By Imani Perry

Staceyann Chin’s memoir, The Other Side of Paradise is a kuntsleroman, the coming-of-age story of an artist. It begins with her early childhood. Staceyann and her older brother are being reared by their efficiently loving and spiritually devout grandmother, two small poor children in rural Jamaica. By memoir’s end she has attended the most elite University in the Caribbean, found her actor’s voice through a theatrical production of Barbadian poet Kamau Braithwaite’s The Arrivants, and is departing for New York City.

The reader who is already familiar with Staceyann Chin, and who knows her as the riveting spoken word artist famous for her role in the Tony award winning Def Poetry Jam, will perhaps be surprised by this book. While Chin the performer is charismatic, tough, and assertively political, Chin the memoirist has a quieter voice. Her writing is exquisitely beautiful and emotionally tender.

In sharing her heart-wrenching narrative, and in particular the separation from her grandmother and brother, which leads to a devastatingly abusive adolescence in Paradise, Jamaica, Chin shows how the tough exterior of her public-self grew-in fact, had to grow-as a means of survival. And yet, it is clear that even when she was just three years old, she already possessed a willful spirit and probing intellect. We root for her through it all, as she challenges religious and social orthodoxies, surmounts obstacles, and continually advocates for herself against the codes of propriety and submission expected from her as a girl child.

Although she was raised by her grandmother, at the emotional center of the book is young Staceyann’s yearning for the presence of her absent mother and the ongoing uncertainty about who her father is (even after she finds him.) Chin’s rendering of her identity as a black-and-Chinese Jamaican is provocative. On the one hand, she reveals how her biracial parentage marks her difference and makes her a target for hostility and resentment. On the other, she recognizes that it has afforded her physical attributes- lighter skin, straighter, longer hair- that are coveted and associated with a higher socioeconomic class status than that into which she is born. Her deft handling of the politics of class, color and identity are reminiscent of earlier generations of writers- of figures like Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, for whom the strange workings of race were both mundane and endlessly complex.

In addition to the absence of her parents, Staceyann’s repeated experiences of separation and uprooting prompt recurrent questions about to whom and where she belongs. Ultimately, she learns that she belongs most of all to herself. And, true to that recognition, as a college student she embraces her identity as a lesbian, a decision that isolates her and exposes her to persecution.

Chin leaves no question, however, about how she makes it through all of this. Her resilience is fueled by her grandmother’s message-which becomes a gospel-that education grants opportunity and independence. She passionately pursues her schooling, even when she has no place to call home. And so, in yet another way, she marks her place in the literary tradition established by early Black writers such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs- for whom literacy was a path to freedom.

Although there are many life lessons in this book, about education, about care and responsibility, poverty and injustice, The Other Side of Paradise is never heavy-handed. This is due to Chin’s exceptional storytelling abilities. The memoir unfolds like a novel, prompting anticipation, concern, heartbreak and joy. It is a page-turner. The writing is gorgeous, seamlessly blending lyrical and allegorical Jamaican Patois with elegant standard English prose. It is, what Kamau Braithwaite calls “national language.”

In this way, she stands in the tradition of Jamaican writers such as Michelle Cliff, whose stories reflect the hybrid histories of Jamaica’s people and the hybrid existences of the writers themselves who often tell the stories of Jamaican-ness from various corners of the globe. Just as Chin’s spoken voice carries the sonority of Jamaican life, her written story is unequivocally a Jamaican one, with the tempo and texture of the island coursing through it. But it is also a universal story- of self-discovery, of surviving adversity and escaping persecution, of exclusion and belonging, of disappointment and possibility. Staceyann Chin, the writer and the woman, is a model of grace.

The Other Side of Paradise ends as she is about to depart for New York. We know something of what will happen there. Staceyann Chin will become recognized as a star poet and performance artist. She will become a woman of Broadway and Off-Broadway stages and scores of youtube clips, critically acclaimed far beyond the rural Jamaica from whence she came. And this marks yet another literary tradition to which Chin belongs. She is the expatriate artist who seeks and finds a place where she can heed her artistic calling and live freely. Like James Baldwin before her, she travels far, but maintains a fierce loyalty to the story of her becoming. Thankfully, in The Other Side of Paradise, she shares that triumphant story with us all.

Imani Perry is a Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law- Camden, and the author of
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004).