Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home

Jamaican-born Erna Brodber, a respected sociologist and critically acclaimed novelist, fuses the literary genres of fiction and nonfiction in this nontraditional, highly imaginative coming-of-age story laced with political and cultural messages. Often referred to as a prose-poem, Jane & Louisa Will Soon Come Home reflects an internal sociological perspective. At first, readers are outsiders, but soon they are invited into the narrative that is best understood in its totality and in the context of Jamaican history. Brodber breaks up the life story of Nellie, the primary narrator, into nonchronological vignettes that explore dimensions of the difficulties of the protagonist’s childhood, sexuality, and search for identity under the circumstances of Jamaica’s tumultuous past and colonial legacy. Brodber does not dwell on race or history but mixes each into Nellie’s process of identity formation: Nellie is not merely aware of how she is seen by others but how she, herself, constructs her own identity—examining her reflection in the looking glass of others’ perceptions of her. In the end, she initiates her own recovery of her past traumas and rewrites her story.