Courage to Be Student Essay: On Nicole Dennis-Benn

By Isis Pinheiro

On Monday, February 10th, Jamaican novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn visited Bard College as the first speaker of the 2020 Courage to Be lecture series. She is a public health researcher turned professional writer and the author of the acclaimed novel Patsy. Her work deals with issues of homophobia, sexualization of girls, socioeconomic disparities, and themes of identity and love. 

In her talk, Dennis-Benn discussed her adolescence, family dynamics, migration to America, and transition from the sciences to writing. When addressing the concept of courage, she explained that survival is a form of courage and that courage is often performed out of necessity.

One of the outstanding features of Dennis-Benn’s talk was the comparison of her courageous life with that of her father’s. She juxtaposed his life as a taxi driver in America with her life as a darkskin lesbian girl coming of age in a country that still had Buggery laws. The narratives paralleled one another; they happened simultaneously but borders apart. 

Dennis-Benn spoke of her father’s necessary courage, that to support his family in Jamaica he had to overstay his visa and adapt to America with little to no support. Dennis-Benn’s father had to have the “courage to survive illegality.” Meanwhile, she was under the pressure of attending an elite school and the looming notion that one day she would have to be the one to lift her family out of poverty.

Dennis-Benn ultimately moved to the United States to attend university. Still feeling the familial and societal pressures to pursue a high-paying career in order to make her family proud, she studied biology with the intention of going to medical school. During her studies, she wrote in her textbooks in a habit that would evolve into journaling. Journaling turned into writing short stories and performing at slam poetry events. Still, she had no intention of being a writer. Then, she began to receive compliments on her work and reconsidered. She decided to enroll in a Master of Fine Arts program.

Throughout her studies, Dennis-Benn struggled with her sense of identity and belonging. She said that she “didn’t feel like a complete person.” She internalized the homophobia she’d grown up with. Depending on her environment, she neglected parts of her identity: while with people of color, she would hide her queerness out of fear of being ostracized; while she was in queer spaces — often mostly white — she was hyper conscious of her Blackness. For Dennis-Benn, survival depended on downplaying the things that made her different. While this might not initially seem courageous, Dennis-Benn asserts that sometimes you have to do what you have to do. This sense of sacrifice for survival lends itself to courage and vice versa. Eventually, she was able to progress past that and exhibit the courage to be her complete self which lends itself to thriving rather than just surviving.