Review by Heather Mallick (1995)

Sleep On, Beloved
By Cecil Foster
Random House, $27

The world of the Jamaican immigrant to Toronto is a foreign one to me. So is the world of the Beaches hippie and the Rosedale matron, for that matter, but my eternal—and faintly shameful—lack of sociability and interest in the lives of my fellow human beings is perhaps not the reason for my neglect.

Who are these people? I know not a single one. And I don't read about them. There is more written in newspapers and magazines about the inhabitants of shelters for the homeless than about the tens of thousands of people from Jamaica in this city. That's because the homeless are an easy hit. They're readily describable, they're insensitive, they won't sue and readers have a stock reaction to them that gets their stories on Page 1 every time.

Jamaicans, now, that's more problematic. Ethnic groups are hell to write about. Only racists find them easy to sum up.
That is why documentation on Jamaican-Canadians exists in police files, immigration reports and well-meant boring articles on the "Jamaican community," but mainstream writing about the real lives of these real people is almost non-existent.
It's that fatal word "community" that injects paralyzing ether into stories about individuals who make up groups. Margaret Thatcher once famously said there was no such thing as society, but of course there is. But there really is no such thing as "community". It's just a handy label for journalists who have to get some quick balance in their ping-pong "police said/community spokesman said" stories.

This makes the achievement of Toronto novelist Cecil Foster all the more remarkable. In Sleep On, Beloved, his second novel, he has created Jamaican-Canadian characters for whom readers will come to care desperately and he has made us see as a whole what drives them as individuals and as a group.

Or rather, three groups. There are the immigrants born in Jamaica who came to Canada seeking a better life. Then there are the Jamaican-born children they hauled over from the old country who are having a terrible time adjusting. And there are the Canadian-born children who will fit in well—or less well, depending on how they were raised by first-generation immigrants.
It seems to me to be extremely difficult and ambitious for a novelist to try to cover all the nuances of people on these three levels. And most important of all, until I had read Sleep On, Beloved, I would have said Foster would have been unable to render three main female characters.

Certainly, Kingsley Amis has been very acute about female alcoholics, and Larry McMurtry has an excellent understanding of depressed Texan women who cry a lot. But generally speaking, this literary cross-dressing doesn't work. For how does a male novelist ever dwell in the minds of women without eventually giving up? We're very complicated people, you know, which is the source of all our problems.

Somehow, Foster achieves it. He writes about three generations of women at war with each other and makes us like each one. Mira Nedd, the grandmother, is the Jamaican matriarch whose intense religious beliefs and domineering nature drive her daughter Ona Nedd to grab the chance of emigration to Canada and leave her illegitimate baby Suzanne behind.
Ona doesn't want to abandon Suzanne but Canada won't allow entry to domestics with babies. Suzanne will not come to Canada for 12 years, and by then the damage is done.

Young Suzanne hates the food, the silence of a Toronto apartment, the loneliness when both parents work at low-paying jobs to survive and the cold. In her head, Suzanne, like her mother a talented natural-born dancer, can only hear the drums she remembers from Jamaica. Here in Canada, there's just elevator music.

Foster does a stunning job of translating Jamaican culture for "cold-arse" Canadian readers and making them admire it. Caribbean music is wild - people dance sexually, like panthers, like fiends. Like true rock 'n' roll and techno music, it has to be played LOUD. It makes our elaborate interpretations of the lyrics of R.E.M.'s What's the Frequency, Kenneth? seem a bit tame and it explains house parties.

Young Suzanne, raised on the Scriptures by her grandmother and urged by her mother to adopt the self-discipline, speed and harder edges needed to succeed in Canada, is hopelessly unhappy. She starts hanging out with petty criminal boyfriends.
Here's another reason to admire Sleep On, Beloved. Foster, a black man born in Barbados, has the guts to come out and say it: Jamaican men have let down their women in the classic white-trash manner. (Significantly, Foster's first novel was called No Man in the House.) The curse of the three generations of Nedd women has been their predilection for useless men who will impregnate them, abandon them, borrow their money and lay waste their lives. Ona was dumped by her first lover, raped by her first employer, a white monster named Jenkins, and wrung dry by her layabout husband. Suzanne ends up as a table dancer, and her boyfriends are unemployed pimp types.

"All you black men out there," Ona tells her loutish husband, "with no ambition, just waiting for some woman to come along an' pick you all up. All you black men are so useless, it makes me sick." Christ," Joe says feebly. "Don't start on that now."

As Sleep On, Beloved progresses, the reader ends up rooting for these women, cheering them on. Mira wants a God-fearing life. Ona wants progress, if not for herself, then for her children. Suzanne wants independence. What they all get is Jamaican jerks. And the older generation of West Indian women in Canada are all forming support groups, Suzanne says disgustedly, where they can whine about how badly their kids are turning out.

But you can't go home again. Suzanne finds Jamaica hot and boring and chaotic. In tidy Toronto, the Canada Post truck arrives on schedule to empty the mailbox on the corner. "That was one thing she liked about Toronto; everything was so attuned to the clock."

The answer, Suzanne (and I assume Foster) concludes, is that to survive, the immigrant must set aside the old self. Only among her own kind can she allow her Jamaican-ness, her "brazen and titillating vernacular" to flower. That's the balance she must find.

It is not clear to me how Foster managed to write this wonderful novel. He is a journalist, and as the British editor Leonard Woolf said, that destroys any ability to write literature. The mind opens and shuts daily or weekly, like a mussel shell or a lens and eventually you become a shellfish or a camera but nothing more, he said.
I think Foster's great talent is for empathy, which he employs so skilfully that curiosity about these women speeds the reader along. Like the best novelists, he can understand other generations, other mindsets, even the other sex. In doing so, he has become a translator of other worlds.