~ Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams ~
Queenie Jenkins is a young black woman (2nd generation Jamaican) from south London (the geography is important to her) working in journalism (The Daily Read, culture section) in London. London’s multiculturalism and segregation are wonderfully depicted in this novel.
‘Queenie. You’re Caribbean. Brixton is you lot’s domain. You should know what’s going on in your area. The same way that I’m African, and Peckham is my lot’s domain. I know what’s happening in Peckham,’ Kyazike informed me.
p143
When Queenie goes on a Black Lives Matter demonstration with Kyazike, and as they pass through Brixton on the protest march, she observes the changes, sees the Jamaican sections have vanished :
making room for trendy new vegan bars and independent boutiques selling shockingly priced men’s fashion. When had this happened? When had the space I had known like the back of my hand, the only area I’d ever been to that I felt like I could be myself in, the place where so many people looked like me, talked like my family, when had it gone?
p210
Queenie, our protagonist, is sassy, promiscuous, confident, articulate, explicit, intelligent, well educated, and somewhat flighty and ill judging. When we meet Queenie, she has her knickers in a twist because her boyfriend Tom, with whom she had moved in, wants to have a break in their relationship, and suggests she moves out. From the text threads between them, it is clear she is a demanding and difficult girlfriend, and at this point, for Tom, impossible to live with any longer as she has an enormous chip on her shoulder, as well as continually sending mixed signals, emotionally insecure but needy, due to some secret horror in her past life. She is desperate to have him back, but meanwhile finds a tiny room in a shared house in Brixton for £750 a month; her annual salary is 21K. She is the well-meaning girl who nevertheless gets attracted to all sorts of men, while fully intending to be ‘good’.
Brain still tired from eschewing thoughts of Ted, heart still sore every time I thought of Tom.
p107
The novel presents her as emotionally faithful while sexually promiscuous.
When we first meet Queenie, she is in a surgery (UK term for a clinic) with her legs in stirrups, being checked. Even in such a position, she is still on her phone and texting – a real child of her time. She texts Darcy, one of her three best girl friends:
“Darcy. They’re asking to examine me for a second time! I’ll have had this machine in me more times than Tom in the last few weeks”
p6
The other two friends are Cassandra, a bossy Jewish girl Queenie met in an English Language seminar, and Kyazike (pronounced chess-keh), the first friend she made on the first day of her secondary school. The three friends are naturally as different as could be – Darcy from work with a serious boyfriend (Simon) she has been with for 6 years, who is 15 years older than her; the drop dead gorgeous Kyazike who sounds extremely street and addresses Queenie as “fam”, Kyazike of the “I don’t call guys, they call me. You know what I’m saying?” [p68]; and the serious minded Cassandra who tells Queenie how to live her life at every opportunity from the moment they met and continually psychoanalysis everyone. [Incidentally, looking up ‘fam’ in the Urban Dictionary, which is where Kyazike directs Darcy to when she uses slang Darcy does not follow, ‘fam’ means ‘a word use to describe your peoples. ones that you can trust dearly. someone you consider family’.]
Queenie is comical and witty, direct and disillusioned. Although she does love and appreciate and even depend on her Aunt Maggie to bail her out of trouble, this is what she says of her:
The obsession with colour is a nod to her fleeting career as an artist; a career in which she never created anything but hype around herself.
p5
Queenie’s depiction of her maternal grandmother, Veronica, is depicted with more tenderness:
The bathroom door opened and my grandmother burst in. I covered myself with the flannel. “Let me wash your back,” she said, grabbing the flannel and lathering it up with a bar of Imperial Leather that she must have bought reserves of in the sixties.
p105
That said, her grandmother is strict, exacting, and has very high domestic standards which she forces Queenie to adhere to if she lives under her roof. Her grandmother also has some very traditional notions such as never reaching for professional mental health assistance, because that would be to acknowledge to the outside world that something is wrong with oneself, and that façade of all is well must never slip, particularly not to the white mainstream world, which would be shameful.
The novel keeps drawing attention to how Queenie spends a lot of time thinking about her physical appearance. She is a size 16, very busty, and her large and “black arse” is mentioned very often, apparently, particularly as an item of sexual commodity where men are concerned. She also spends a lot of time thinking about the rest of her features, e.g.:
I’m always worrying about my lips compared to the lips of the person I am going to kiss because, as it stands mine have always been the bigger lips, kissing someone with no lips or small lips is just so sad.
p134
The item which gets the most mention however, is Queenie’s hair. It seems both the pride and bane of her life. She cannot stand people touching her hair, or her ‘twists’. She does not allow even those closest to her, to touch them, and needs to sleep with her hair in a cloth.
Now, I’m no stranger to pain. I had my hair relaxed every two months from the age of eleven to twenty-three, and the feeling of your scalp burning away so it weeps and scabs the next day has set me up to deal with any injury you can throw at me. Sexual or otherwise.
p117
Her skin colour and Jamaican origins are obviously key to Queenie’s identity, but no less is her hair, apparently, an identity marker.
The novel contains quite a lot of instances where Queenie demonstrates her awareness of the drawbacks of being black in this society, not least because she is often stereotyped and sexualised, and orientalised too. There are many instances in Queenie where the sense of being black and therefore outside of mainstream society in the UK is a consciousness which is carried all the time. The novel is light, comical, fast paced, even flippant at times, but there are also more weighted race-related incidents interwoven into the narrative. For example, at a club where Queenie and Kyazike are the only black people, a white girl runs her hands through Queenie’s hair without permission, exclaiming with admiration, and Kyazike grabs the girl’s hand, pushing her away and shouting at her. A bouncer throws Queenie and Kyazike out.
It was unfair, whoever way you looked at it, and was pretty indisputable evidence that even in Brixton, where we were meant to be the majority, we weren’t. Another reminder that we, and our needs, didn’t matter.
p144-145
It is noticeable while Kyazike speaks in slang, Queenie’s English is always extremely grammatical and correct, and even polished. Possibly to underline that she may be black, but she is educated and sophisticated, intelligent and accomplished.
As the novel progresses, we discover that Queenie holds a grudge against her gently, self-effacing mother, Sylvie, and is terrified by as well as loathes her abusive stepfather, Roy, who is apparently now in Jamaica. However, after more than half a book’s worth of Queenie’s liveliness and spiritedness, it feels slightly like a cop-out to conveniently blame all Queenie’s faults on low self-esteem as the result of a childhood trauma. The novel has Queenie’s best friends telling her she picks men who are bad to her, instead of picking men who are nice to her, because she feels undeserving. It is a surprisingly clichéd story line to tie this otherwise uncliched, fresh, feisty protagonist into.
The narrative describes Queenie’s breakdown and recovery – the second half of the novel is more focused on her struggle, and the sad background to some of her childhood experience, but somewhat loses slightly the momentum and fun and pace of the earlier half. It does a fairly good job though of representing just how broken she is, how fragile, and how strong she needs to be to put herself and her life back together again. The wrap up is predictable. But for all that the book was a better read in the first half, it was overall, an excellent read, and I can only say I look forward to the next Candice Carty-Williams novel with great anticipation.
Recent Comments