Son of foreign parents, citizen of nowhere | Culture

In a country of immigration like the United States, many of its residents still feel like a ship stranded in no man’s land. Citizens with American passports who were born to foreign parents and do not fit in either their country of origin or the place where they were born. This is what happens to Trelawney, one of the characters in If I survive them (AdN), novel by Jonathan Escoffery (Houston, 43 years): For Americans he is Jamaican and for Jamaicans he is American. And not only that. On black people it looks too white and on white people it looks too black.

Although he looks like other fellow Caribbeans, he doesn’t speak Spanish like they do. There is no room for him in any group. His parents came to Miami from Jamaica and he is the second child, the youngest. He neither finds his place in the family nor in the job market: After completing his studies, he navigates aimlessly through a sea of ​​uncertainty. Accept a Work A girl who claims to be preparing a photography project and even lives homeless for a while is punched in the face. Although it may seem unlikely, the stories in which he and his loved ones star elicit as many smiles as sympathy and even shock. “I often write about complicated situations and serious topics like race, ethnicity and identity, but I try to do it in a way that doesn’t come across as depressing,” Escoffery explains in a video call. “I think depending on where readers come from, they understand my stories in one way or another.”

Like Trelawney, the author is American with Jamaican roots. Like his character, he grew up in Miami, a cosmopolitan city whose idiosyncrasies are part of the stories he tells. “I think Jamaicans are people who are sometimes romanticized and sometimes simplified in a way that doesn’t reflect the complexity of the human experience in a city like Miami,” adds Escoffery, who goes beyond the similarities with his biography to emphasize that everything told in the collection of interconnected stories that make up the book is purely fictional. “I was just careful not to be too inventive when talking about racism or the tensions that can exist between communities in a place like Miami,” he notes. “I didn’t want to heighten these tensions just to create a funny story because I think that would be ethically objectionable.” Which, of course, doesn’t mean that discrimination doesn’t permeate the characters’ life experiences.

Identity – the way it is expressed, its search, its meaning – marks the background of the novel. Behind this lies the irrevocable institution of the family. “The funny thing is, I never intended to focus on family, but then I realized that everyone comes from somewhere. When I thought about Trelawney, I knew that he could not become independent of his ethnic identity, but he also could not become independent of his family or his cultural heritage, even if it was difficult for him to feel accepted in that community he said. One of the hallmarks of this heritage, which is diluted with generational change, is language. The protagonist, who grew up in the USA, speaks much more normal English than his father, which is reflected in a Patois this permeates the pages on which he presents his point of view. Here we must highlight the translation work of Julia Osuna, who correctly formulated a Spanish which refers to the linguistic mixture of the Jamaican Creole language.

Escoffery, a short story writer, creative writing fellow at Stanford University and professor of creative writing, has been selected as a finalist for the 2023 Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the English language (which went to Irishman Paul Lynch). for the novel Prophet’s song). “Above all, it helped me expand my audience beyond the United States,” responds the author about the significance of the milestone of passing this test with his first book. “Before I stopped hearing from foreign readers, suddenly people from the UK, from Australia, from India started writing to me… I was in England and Wales recently and it was incredible to see how many readers appeared to see the Booker finalists. I think all of us finalists looked at each other in disbelief because we were standing on a stage in huge stadiums. “I’ve never seen so many people at a literary event.”

The author is currently working on a few short stories that he would like to “put down” as soon as possible in order to fully devote himself to his new novel, in which he will return to Florida to deal with the situation in the classrooms. Issues such as “what can be taught, which books are banned, and who is allowed to speak out.” A local problem that, like questions of identity and race, can easily be exported to an increasingly globalized world, as Escoffery has verified If I survive them. “There are certain points in the book that resonated with many people, such as racial mixing and the importance of multiculturalism,” the author concludes. “If your parents come from different places, the question for you is whether you are Italian or Irish, whether you are Jamaican or Haitian. This has an impact on many people who have ever asked themselves this question, people who have been forced to ask themselves this question because others have asked them.”

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