Son of foreign parents, citizen of nowhere

In a country of immigrants like the United States, many of its inhabitants still feel like a ship stranded in no man's land. Citizens with American passports born to foreign parents, who fit neither in their countries of origin nor in the place where they came into the world. This is what happens to Trelawney, one of the characters in If I survive you (AdN), novel by Jonathan Escoffery (Houston, 43 years old): for Americans he is Jamaican and for Jamaicans, American. And not only that. Among blacks it looks too white and among whites, too black.

Although he might look like other compatriots from the Caribbean, he does not speak Spanish, like them. There is no place 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 within the family, nor in the labor market: after studying at university, he navigates aimlessly through a sea of ​​precariousness. He accepts a job which consists of punching a girl in the face who claims to be preparing a photography project and even spends a period living homeless. Although it may seem improbable, the stories that he and those close to him star in unleash as many smiles as compassion 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 feel 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 an 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 does not correspond to the complexity of the human experience in a city like Miami,” adds Escoffery, who, beyond the similarities with his biography , emphasizes that everything told in the collection of interconnected stories that make up the book is purely fictional. “The only places I tried to make sure I wasn't too inventive were when I talked about racism or the tensions that can exist between communities in a place like Miami,” she notes. “I didn't want to exacerbate those tensions just to create a funny story, because I think that would be ethically reprehensible.” Which does not mean, of course, that discrimination does not permeate the characters' life experience.

Identity—the ways in which it is expressed, its search, its meaning—marks the background of the novel. Behind this the institution of the family is irremediably hidden. “The funny thing is that I had never set out 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 says. One of the markers of that legacy that is diluted when jumping between generations is language. Growing up in the United States, the protagonist speaks a much more standard English than his father's, which is expressed in a Patois that invades the pages where he contributes his point of view. Here we must highlight the translation work of Julia Osuna, who has correctly formulated a spanglish which refers to the mixture of languages ​​of the Jamaican Creole language.

Author of short stories, creative writing fellow at Stanford University and also a professor of creative writing, Escoffery was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English language (which went to the Irishman Paul Lynch for the novel Prophet Song). “Above all, it has helped me expand my audience beyond the United States,” the writer responds to what the milestone of overcoming that test with his first book has meant. “Before I didn't hear anything from foreign readers, and suddenly people from the United Kingdom, from Australia, from India started writing to me… I was recently in England and Wales and it was incredible to see the number of readers who showed up to see the finalists of the Booker. I think all of us finalists looked at each other in disbelief, because we were up on a stage in huge stadiums. “I have never seen such a large number of people at a literary event.”

Currently, the author is working on a couple of short stories that he wants to “get rid of” as quickly as possible to dedicate himself fully 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, what books are prohibited, and who is allowed to express themselves.” A local issue that, like the question of identity and race, can be easily exported to an increasingly globalized world, as Escoffery has been able to verify with If I survive you. “There are certain points in the book that have resonated with many people, such as the mixture of races and the meaning of multiculturalism,” summarizes the author. “When your parents come from different places, that puts you in the question of whether you are Italian or Irish, whether you are Jamaican or Haitian. That has an impact on many people who have ever asked themselves that question, people who have been forced to ask themselves that question because others have asked it to them.”

_