Jamaican Heat: Kwame Dawes

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IT'S EASY TO think that poet and playwright Kwame Dawes' debut novel, "She's Gone," is autobiographical. The male lead, Kofi, is a Ghanian-born Jamaican musician, and the female protagonist, Keisha, is a South Carolinian. Meanwhile, Dawes, a teacher at the University of South Carolina, was born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica.

But Dawes, who joins Helon Habila and Dinaw Mengestu for readings on Monday evening at Charles Sumner School, denies any autobiography. He constructed the book on familiar terrain because "I wanted to explore South Carolina. I wanted to explore the landscape and the experience. And I wanted to look at the way these two cultures worked with and against each other. The idea of writing a novel with black characters, just experiencing it within the diaspora, was just fascinating to me. I don't think we do it enough."

A common plot device in books about Jamaica, such as "Voices Under the Window" by John Hearne and "The Book of Jamaica" by Russell Banks, is to place an outsider, usually a Caucasian, on the island and see how he or she deals. By putting a black American in Jamaica — and not letting her "get her groove back" — Dawes turns tradition on its head while still exploring the complexities of race and class divisions within the African diaspora.

"I believed Stella's story," he said, referencing Terry McMillan's novel, "but the Jamaica that Stella went to was a certain Jamaica that made her story possible. But for somebody to enter into Jamaica from the south coast — the Kingston area — the Jamaica that is not catering for a kind of tourist sensibility, it's interesting to see how they contend with the complexities of race. Some people claim that Jamaica isn't a country that has to deal with race, and that blackness across the diaspora creates unity immediately, which is nonsense. All of these things have to be created."

» Charles Sumner School, 1201 17th St. NW; 6:30 p.m., free; 202-442-6060. (Farragut North)