How to Love a Jamaican Quotes

“There is a way to be cruel that seems Jamaican to me. But I’ve heard other islanders say the same thing, so maybe it’s a Caribbean thing. Though Africans and African Americans tell me that it’s a similar way with them, so maybe it’s a black thing. It’s saying exactly what you think, regardless of how it will affect the listener. Perhaps this is the language of the oppressed—the colonized, the enslaved. Maybe our kind doesn’t have time for soft words. My friend, from Jamaica same as me, says that she prefers this to people talking behind her back. I don’t know that I agree.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“I don’t know why more love stories aren’t written about platonic intimacy.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“I didn’t know anybody and didn’t know how to know anybody—the world closes up for a quiet man.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“used to have to work myself up to call my mother. She complained that my siblings and I didn’t call her often enough. She complained that she had seven ungrateful children.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“Jamaican mothers raise their daughters to be obedient, and some of us don’t know how to be any other way even when we are women.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“Jamaican children wearing their school uniforms are as beautiful as flowers.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“Oh wow,” which is what she says when she wishes someone, especially a white someone, would stop talking.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“Then she is wrapping her arms around me and whispering a quick prayer because she watches on the news the ways in which America can swallow black sons.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“She faced her history even while she made her future.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“Before she had children, she had hoped that she would see her daughter as more than a daughter, as a person with desires and her own set of truths, but it turned out that all she saw was a child who needed from her, She determined that what a daughter needed was to be fed, clothed, baptized, and protected from men. When her daughter put her mouth on that boy's penis, the question hadn't been why, but the answer had been no”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican

“You came across as the eternally offended black woman.

“That’s because we are eternally being disrespected.”
― Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican