She's Gone Far From Universal

As the number of people claiming more than one national identity grows ever larger, it can be easy to fall into the "global village" trap, to believe that all cultural differences can be negotiated and that all human conceptions of love, madness, and the like are universal. The Ghanian-born Jamaican writer Kwame Dawes' first novel, She's Gone, seeks to prove otherwise.

Initially, She's Gone promises an interesting foray into the psychology of a couple from strikingly different backgrounds, but it never fulfills its early potential. The novel charts the strange, painful romance of Kofi, a Ghanian-born Jamaican reggae singer, and Keisha, a sex researcher from South Carolina. They meet at a bar where Kofi's band is playing, and shortly thereafter, he somewhat implausibly convinces Keisha to travel back to Jamaica with him. After some disturbing encounters with his bizarre, wealthy family, Kofi, who suffers from what seems to be mild schizophrenia, withdraws into himself, leaving Keisha to her own devices with Kofi's sinister ex-lover, Dorothy. When Keisha is nearly raped, Kofi's and Dorothy's failures to help drives Keisha, who is pregnant by Kofi, back to South Carolina. There, Keisha falls back in with her abusive ex-boyfriend, while Kofi, realizing his love for her, returns to the states to pursue her. It is to Dawes' credit that, despite its overwrought story line, the novel never becomes a mere soap opera.

Dawes' strength as a writer lies in his ability to conjure the mood of a scene. From the Gothic otherworldly funeral of Kofi's aunt to the sinister pulse of a Jamaican dance club, Dawes finds the details that create a sense of place. His background in poetry, then, comes as no surprise-his prose is sometimes awkward, but it is highly evocative.

Unfortunately, Kofi, Keisha, and the many supporting characters do not fare as well. Much of their dialogue sounds forced and wincingly childish. In the face of Dorothy's indifference to Keisha's well-being after the attempted rape, Dawes has Keisha say, as if reading from a B-movie script: "I... He tried to rape me. But it's all right. I am getting out of this shithole. Really. You all hate me anyway."

Much of the couple's behavior doesn't add up, either, even after Dawes belatedly reveals Keisha's history of sexual abuse at the hands of her uncles. Perhaps he was aiming for complex characters, but complexity comes naturally with vividly-imagined characters. Kofi and Keisha start out this way but gradually become less plausible due to Dawes' simplistic psychology. He even inserts a long, artificial conversation between Keisha and Kofi's Aunt Josephine, who raised him, about Kofi's past, in order to superficially explain his behavior. Much of what she tells Keisha is never developed, like the fact that Kofi's darker skin made him a "disappointment" to his family; any connections between this and the way Kofi's life has played out are left completely unmentioned. And the novel's ending, with its trite suggestion that it's possible to simply ignore one's messy past for a relationship, feels at once predictable and all wrong.

As a meditation on race, culture, and sexual conflicts, She's Gone is halfway successful in some respects. Most of the conflict between Keisha and Kofi results from Kofi's strange behavior, and not from his affluent Jamaican background versus her poorer American one. Besides Kofi's nonsensical ramblings about how Keisha doesn't understand his concern with "his people"-which she is justified in not understanding since he uses none of his wealth or time to help them-Dorothy is the only one to explicitly bring up the culture clash: "Yes, you might be black, but you is American first... whenever I look at you, I have to think that you Americans here to exploit us, you know?" This would be an interesting undercurrent to Keisha's stay if it weren't the case that the wealthy Dorothy had invited Keisha to stay with her for free and that Jamaican culture and politics remain very much in the background of the novel. Nevertheless, the truest passages in She's Gone examine Keisha's ambivalence about Kofi's mix of utter vulnerability and toughness. After an unloving, purely sexual relationship with a macho military man, Keisha is disconcerted when her relationship with Kofi does not fall into similarly rigid gender roles. The fact that Kofi cries when he comes, for instance, both attracts and repels her to him.

Despite all of its flaws, She's Gone is an interesting read, and there are many hints that Dawes might be capable of a much better novel in the future. With Dawes' unconventional perspective and style, here's hoping that's the case.