Skift Book Club Confronts the Dark Side of Tourism
The Skift Book Club has a blatant agenda. We read books about diverse places, written by authors from varied cultures, to better understand the world we live in and see through our travels.
Most recently, we read Here Comes the Sun by Jamaican novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn, set in Montego Bay. Main character Margot comes from a struggling family and works at a luxury resort while trying to put her sister through school, and over the course of this action-packed story, we learn how tourism affects the lives of these two sisters, their mother, and everyone in the town. Spoiler alert: it’s not pretty.
Skift Book Club co-founder and senior writer Andrew Sheivachman has written extensively about the negative effects of tourism on local communities and this concept appears in Here Comes the Sun. In the novel, the resort dominates the local economy, controlling most of the decent-paying jobs, driving up prices with an influx of wealthy foreigners, providing services that most residents can’t afford, and buying up property to expand the business, thus displacing residents who may have nowhere else to go and no money for relocation.
Frankly, once this novel is done with you, you may never want to take a cruise or book an all-inclusive Caribbean resort ever again. You might even be tempted to swear off travel altogether.
Here at Skift, we frequently approach travel with optimism, but we’re never afraid to confront its dark side. Our coverage of tourism’s negative effects on local communities is among our most important work. So I sat down with Sheivachman to get his take on the novel.
“There’s a lack of fiction about this,” he said about the dark side of tourism. “Eat Pray Love, all that garbage, it portrays tourism as something that’s uplifting and healthy, but it totally obscures the effect on the locals in a place, and a book like this, that’s sort of pop-fiction but a good book, can teach people to not ignore the dark side, the dark ramifications of what they buy.”
He continued, “The travel industry does a really good job of pretending that there is no dark side to travel.”
In Here Comes the Sun, cruise ships dock in Montego Bay and tourists stream off the ship to buy souvenirs at a local market, at which Margot’s mother sells her goods. Sheivachman said, “Cruising is a hugely popular type of vacation, but most people don’t pick up on the whole underclass on the ship that is inside all day. The bartenders work seven days a week and pay five dollars a minute to call home to Indonesia.”
While tourism is often touted as an economic driver, Sheivachman said about tourism in the novel, “It doesn’t really translate through to a wider middle class where people are lifted up out of poverty.”
If you’re interested in catching up with the Skift Book Club, here are the books we’ve read so far:
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn
After every meeting, members suggests a new book they haven’t read that fits our agenda, then we take a vote. Up next:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
— Sarah Enelow, Assistant Editor
