Jamaica Road author Lisa Smith was guided by Annie John and Swing Time  – debutiful

Lisa Smith’s debut novel, Jamaica Road, is a story about two best friends who grow up, grow apart, and try to find their way back to each other. Set in a close-knit British-Jamaican community, the novel traces one couple’s connection across a decade of upheaval, from the streets of South London to the shores of Calabash Bay.

Smith holds an M.A. in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she won the Pat Kavanagh Prize. She was the recipient of the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize for “Auld Lang Syne” and was named a London Library Emerging Writer in 2020.

We asked the author to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know her and the books that shaped her story.

What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?

In the 1970s, my mum became an Early Years Educator, and her first job was on the Lewisham Playbus, a double-decker London bus that was kitted out as a mobile nursery with toys, crayons, sand, and water play pits. I was three and not yet old enough for school, so accompanied Mum to her work. I always gravitated towards the book corner located on the upper deck and it was here that one day Mum found me sitting with a copy of The Tiger Who Came To Tea, reading the story aloud to a rapt group of children. In truth I probably wasn’t “reading” but simply retelling the story based on the pictures, it was my favorite bedtime book, and I knew this weird and wonderful story by heart. I loved this book because of the vivid illustrations, especially when after the Tiger has left them with nothing to eat or drink, Sophie and her parents “went out in the dark” and walk down the road to the café. Here there is a double page illustration of the high street at nighttime. I always found these pages thrilling and would imagine myself as Sophie, who not only is allowed to stay up late, but is going out too!  After a day spent entertaining a Tiger this to me seemed like an incredibly exciting and glamorous way to end the day. 

What book helped you through puberty?

Adolescence is hard! Being a black girl in the 1980s and growing up in a working class and predominantly white neighborhood meant being overlooked by both the white boys and the black boys in school and I was never invited into the popular girl’s inner circle. So, to avoid the hurt of rejection I resolved that if I wasn’t considered “pretty” then I would be “clever”. As English was my best subject, I figured that being “clever” meant being “well-read”. So, from the age of twelve I steadily worked my way through the works of Dickens, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, EM Forster and such, for the most part these were books that I enjoyed, and in the case of Wuthering Heights, revisit time and again. However, when I was fourteen a new English teacher arrived at our school who brought literature alive, quite literally, by including contemporary writers into the mix alongside the classic texts that were required reading. I’d always assumed that autobiographies were stuffy books full of facts and dull anecdotes, but the prose in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings sours above a mundane re-telling of the past. I loved it, and when I said as much to this teacher, she began lending me other books she had read, all were by living writers and women of color I’d never heard of before: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Jean Riley to name just a few. These authors explored themes such as racism, Eurocentric beauty standards, sexism, sexuality and relationships, I saw aspects of myself in the characters they created, and these novels offered me a different perspective of the world and my place in it.  I will be forever grateful to Miss O’Mahoney who first pressed these novels into my hands at a time when I needed to feel seen.

What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?

History was another of my favorite lessons at school, again this was partly down to having an inspirational teacher who helped us to understand that history is not just one unchanging line of dates and facts, but an ever-evolving story, especially when other voices are given space to add their perspectives. I think the same could be said of literature. The classics have a lot to offer, however, I believe that Jane Eyre should be pared with The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and similarly if teenagers are assigned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then they should be urged to read James by Percival Everett too. Reading widely is never a bad thing, and it feels that now more than ever young people ought to be encouraged and open to exploring other points of view.

If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?

Where to begin?! Probably if you were to ask me tomorrow, I’d come up with an entirely different list but here goes…

When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine which appears in the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. Aside from the beautiful writing and lovingly crafted characters, in this story Jhumpa Lahiri deftly weaves a big historical event alongside a smaller, personal narrative. Also, On Beauty by Zadie Smith for energy in prose and how to skillfully handle a large cast of characters. Giovani’s Room by James Baldwin for emotional complexity simply executed. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead for tight, agile writing that shows much more than it tells. Dubliners by James Joyce for psychology and atmosphere. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin for her use of wit. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston because everyone should read this book.

What books helped guide you while writing your book?

There were so many it’s hard to get them all into one answer!  One of the books that guided me when I first started writing Jamaica Road was A Brief History of Seven Killings. I wanted to write a novel where smaller more personal narratives play out against the background of key events in Black British history such as the New Cross fire, the Brixton Uprisings and the murder of Stephen Lawrence. I admire the way Marlon James spins the political and social upheaval in 70s/80s Jamaica into the backdrop of his character’s lives and we see how it shaped them and how they view the world.  I also read Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John and Swing Time by Zadie Smith, these first-person narrations use an adult’s vocabulary and register with a child’s (later a teenager’s) point of view and experience of the world, I wanted to see how I might be able to slightly shift Daphne’s narrative voice as she ages. When it came to patwah I spent a lot of time reading Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry aloud, Johnson was also an activist during the 70s and 80s and his work chronicles that time, so through his writing I was also able to steep myself in the period. I tend read a lot generally, I’m not one of those authors who won’t read other fiction when they are working in case it influences their style, because I find reading is a really good way of helping me relax -particularly when I feel stuck or blocked. When I “step away” and immerse myself in another writer’s world for a time then the cogs in my own brain start to whirr again and when I come back to the page, I am just a lot less tense!

What books are on your nightstand now?

I’m a member of a book group who meet at my local public library once a month and we have just started reading Hell of a Book by Jason Mott. I was also given a copy of The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha which I couldn’t wait to begin so I’m reading these two books in tandem.