Broughtupsy
Christina Cooke
House of Anansi Press, 2024
Review by Laurence Lewis Neal
To read Broughtupsy is to exist, for the duration of its pages, inside a rip. Playing with form allows authors to communicate something visceral, and Christina Cooke’s debut novel collapses the corporeal boundaries between protagonist and reader. As we read, we feel ourselves being undone, our atoms stretched apart. The novel’s settings of Jamaica, British Columbia, and Texas— and the events that occur within them— operate like particle colliders. They stir the characters up and set them on a crash course. An isolationist rigidity at the core of these characters and their family dynamic lends a sense of inevitability to these crashes. As the relationships between them begin to slowly boil, one degree at a time, there’s an exquisiteness in wanting to look away but not being able to.
It is apt that Cooke uses this form to address themes of grief, abandonment, and migration. The book drips with different kinds of loss: loss of family, loss of homeland and comfort, and loss of a certain sense of self. When we meet the twenty-year-old protagonist Akúa, she is visiting her younger brother Bryson in the hospital, where he is being treated for sickle cell anemia with a scant chance of surviving. This same condition killed their mother a decade ago, initiating the family’s fractures: their physical immigration from Jamaica to Texas and then Canada, as well as their emotional rift from Akúa’s older sister Tamika, who refused to leave Jamaica. Each family member reacts differently to these losses, which tears them further apart. While they each struggle with guilt, blame, avoidance, and unmet needs, these struggles divide rather than unite them. This family portrait hits a universal chord, showing how, even in the aftermath of loss, survivors can double-down and lose each other.
The difference between the characters’ experiences escalates and hardens into isolation when they are unable or unwilling to relate to each other across these differences. As a result, they operate in a fractured emotional landscape throughout the novel. Cooke outlines the jagged edges of these fractures in deft details that capitalize on the discrepancy between what we want and do. When Akúa calls Tamika to tell her news about Bryson, “static crackled through the phone, puncturing the long silence, then she started to pray. So I smashed the phone against the wall so hard that the black plastic split at the seam. No I didn’t.” The way this prose surges, then concisely undercuts its own energy, emphasizes the emotional loss between Akúa’s instincts and reality. Between what she wants and what actually happens. It’s one of the many moments in the novel where we can almost hear the rip.
Akúa’s anger at Tamika’s stubborn isolation pushes at the seams to be let out, but true to the habitat in which Akúa was raised, she isolates this rage. It seeps out in pockets throughout the novel: in fantasies like smashing the phone, thoughts left unspoken, and, eventually, reckless actions. Desires get trapped, too. Akúa pines for intimacy: with Tamika, her homeland of Jamaica, and other queer women. But access to these intimacies is tricky. When Akúa visits Jamaica to force a connection with Tamika and her heritage, it is not a sentimental or smooth reunion. Akúa’s experience of queerness there is also hemmed in by heterosexual enforcement, in ways that are both similar to and different from her experiences in Canada. But Akúa is twenty and ultimately cannot be contained. When her energy escapes from repression, it is new, intense, anxious, and sometimes incautious. Alongside her, we ride the boomerang surge of escaped feelings released from immense pressure.
Cooke fragments this story further by occasionally taking us back in time when something in the present triggers Akúa’s memory. Her past is also full of fragments to juggle: small and large moments of belonging and difference, sometimes occurring simultaneously. Cooke illustrates the psychic weight of being both loved and reviled, included and excluded. It is up to Akúa to hold all these fragmented pieces together: the past, the present, her queerness, her Jamaicanness, her Canadianness, her sister’s conservative Christianity, her father and sister’s isolationist ways, her loneliness, her autonomy, and her deep need for loving relationships. All of these fragments add up to a heaviness different from the mood of tragic novels with singular causes and clear solutions. This novel is limber, energetic, and occasionally erratic. The emotional weight of Akúa’s fragmentation is not a stone; it’s a titrated rip that you feel but don’t always see. It’s the weight of dissociation, of losing your body and sense of self to others. As Akúa attempts to bridge these divides in thoughtful, foolish, impulsive, self-denying, or tender ways, Cooke continually stirs us to ask: How much of yourself do you give up to reach across a divide? At what point, in trying not to lose your family, can you lose yourself? Where is the line?
The experience of reading Broughtupsy is one of being dispersed, disbanded, maybe even unraveled. And then reconstituted, over and over. Some upbringings are like that. Some homecomings are a chance to disrupt the cycle.
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Laurence Lewis Neal (they/them) is a nonbinary writer, historian, and artist. They have worked in television writers’ rooms, published essays on social movements, created queer-centered poetic installations & rituals, and made two comics currently in bookstores: Surprise! You Have a Nonbinary Friend and A Guide to Cis-Hetero Grooming Your Child. They are currently working on their first novel while earning an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Follow them on Instagram @lauris4letters