Family and other quandaries

Broughtupsy
by Christina Cooke

Toronto: Anansi, 2024
$22.99 / 9781487012762

Reviewed by Jessica Poon

*

I always feel as though I’m observing an alien species when I see siblings getting along. I’m aware that my immediate compulsion to leave the room if my sister appears in the vicinity is borderline reprehensible, though also, I’d argue, an underrated coping mechanism. Even with siblings who get in epic fights, I can’t help but think: you were in the same room voluntarily long enough to do that? Amazing. What passion, what blood. 

In Broughtupsy, Christina Cooke’s debut novel, the central relationship is between the protagonist, Akúa, a queer twenty-year-old woman, and her older sister, Tamika, from whom she’s been estranged. When their brother, Bryson, dies of sickle cell disease at the age of twelve in a hospital in Vancouver, Akúa decides to scatter his ashes in Kingston, Jamaica, which is also where Tamika happens to reside. 

Akúa and Bryson grew up together in Vancouver and Texas, whereas Tamika, after their mother’s death, decided to return to Kingston—where there’s death and taquitos; homophobia and religion; breadfruit and sexual liberation. And a whole lot of blunt questions, echoing silences, and unsolicited sisterly advice with a side of paternalism.

Cooke is excellent at showing the contrast between what gets said out loud, and the interior, unvoiced subtext. For instance:

“I’m going out alone.” I look out at the power lines looping between the short buildings. I hate you, so I won’t follow.

“If I were to put you outside right now,” Tamika says, “you wouldn’t know your ass different from your ear.” 

“Give me a map, then.” 

She laughs. “So yuh can go wonda de streets like a dyam tourist? Might as well save yuhself de trouble and give de gunman yuh purse now.”

“I don’t carry a purse,” I murmur, watching her. Don’t you remember? I hate the weight of bags on my shoulders or straps in my hands. I don’t like purses. I carry a wallet. You should remember. I’ve been this way since I was young.

In this brief interaction, Cooke shows us that even despite the thick tension (the sharpest knife would do little) between the sisters, Akúa is still able to provoke laughter in Tamika. There is something familial about that combination, though when I say familial I don’t mean loving; rather, I mean the intimacy of knowledge and contempt combined. Ergo, the tension.

The purse heterodoxy—the assumption Akúa would use one at all when there is no historical precedent—is striking. To carelessly forget a detail that signifies far beyond the mere detail, but to remember the things that sting—how their mother gave Akúa the nickname of “Your Highness”—that, too, is family. Akúa doesn’t actually remember the origins of the nickname, and cannot interject with her own memory, because she simply doesn’t have one. Tamika, though, seems to remember in encyclopedic detail:

“You’d scream like you just couldn’t go on living unless everything shifted to make space for you. … Mummy used to make eggnog every Christmas morning from scratch. The proper way, the Jamaican way, with brown sugar and fresh nutmeg and white overproof rum. You hated it. You’d hear the blender going on Christmas morning then scream for hot chocolate with little marshmallows on top.”

… “So when you were four, or was it three? I don’t know, when you were young enough to not yet piss me off,” Tamika says. “Mummy gave you a small bowl of eggnog. No liquid, just the white foam off the top. ‘Snow,’ she told you, ‘for Her Highness on Christmas morning’. I thought you’d scream your head off but you didn’t. You stuck your face in it till the peaks stuck to your chin then you ran around the house yelling, ‘Look! I’m Santa Claus!’ Mummy just laughed. She was the only one who knew how to make you hers.”

From the onset, Tamika’s estrangement from the family is clear when she announces, with no further explanation, that she won’t be visiting Bryson on his deathbed. Throughout, Tamika is not one for explanations, which means there is no closure—in any case, a mythical thing that doesn’t really exist—for either Akúa or the reader. It’s frustrating, but also real (that’s why it’s frustrating). A conversation between Akúa and Tamika is not so much a sensible exchange of words as a series of crossed-wire communications. 

The two sisters have already decided who the other person is; rather, it’s a matter of trying, and failing, to impose dictums and preferences, and confirming (or disavowing) shared histories from different perspectives. At best, it seems, the closest Akúa and Tamika can get is accepting that they will never understand each other and that, regardless, they will always be sisters. 

Though the story is written in the present tense, there are several flashbacks interwoven that fill in the gaps between the present and the past. Akúa’s relationship with Sara is not presented idyllically, but depicted as a friendship that begins after observing, in the rudeness especial to children, each other’s cultural differences. Nevertheless, Akúa and Sara are romantically involved for four years. Sara is with Akúa at her brother’s deathbed, in danger of failing her medical school exams. There is no long, acrimonious break-up scene. When Sara is in Jamaica, Akúa’s father neglects to mention what, exactly, Sara’s letter sent in Vancouver to Akúa says. This absence of specificity is particularly effective at letting us fill in the gaps of devastation too unseemly to report back on the phone. 

Sara is not Akúa’s lone romantic interest, though. Jayda, a charismatic stripper, enters Akúa’s life in Jamaica. Their meet-cute happens on a bus, though they don’t talk to each other then. Unsurprisingly, Jayda is hardly someone that Tamika, who is devoutly religious and heteronormative— and who openly laments the loss of British rule—would envision as a suitable partner for Akúa.

When it comes to strained sibling relationships in literature and cinema, I am always worried siblings will become unrealistically close after a defining moment of tragedy. In Broughtupsy, though, there is no effortless, unearned sentiment that cloys like a cavity. 

This novel is full of feelings, many of them exceedingly negative which, frankly, is what I liked most about it. In the final scene, Tamika bathes Akúa, which may sound dangerously on the nose, but is rendered poetically: “Waves crashing like blood lapping, I am the sea.”

*

Originally from East Vancouver, Jessica Poon is a writer, former line cook, and pianist of dubious merit who recently returned to BC after completing a MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has reviewed books by Loghan Paylor, Lisa Moore (ed.), Sandra Kelly, Robyn Harding, Ian and Will Ferguson, Christine Lai, Logan Macnair, Jen Sookfong Lee, J.M. Miro (Steven Price), Bri Beaudoin, Tetsuro Shigematsu, Katie Welch, Megan Gail Coles, and Ayesha Chaudhry for BCR]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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