Broughtupsy
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
At once cinematic yet intimate, Broughtupsy is an enthralling debut novel about a young Jamaican woman grappling with grief as she discovers her family, her home, is always just out of reach
Tired of not having a place to land, twenty-year-old Akúa flies from Canada to her native Jamaica to reconnect with her estranged sister Tamika. Their younger brother Bryson has recently passed from sickle cell anemia—the same disease that took their mother ten years prior—and Akúa carries his remains in a small wooden box with the hope of reassembling her family.
Over the span of two fateful weeks, Akúa and Tamika visit significant places from their childhood, but time spent with her sister only clarifies how different they are, and how years of living abroad have distanced Akúa from her home culture. "Am I Jamaican?" she asks herself again and again. Beneath these haunting doubts lie anger and resentment at being abandoned by her own blood. "Why didn’t you stay with me?" she wants to ask Tamika.
Wandering through Kingston with her brother's ashes in tow, Akúa meets Jayda, a brash stripper who shows her a different side of the city. As the two grow closer, Akúa confronts the difficult reality of being gay in a deeply religious family, and what being a gay woman in Jamaica actually means.
By turns diasporic family saga, bildungsroman, and terse sexual awakening, Broughtupsy is a profoundly moving debut novel that asks: what do we truly owe our family, and what are we willing to do to savor the feeling of home?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cooke makes an assured debut with the story of a queer Jamaican Canadian woman reckoning with her roots. In 1996 Vancouver, 20-year-old narrator Akúa loses her beloved 12-year-old brother Bryson to sickle cell anemia, the same illness that killed their mother when Akúa was nine and the family still lived in Jamaica. Overcome with grief, Akúa takes her brother's ashes home to her stubborn older sister, Tamika, in Jamaica. Tamika's prior refusal to visit a dying Bryson continues to upset Akúa and exacerbates the sisters' strained dynamic, as does Tamika's homophobia. There's still love between them, though, and Cooke uses Akúa's return to examine the meaning of home, be it familial or geographic. "Am I Jamaican?" Akúa asks herself as she struggles to understand patois after Tamika labels her "foreign." The god-fearing Tamika also hits Akúa and demands she "renounce" her sexuality. Defiant, Akúa strikes up a relationship with a stripper named Jayda. Akúa's chronicle of self-determination is stirring, as are the flashbacks to her childhood in Texas, where the family first moved from Jamaica and where Akúa resisted her teachers' attempts at assimilation. Cooke successfully evokes the temerity and rebellious intelligence of Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse.
