“David”
Two Sudanese women—one a young mother and the other older and more experienced—cross paths on a street. The central symbol of the story is the new bike owned by the younger woman. The bike becomes a symbol of flight, of freedom, independence. The two women share little as they not only belong to different generations, but are also separated by geographical history. They are also separate by cultural expectations revealing the divergences of time. The titular character here is the son of the older woman and her story-within-the-story of a flashback to an incident involving his bike serves as the thematic foundation unifying the two women most completely.
“Harlem Jones”
This is a story of police brutality, the infamous 2011 Tottenham riots and rage. The title character is know to the local enforcement as so many others. The main difference is that they are about to underestimate this “boy” who declares by the end, holding a Molotov cocktail in his hands and the energy of anger in his actions, that he is not their “son.”
“Hope”
Millie is a Jamaican girl with a peculiar nickname: Banana Girl. The provenance of the nickname is even more peculiar, deriving from the crop planed in the backyard by her father as a symbol of his hope for a better life for his eldest daughter and her brothers and sisters. Things suddenly start to take a hopeful turn when Millie becomes apprentice for a seamstress, but eventually falls in love and winds up pregnant. This man—upon whom Millie hangs her hope for a better future—promises to return when he heads out from Kingston for work, but when he doesn’t return, hope seems as fragile as a soft rotting banana.
“Foreign Soil”
The title story builds upon that theme of chasing after hope through love. A Uganda man named Mukasa walks into the Australian salon where Ange works as a hairdresser and everything changes in that instant. She leaves home to follow him to his homeland, but once there witnesses a complete and total change in the character of the man who had never shown aggression nor seemed prone to domestic violence while in her country. Desperate to escape, Ange finds herself trapped by geography where more foreign soil is the destination of everywhere she turns in her desire to escape.
“Railton Road”
It is the 1960’s in England, but hardly swinging London. Rebels have set up home in a squat in Brixton, as in the song by the Clash about the guns of that city. Solomon, who dreams of being conjured as the very spirit of Africa, hopes to land a promotion with the London Panthers activist group. He is a rebel; it is a rebel squat. The police are aggressive and the landlord is overly eager to evict everybody associated with them. By the end, however, this story becomes a complex portrait of reverse racism, perverse masculinity, and the revelation of the potential that not everything rebellion is perhaps serving the purpose it seems.
“Big Island”
This story is purposely not the opening tale of the collection. A stranger with no idea what to expect might open to “Big Island” and assume everything else was written in the same dense, difficult dialect which commences with its opening line:
“Nathanial Robinson lean out ovah de water, shake im head an look-look down pas im grubby dungarees an im heavy leather work boot, an inte de water below.”
Difficult and off-putting it may be, but the utilization of Jamaican patois throughout serves a definite thematic purpose as well as narrative. This is a story about a wife teaching her husband the alphabet one letter at a time, a week per letter. Nathanial is not interested in learning the entire alphabet; he just wants to focus on the important letters. Communication, willful ignorance, the revelation of how learning can expand into knowledge beyond the specifics of what one learns is all demonstrated through Nathanial’s epiphany involving a newspaper story about the experiences of a West Indies cricket team.
