Everyday Apocalypses: Debt and Dystopia in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun

Writing in November 2010 in the aftermath of a series of devastating hurricanes, Norman Girvan admitted to “a growing sense that Caribbean states may be more and more facing a challenge of existential threats”. By this, he continues, “I mean systemic challenges to the viability of our states as functioning socio-economic-ecological-political systems” due to “the intersection of climatic, economic, social and political developments”. In this article, I examine the specifically literary response to these existential threats. My focus is on Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel Here Comes the Sun (2016), which offers a searing critique of what I term the apocalypse of the everyday, that is, of the way capitalism’s logics of social death and ecocide permeate every facet of contemporary quotidian practice. I am particularly interested in Dennis-Benn’s registration of the impact of debt colonialism on Jamaica. Debt, for Girvan, is one of the contributing factors to the existential threat facing the Caribbean. However, the temporality of debt also provides a useful optic for understanding how Dennis-Benn’s novel grapples with the effects of the ongoing catastrophe of slavery and the plantation system, as well as with the erosion of futurity in apocalyptic times.