Love It When You Come, Hate It When You Go

Sharon Leach's Love It When You Come, Hate It When You Go occupies new territory in Caribbean writing: the characters of her stories are neither the folk of the old rural world, the sufferers of the urban ghetto familiar from reggae, nor the old prosperous brown and white middle class of the hills rising above the city, but the black urban salariat of the unstable lands in between, of the new housing developments. These are people struggling for their place in the world, eager for entry into the middle class but always anxious that their hold on security is precarious. These are people wondering who they are—Jamaicans, of course, but part of a global cultural world dominated by American material and celebrity culture. Her characters want love, self-respect, and sometimes excitement, but the choices they make quite often offer them the opposite. They pay lip service to the pieties of family life, but the families in these stories are no less spaces of risk, vulnerability, abuse, and self-serving interests. Bringing a cool, unsentimental eye to the follies, misjudgments, and self-deceptions of her characters, Leach never loses sight of their humanity or their individual natures.