jamaican women as LGBT.[27]

While there is more openness today, and there are more literary portrayals of same-sex Caribbean characters, there are still violent signs of homophobia in Jamaica. Dennis-Benn explains that her ability to write came only once she was in America, and that other LGBT Jamaicans have had similar experiences. King writes that “the homophobia that made [LGBT authors] immigrate are taken up by the media to become an integral part of the story of the entire region.”[27] 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 discuss same-sex love through characters such as Margot, because while they may not understand Margot's sexuality, they can relate to other parts of her life, which humanizes the issue.

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.[22] 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."[23]

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 workers, Margot does this because she has to, and she 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."[28] There is also an underground sex tourism that brings both men and women travelers to Jamaica in order to explore their own sexuality and live out fantasies of having sex with someone 'exotic.' Nicole Dennis-Benn shows this in her novel through Margot, who explains the way men (male tourists) so often just want to see her black skin and see what her body looks 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."[28] The Sex Work Coalition Archived 2018-06-30 at the Wayback Machine in Jamaica works towards helping decriminalize sex work in Jamaica and advocates for the rights and safety of sex workers. They hope to end the stigma against sex workers as well as the health care discrimination they experience.

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 her family has on cream from an old fisherman's wife, in an attempt to lighten her skin. Skin lightening is a booming industry in Jamaica, making huge profits. Thandi hopes to lighten her skin so that the boys at school will like her. They call her a "browning," and say that she will be more popular at the party she is invited to later in the school year if she has lighter skin. In an article exploring the skin bleaching culture in Jamaica, Rebekah Kebede interviews Jody Cooper who explains: "When you black in Jamaica, nobody see you."[29] Christopher Charles notes that the bleaching culture comes from European ideals and Colonialism, since brown Jamaicans were assumed to be half-white and "often receiv[ing] greater access to land and resources as a result of their white ancestry." Dennis-Benn's story “Growing Up with Miss Jamaica” states "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 an accepted part of Jamaican culture.[29]

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. 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.[9]

• Here Comes the Sun (2016)
• Patsy (2019)

• "Who's Allowed to Hold Hands?"
• "The Day I Learnt to Accept that My Dark Skin was Beautiful"
• "We Deh Yah"
• “What it Means to be a Writing in the Time of Trump"
• “My First Visit to the Church of American Democracy"
• “Resistance, Desire, and History: The Story of My Deadlocks"
• “A Woman-Child in Jamaica"
• "Coming Out as a Writer"
• "Innocence is a Privilege: Black Children Are Not Allowed to Be Innocent in America"
• "Breaking Taboos and Loving the Characters We Fear"
• "Growing Up With Miss Jamaica"
• "Shifting Selves: Holding Two Flags"
• "Mecca Jamilah Sullivan: Interview"
• "What’s in a Name"
• "What’s for Sale" (Nominated for 2016 Pushcart Prize)
• "God Nuh Like Ugly" (Nominate for 2016 Pushcart Prize)
• "Chinelo Okparanta-Interview"
• "Ayana Mathis: Interview"
• "The Measure of a True Artiste"
• "In Her Own Words"
• "The Impact of Living Out Loud as a Gay Jamaican"