Staceyann Chin knows what Paradise is like — and it’s certainly not brimming with peace and prosperity.
The several years Chin spent in the Jamaican village of Paradise during her adolescence were turbulent and at times traumatizing, but helped solidify her motivation to push past the poverty in which she was raised and defy the cultural expectations she faced.
Chin, an openly lesbian poet and author, will share her passion for storytelling with the Philadelphia LGBTQ community next weekend when she reads selections from and signs copies of her new memoir, “The Other Side of Paradise,” during the 2009 LGBT Womyn of Color Conference, April 3-4.
Chin said that while her own background may differ from that of the event’s participants, she expects the message of her memoir to resonate with the entire audience.
“I think it’s a human tale of survival,” Chin said. “In these times, I think this story is becoming more relevant because America has just left behind its era of plenty. I think people will recognize some of their own desires, or even their needs, that aren’t met in this book.”
Chin, who is of Jamaican and Chinese descent, spent part of her childhood in Lottery, Jamaica, raised by her grandmother, but yearning for the mother who abandoned her and a father she never met.
At age 9, Chin was separated from her grandmother and brother and went to live with relatives in Paradise, an area she said represents the vast economic divides of the island nation.
“Paradise is split between on one hand being very poor and the other being very wealthy, and I lived in the very poor section and longed to belong to the other side of Paradise,” she said, describing the title of her memoir. “In the North American public imagination, people think of Jamaica as this idyllic holiday place with the sea, food, fun and resorts, and this story is about the other side of Paradise. It’s not all a place of holidays and summer nights.”
Chin’s tale describes the hardships that she and other members of her island community faced, detailing the poverty and abuse she was confronted with and the abandonment issues that have followed her throughout her life.
The story also follows Chin’s gradual acknowledgement of her sexuality.
She said when she did begin to realize that she was a lesbian, she embraced her identity, at times a little too forcefully.
“When I came out, I think I was so brash and unashamed to be a lesbian and also had a lot of the hubris of youth, and I think I forgot how to deal with the cultural norms of the world in which I lived. Although I was proud and unapologetically lesbian, I almost forgot that kind of excitement of being lesbian,” she said. “Not being accepted turned me into a jerk, and I became unbearably crass and rude, which intensified people’s response to my being gay.
“And it’s always complex in communities of color, too. When young white people in movies come out, it usually kind of turns out OK, whereas in communities of color, we have so much we’re already dealing with in our communities. When I came out, I wasn’t just coming out as a lesbian, but I was flying in the face of traditions and introducing a foreign way of life into a space that had already decided it’d rejected it. I was brutally honest and walked into every room a lesbian first and me and everything else about me later.”
Chin said she did experience violence motivated by her sexuality, which prompted her move to the United States at age 24.
Even after she’d settled in the country, though, she faced other biases, which influenced her desire to express her identity through writing.
“When I came here as a lesbian, I expected joy and wonder and, ‘It’s going to be amazing,’ and then I discovered racism,” she said. “So I began the journey of writing down who I was with the hope that it’d make it into literature that I would read and that my children could one day read.”
Chin, now 35, has taken her slam poetry around the world and garnered a cavalcade of awards for her work. She won the 1998 Lambda Poetry Slam, the 1998 and 2000 Slam This! competitions and the 1999 Chicago People of Color Slam and was a finalist in the 1999 Nuyorican Grand Slam and the 1999 Outright Poetry Slam.
Chin compiled her poems into several books and has also been featured in numerous poetry anthologies. In 2002, she fused her passion for the written word with her talent for spoken word, co-authoring and performing in the Tony Award-winning Broadway hit “Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam,” based on the HBO show of the same name.
Chin said she’s also performed in Jamaica and, while she was hesitant to say the environment for LGBT people in that country has improved since she left, she acknowledged that the Jamaican culture has at least become more aware of the LGBT community.
“I’ve had people [at shows in Jamaica] give me a standing ovation, people walk out, people threaten to kill me from the audience and shout nasty things to me and I’ve had complete silence,” she said. “But this conversation is being had in a public space and a public forum, so it’s becoming less difficult to begin it. People can’t claim to not know what a lesbian or a gay person is anymore. They know what it is and so at least now there’s a point to begin the disagreement.”
Chin noted that although she has experienced a lot of adversity throughout her life, she’s always been able to count on the support of the LGBT community.
“Our past makes us who we are and I was absolutely a child who’d gone through so much. Everything I am is formed, not always in a healthy way, by those challenges and how I dealt with them and the scars I took away from them,” she said. “The LGBT community has stood by me in a way that the African-American community hasn’t or the white, straight community hasn’t. The LGBT community still keeps inviting me and has been remarkable in supporting me as an artist.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].