BOOK REVIEW - FRYING PLANTAIN

Frying Plantain by Zalika Benta-Reid

Format: Hardback

Publisher: Dialogue Books

Published: June 2019

Genre: Short Stories

Setting: Canada, Jamaica

Rating: 3 Stars

Synopsis:

Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle — of her Canadian nationality and her desire to be a “true” Jamaican, of her mother and grandmother’s rages and life lessons, of having to avoid being thought of as too “faas” or too “quiet” or too “bold” or too “soft.” Set in “Little Jamaica,” Toronto’s Eglinton West neighbourhood, Kara moves from girlhood to the threshold of adulthood, from elementary school to high school graduation, in these twelve interconnected stories. We see her on a visit to Jamaica, startled by the sight of a severed pig’s head in her great aunt’s freezer; in junior high, the victim of a devastating prank by her closest friends; and as a teenager in and out of her grandmother’s house, trying to cope with the ongoing battles between her unyielding grandparents.

A rich and unforgettable portrait of growing up between worlds, Frying Plantain shows how, in one charged moment, friendship and love can turn to enmity and hate, well-meaning protection can become control, and teasing play can turn to something much darker. In her brilliantly incisive debut, Zalika Reid-Benta artfully depicts the tensions between mothers and daughters, second-generation Canadians and first-generation cultural expectations, and Black identity and predominately white society

My Thoughts:

I have read a couple books in the recent past referencing food in their titles and I love this recognition of the centrality of food in human connections and interactions. And so, I knew this would be one that I loved, if it lived up to its promise and while it does begin (pig head) and end (frying plantain) with food, I was a tad disappointed that some of the stories fell flat.

Frying Plantain is a collection of connected coming of age stories following the life of Kara, a Canadian-born Jamaican girl living in the neighbourhood of Eglinton Neighbourhood, ‘Little Jamaica’ in Toronto, Canada. In this small community, which serves as a melting point for Caribbean immigrants from the different islands, Kara comes of age and we follow her struggles as she tries to establish her identity while straddling different worlds and cultures. Through snapshots of her life, we get glimpses of her strained relationship with her friends, boys and boyfriends and most importantly and what carries the book, her mother and mostly dysfunctional grandparents.

In the first story ‘Pig Head’, on a recent family trip to Jamaica, Kara opens the fridge only to be met with a severed head of the pig. Whilst this scene mildly traumatises her, Kara has to put up a bold face in front of her Jamaican cousins. Back in Canada, she regales tales of how she helped slaughter the pig. Each telling and bold-faced lie getting more exaggerated and bloodier than the last which finally lands her in trouble with her teachers, earning her a talking to from her seemingly detached mother. The rest of the stories follow Kara’s journey through friendships and how these can change and evolve over time, first loves and first crushes. From these snapshots of her encounters with boys, I hoped Benta-Reid would have Kara’s sexuality would have been explored further.

Another angle I had hoped to really get into was Kara’s relationship with her mother and grandmother which unfolds through tense and sporadic interactions in the stories. We get to learn that Kara was as a product of a teenage pregnancy and her father left when she was a child, leaving her single mother to raise her by herself (with the help of her grandmother). And as she struggles to put herself and Kara through good schools (she was pursuing her Master’s degree), having to keep moving houses and a few times teetering on homelessness, forced to seek boarding with her fastidious grandmother, she comes off as cold, strict, detached and quite toxic to be honest. It becomes clear as the stories unfold that this is driven by fear of not wanting her daughter to suffer the same fate. This is story I yearned more of.

Whilst this book is well written and Benta-Reid has cemented her place as a formidable debut author, I couldn’t help but feel like this book left me empty. Yearning. And because so much of the stories are tiny snapshots of interconnectedness, it almost felt like the actual stories were happening outside or in between the stories. As if the reader is coming in after the event has already happened and what you are left with are the aftershocks.