Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer 
Nine-year-old Annalise Bennette (left) gets the signature of author Claudette Beckford Brady in her book 'Sweet Home, Jamaica', at the launch in the Social Sciences Lecture Theatre, UWI, Mona, on Saturday, December 1. - Peta-Gaye Clachar/Staff Photographer
Claudette Beckford-Brady smiled and limped as she walked to the podium for the second time at the Social Sciences Lecture Theatre (SSLT), University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona cmpus, on Saturday evening.
On her first trip to the microphone she had read excerpts from her debut novel, Sweet Home, Jamaica. This time around, she was saying thanks.
"It feels really surreal being here this evening. This is the stuff of my dreams, really. For years I have envisioned myself in this position, standing in front of a crowd of people reading my book," she said to applause from the gathering at the book launch. "It just goes to show that dreams can come true."
"Me. Ordinary little me. Country girl from Gravel Hill, Old Harbour. If I can do it anybody can," Beckford-Brady said.
Powerful prose
It was more than a matter of making a full-length literary debut, though, as guest speaker Dave Rodney had given the reason for the limp earlier. After introducing Sweet Home, Jamaica as "this amazing debut novel", saying "the prose is powerful and the dialogue is rib-tickling", and summing up its elements of "drama, tragedy, despair, tears and laughter and loads of classic Jamaican bad words", Rodney said that Beckford-Brady has sickle-cell disease.
"It was said that people with sickle-cell would not live past 30 and Claudette grew up with that expectation," Rodney said. When she turned 30 she considered herself to be living on 'brawta' and was determined to return from England to Jamaica. "She really came home to Jamaica to die," he observed.
However, "indeed, she orchestrated her own resurrection and found in Jamaica a new beginning and a brand new start. She has become a hot new arrival on the Jamaican literary landscape."
Rodney said that he had been hooked from the first sentence of Sweet Home, Jamaica, which is set in two volumes, the first covering 1974 to 1982 and the other continuing the tale into the 1990s.
Beckford-Brady read that first sentence as she presented two parts of Sweet Home, Jamaica, the first chapter entitled 'A Shocking Discovery' beginning "I was 13, going on 14, when I discovered that my mother was not my mother."
The information, delivered in the middle of a whipping from her stepmother Mavis ("I don't know why yu father carry you come give me ..."), the start of Michelle Freeman's journey to self-discovery, which took her from England to Jamaica. There, in the second excerpt, as she met her maternal family and was shown the two pimento trees planted for her mother and herself in the yard she lived for four weeks before being sent away, Freeman said "for the first time in my life I felt like a Jamaican person.
"Here I did not have to apply to become a citizen. I had a birthright. Now I had discovered I did not want to be British. I was Jamaican and there was no better feeling in the entire world," Beckford-Brady said, to complete the reading to very good applause.
Entertaining evening
As entertaining a read as it was, the music of the Eagle Star Marching Band playing This is the Land of My Birth and Maurine Powell's spoken word piece adding to the entertainment of the evening, Sweet Home Jamaica had a serious impact. One man related his own true experience of discovering that he was not his 'mother's' child, much like Michelle Freeman, the information delivered during a fight with a cousin.
And Professor Carolyn Cooper, who hosted the launch, noted that the congratulations of Velma Pollard, who was in the audience and added 'national' to the descriptions of Sweet Home, Jamaica was no small matter.
The launch of Sweet Home, Jamaica, was co-sponsored by the Institute of Caribbean Studies, UWI, Mona, Best Dressed Foods, Lasco Distributors Ltd. and Mae's Catering Services, with Cecil Gutzmore introducing the guest speaker.
