Having been widely acclaimed on the Black British Writing scene for I Am Not Your Baby Mother and Sista Sister, which dealt with the challenges of being a young black woman in modern day urban Britain, I expected good things of Brathwaite’s first work of fiction, Cuts Both Ways. I must say, I am disappointed.
The premise is interesting enough – Cynthia is a Nigerian teenager in Britain, from a reasonably affluent background (her father is a surgeon, and they can afford to send her to an expensive public school (which in Britain means private education). She joins Thornton because her father decides to move the family out of South London to more rural Buckinghamshire after Mike, Cynthia’s older brother, is killed. The author repeats that in Thornton, it is a very white school where Cynthia feels “one of one”, the only black girl, and there is only one other black student there, adopted by a white family.
In Thornton, on her very first day, she is welcomed by Thomas Goddard, the tall, green eyed, handsome rugby playing headboy, who is of the super-rich Goddard family, and who immediately fancies Cynthia. She is in the same class as Issac Goddard, adopted black younger son and brother of Thomas, who also fancies her, and who is apparently even cuter than his brother (and cooler too). This novel begins and continues all the way to read something like a rather weak young adult fiction novel. The dialogue is fairly stilted, and the author tries to inject a lot of patois and South London slang into it for veracity, but the dialogue still comes across as unconvincing. Also, it has to swop between standard English and black slang, as Issac is always doing, because he has to ‘police his talk’, as he puts it, except when he is with Cynthia.
Cynthia and her best friend, Jadell, call each other girl, sis, bitch, fam and babes, and talk in a broad slang. They say “rah” a lot, and
“Man’s got bars!” (p175)
“Ya get me, fam?” (p139)
“So wha really gwarn?” (p140),
“Is that you, yeah? […] Bad gyal and that?” (p140)
Some of the slang is quite well rendered:
“Cyn! Cum here mek we start di ting so yuh mudder ain’t driving home at the crack of dawn,” (p175)
There are some amusing moments like where Cynthia’s mother reminds her to take her GVM on a date – Get Vex Money – basically, cash so she can flee a situation and pay her way out if she needs to. There is a lot about hair, and a black teenager’s obsession with her hair. There is a lot of texting of course, and there is a lot of mentions of skin colour, with fairness equated to beauty (with all its privileges). Those parts/mentions were quite nicely done.
The storyline however is hardly riveting – Thomas plays the goody two shoes and asks Cynthia’s father if he can date her. Cynthia has no trouble shoving him off – she is depicted as privileged but street smart, best of both worlds. She continues her love affair with Issac very happily, who is apparently the dream boyfriend, though we are told she is haunted by the untimely death of her older brother, and also vaguely aware Issac has some secret he has not told her.
Of course when the secret is revealed, Cynthia is shocked and horrified. The predictability is more than weak, it is tiresome. The book lacks depth and conviction, it lacks verisimilitude – which is so strange, given this writer’s credentials and her first two books – it lacks heart, somehow. The supposed sisterhood or community of black Britons lacks the genuine warmth – or rather, we are told it is warm, and it is all about telling and not showing, which makes this read a little dull. At least it is a quick read, so it is over relatively soon. Cynthia is not much of a protagonist, apparently, she is so beloved, so popular, so street smart and strong and clever and funny and pretty…and honestly, I might even buy all that if I was her age, a young teen again, but I don’t know who else might. It just comes across as a rather immature novel, in both content and storyline, character development, writing style, dialogue and exchanges. Maybe Brathwaite is just better at non-fiction.
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