By Naomi Jackson From ELLE

In Grace Jones, novelist Naomi Jackson finds inspiration and permission to break the mold of the proper Caribbean woman she was expected to become.
Two hours into Grace Jones’ electrifying performance at AfroPunk this August, she stopped my heart with two words: “Hi, Mom.” Bare breasted and sweat-drenched, Jones waved to her mother, a seamstress from Jamaica, in the audience.

As she cycled through four decades of music and countless costume and wig changes, I was struck by Jones’ vulnerability, how she gave up everything on stage, or at least so it seemed. Jones’ show rewired my thinking about where to find the courage that an artist’s life demands.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Jones’ new book, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, ever since. It came right on time, and will be a glittery north star as I try to answer the question of how to live with style and panache.

I was born in Brooklyn to a conservative Caribbean family in the 1980s, just before Jones’ star ascended with the release of her hit songs “Pull Up to the Bumper,” “My Jamaican Guy,” and “Slave to the Rhythm.” Back then, I listened to some rock (this was before radio was more entrenched in its segregation), R&B, reggae, dancehall, calypso, and the grand old gospel of salvation. I don’t remember being aware of Jones or her music until the 1990s when Jamaican dancehall artist Patra made a popular cover of “Pull Up To The Bumper” and Jones took on the unforgettable role of Strange in the 1992 movie, Boomerang, when she berates Eddie Murphy, shouting in a fancy restaurant, “No man can turn down this pussy.”

I saw that movie at the beginning of my sexual awakening. Seeing Grace Jones take charge by offering herself up boldly, and then storming off when she was rebuked, gave me a new blueprint for female sexuality that up until then was all about secrets, shame, and punishment.

It’s hard to reconcile the stunningly gorgeous, over the top Grace Jones I first came to know through movies and music with her roots in Jamaica. In short, I thought that Grace Jones was from a different planet than the one that created the Caribbean women I knew. Reading her memoirs, it is still hard to believe that Grace Jones, known back in Jamaica by her middle name Beverly or Bev, just like my Jamaican stepmom and aunts, was fired in the same cauldron as them. I couldn’t see Grace packing a barrel to send home, or going to church, or getting her children dressed for school, really doing any of the things women in my family did. She was entirely different, and seeing her now, claiming the ways that her upbringing in the Caribbean both molded and maimed her, is so important as I work to make my life as a free-willed writer grounded both there and in Brooklyn.

Graces Jones’ memoirs make it clear that she is as far from the women who raised me as I imagined. She talks openly about using drugs for experimentation and psychotherapy, takes lovers with the breeziness I was taught to associate with men, maintains her own independence by keeping her own apartment and being her own sugar daddy. Growing up, I was warned that becoming this kind of slack woman would kill my chances for happiness and cut me off from my family. Despite several shocks to my family, most recently writing a novel set in the Caribbean that directly addresses many taboos in our community – mental illness, homophobia, sexual exploitation – they still claim me. After one particularly rough conversation with my stepmom, I asked if they were going to disown me. She told me that I wasn’t getting off that easy.

As a child, I was told that I needed to learn to cook and clean and keep myself neat and pretty so that I would one day find a husband for whom to cook, clean, and keep myself neat and pretty. Having rejected that template, I have found myself without roadmaps, making it up as I go along. I went to Jones’ memoirs not necessarily looking for instructions on how to live (there is only one Grace, after all) but for evidence, beyond my own experience, that there is reward in being true to yourself and to your art, not in fame, money, or friends, but in integrity. I also went to her book hoping for some indication that I could have both my family and my freedom. Watching Grace Jones wave “Hi, mom,” reading about her family’s steadfast support in spite of her outrageous antics, and even learning about her son and granddaughter, has provided me with comfort and confidence that is hard to describe.

I was drawn in by Grace Jones’ take on how visiting Jamaica provided her with opportunities for both creative growth and healing. Jones writes about her creative debt to the island where she returned to make the signature hits for which she is most well known, released on the 1985 compilation album Island Life.

“The moment my music came together as something that came from me was when there was the introduction of my Jamaican roots…Previously, I had been more of a mimic, a sponge, absorbing and learning other styles, mastering experiences, putting them on like a costume, wearing them like a wig. I was a transplanted transatlantic creature with one foot in an airport and one foot in a nightclub.”

Jones describes discovering a Jamaica as an adult that is lush and fertile ground for her creative work, almost unrecognizable from her circumscribed childhood within a fundamentalist church and repressive home.

I experienced a similar thrill visiting Barbados to write and research a first draft of my novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill. That summer was richer and more meaningful than what I’d experienced in the summers that I’d visited as a child, and during the other visits I took there as an adult. Reading Jones’s memoirs was a welcome opportunity to reflect on the complexity of my relationship to my Caribbean heritage. Jones outlines how her strict Caribbean upbringing has been both essential to her career—affording her discipline, style, a uniquely Jamaican swagger—and damaging, leading to defensiveness, immaturity, and abusive relationships. I feel similarly conflicted about the ways my upbringing has both hindered and supported me, although the foundation for my writing about the Caribbean and its diaspora is a deep love for my family and the places that have made me who I am.

I’ll Never Write My Memoirs is at its best when Jones is writing about her family and Jamaica, and when she takes on the female performers who’ve come after her. Among many great passages about the performers to whom she has given rise, including Madonna, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and Lady Gaga is this one:

“With these singers, it’s not that they’re new and amazing that bothers me…It is more than I am disappointed with what has happened to them, that they have fallen into the same old traps. They didn’t really learn from those of us who went there before. I’d rather be defaced by them than meekly followed.”

What joy in finding a legendary performer who calls for the audacity rather than the imitation of the women who walk in the paths she’s made for them. I wonder how my life would be different if my mothers and mentors asked the same of me.

I read Jones’ memoirs as I took in her show, all at once, in a rush, with my mouth half-open. While I was reading, I felt like I was in the hands of an eccentric, wise, entirely too chatty, and slightly deranged aunty. There are plenty of juicy anecdotes—Jones’ first acid trip on a hippie commune in Philadelphia, performing “La Vie En Rose” while wearing an impromptu Yves Saint Laurent getup at Club Sept in Paris, and of course, partying with Andy Warhol and the Studio 54 set. But for me, the heart of Jones’ life and her memoirs are their instructions for the good, free life.

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GRACE JONES PERFORMING AT AFROPUNK GETTY
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Naomi Jackson is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, published by Penguin Press in
June 2015. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and lives in Brooklyn. GETTY

For more on this story go to: http://www.elle.com/culture/books/a30936/grace-jones-taught-me-how-to-live-essay/