A Review

By Berkley Wendell Semple

DWIGHT Thompson’s raw and compelling new novel, My Own Dear People (Akashic Books, $17.96), evokes the title of Claude Thompson’s 1943 short-story collection These My People — and like its predecessor, it offers a visceral portrait of Jamaican life. But where Claude’s work chronicled the rural poor, Dwight Thompson shifts the lens toward the urban middle class, painting a vivid, unsettling tableau of contemporary Jamaica — and by extension, the wider Caribbean.

At its core, this is a novel about masculinity: more precisely, boys imitating the hardened men around them, internalising toxic notions of manhood and warped sexual norms. It is a book about the cost of belonging — about the guilt boys carry for the wrongs they endure, witness, and inflict; the secrets they must keep to preserve their sanity and social standing.

Violence permeates the novel — against women, against men who defy gender norms, and against gay men, or “batty men” in the Jamaican labrish. This is a harrowing narrative, yes — but Thompson’s deft storytelling prevents it from sinking into bleakness. Through the eyes of the young narrator, Nyjah Messado, the novel pulses with urgency and nuance, offering a bold, unflinching assessment of Jamaica today.

Stylistically, My Own Dear People is brisk and tightly constructed, with the pacing of a thriller. One might suspect Thompson of studying Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules for Writing — especially rule #10: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” There are no lulls in this book. Its lyrical prose is sharp and affecting, and the dialogue — much of it in Jamaican patois — feels vibrant and authentic. The rhythm, tone and musicality of the dialect lend the text a memorable poetic cadence. Non-Caribbean readers will find it accessible, even enriching.

This is not the countryside of cane fields and yam hills familiar from canonical Caribbean literature. Thompson’s characters are urban, middle-class boys from Montego Bay: students at private schools, fixtures at beach parties and gated compounds. The novel confronts head-on the sexual permissiveness and moral ambiguity that swirl in this milieu. Within the first two chapters, a young schoolteacher is gang-raped by a group of privileged boys. The rest of the novel circles this act — its reverberations, its silences, and its cost. Nyjah, our protagonist, is a witness to the crime and a reluctant participant in the culture that enabled it. He is haunted, complex and contradictory — a product and a victim of the very masculinity he performs.

The titular phrase — “my own dear people” — takes on a grim irony. The characters are bound by shared guilt and mutual denial. When they reunite, they speak in cruel banter, always circling, never confronting the terrible truth they share. Their interactions are plastic, performative, and shadowed by trauma. Thompson handles these psychological undercurrents with precision, creating layered, morally compromised characters whom we may despise but never dismiss. He excavates their histories with such care that understanding — if not forgiveness — becomes possible.

But the novel is about more than just one violent act. It interrogates how boys are socialised into manhood, how homophobia and misogyny are normalised, and how this brutal social conditioning curtails tenderness, safety and connection. The women in this novel, though few, are subjected to startling brutality. One dinner-table scene involving a husband and wife is especially harrowing — its tension almost unbearable. This is a book that unsettles, provokes, and lingers in the mind. Yet it is never gratuitous, never boring.

My Own Dear People is a heartbreaking, propulsive work that deserves serious attention. It is a brave, unsparing novel that forces us to confront the many contradictions of Caribbean identity, masculinity and memory.