Ishi Robinson

Ishi Robinson was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. A Canadian citizen, she has lived in Bern, Toronto, Rome, London and now lives in Berlin with her Czech husband. Her first published work was a short story in Jamaica’s national newspaper when she was eleven years old. At seventeen, she sent a letter to her father from Switzerland that he thought was so funny he sent it to the other national newspaper, which snagged her a weekly column on teenage life in Kingston. She also previously wrote a weekly column on life as an expat in Rome for a now defunct online magazine. Robinson got back into fiction writing in Berlin, from where she has published short stories in several online publications and one anthology. Sweetness in the Skin is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?  

There’s a lot of meaning behind the title: I’m telling the story of a young girl who is searching for family, identity and belonging; one who’s using her talent for baking to reach what seems to be an unreachable goal. As she tries to figure out who she is, she’s bucking up against the expectations her family have set for her, which are a direct result of the colorism and legacy of colonialism that exist in Jamaica still. So we’re talking about being comfortable in your own skin, about sweet foods, about which skin color is beautiful and more deserving than another – for me, that all culminates in Sweetness in the Skin.  

What's in a name?  

My two characters with the most unusual names are Pumkin and Boots. My mum calls me Pumkin, so that one was easy – even though this character is not me, there’s a lot of me in her, and she is loved, so the name seemed fitting. The character of Boots was inspired by my Uncle Shoes, a very close family friend. He was one of the loveliest, sweetest men ever. Everyone called him ‘Shoes’ since he was in high school…but no one remembers why.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?  

Mildly? I don’t think she’d be surprised that I wrote a novel, but that the novel is so emotional. I typically wrote very lighthearted, humorous things – and also horror stories! So I surprised my adult self that this is what came out when I set out to write a book. 

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?  

The middle. The beginning comes pretty quickly to me, and pretty soon after I start writing, the end makes itself clear. It’s everything in between that’s a struggle.  

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?  

I see a lot of myself in some of these characters: in Pumkin, in her tenacity, her fear of rejection, not knowing if people will show up for her, feeling like she has to figure everything out on her own. And in Mandy for her sheer cluelessness about things that ‘every’ Jamaican is supposed to know or do.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?  

Music: I had a specific playlist of 90s Jamaican dance hall, peppered with some older Rockas (the Jamaican equivalent of R&B), that I would only listen to when writing this book. It helped transport me back to a specific time and place and elicited the emotions I was looking to convey.

Visit Ishi Robinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue