An Interview with Sasenarine Persaud

Stephen Narain

“And we chant the hymn of ages / Om bhur bhuwa swaahaa / Oomm bhur bhuwaa / Swaahaa tat savitur.” So ends the final stanza of Sasenarine Persaud’s poem “Porknocker, Come Home!”[1] Beneath a “diya-lit sky,” a miner, fresh from his journey into the Guyanese interior, sings the Gayatri mantra at a puja, submitting to the scent of daal mingling with “bhajee, baigan / Curry.”[2] Persaud’s poem invites us all, especially those in the Indo-Caribbean community—Hindu, Christian, Muslim, none of these—to pray with his porknocker. In one sense, the Indo-Caribbean reader, caught between his own thrills of ambition and the burdens of history, is Persaud’s porknocker. This sentiment energizes the poet’s work, much of it centered on the lives of the descendents of Indian indentured laborers who poured into the West Indies during the nineteenth century. Today, it is estimated that more members of this largely multiracial community populate pockets of New York and Toronto and London than the Caribbean itself.[3] While sociology books frequently cast the collective narrative of the Indo-Caribbean immigrant community within a comfortable teleology—migration, assimilation, cultural hybridity—Persaud’s poems avoid any such summary. The poet basks in the complex simplicity of the Upanishads. Like Walt Whitman, he is unafraid of contradiction.

Cultural hybridity—a staple of postcolonial theory and zealous reviews of Zadie Smith’s novels—a concept that I believed as an undergraduate would resolve all my identity crises, is particularly taken to task in Persaud’s work. His formulation of Yogic Realism, less a critical construction, more a “progressive comprehension,” connects ancient Indian philosophy to the writing process.[4] His nine poetry collections, including The Wintering Kundalini, and three works of fiction, including Canada Geese and Apple Chatney, blaze a stubborn, if fraught, trail back to India.

Born in Georgetown, Guyana, Persaud lived for several years in Toronto before settling down in Tampa, Florida. He holds an MA in creative writing from Boston University. His most recent poetry collections are Unclosed Entrances: Selected Poems (Caribbean Press, 2011), a selection of the Guyana Classics Library, and Lantana Strangling Ixora (TSAR Publications, 2011). This interview took place over e-mail in January 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

A Conversation with Sandra Pouchet Paquet 

Sheryl Gifford

Sandra Pouchet Paquet is a pioneer in US-based Caribbean literary studies. In 1992, she obtained a professorship as a Caribbeanist at the University of Miami, one of the first in the United States. The university’s location at the heart of Florida’s rapidly growing Caribbean community was an ideal setting to promote the study of Caribbean literature, and Pouchet Paquet’s efforts enhanced the university’s positive reputation among scholars of Caribbean literature and increased other institutions’ awareness of the field’s value. She has contributed comprehensive critical studies of Caribbean literature to African American and Caribbean scholarly archives, particularly on George Lamming’s work, and she directed the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute, which fostered creativity and a sense of community among authors and scholars of Caribbean literature by providing them with a neutral space for intellectual exchange. Pouchet Paquet launched Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal in 2003 and served as its editor until 2009. Her recent work includes Caribbean Autobiography (2002), which explores the Caribbean subject’s (re)creation of identity through autobiography and stresses the genre’s significance to the region’s history. It was an honor to speak with Professor Pouchet Paquet at her home this past February. Read the rest of this entry »

Reflections on the 1970 Trinidad and Tobago Black Power Movement in Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie

Sophie Megan Harris

In January of 2011 Trinidadian author Earl Lovelace’s latest and much-anticipated novel, Is Just a Movie, was published.[1] This year, 2012, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Trinidad and Tobago’s independence as a nation. The following interview with Earl Lovelace touches on his views on the nature, meaning, and ongoing significance of one of the defining events of the decade following Trinidad and Tobago’s independence: the 1970 Black Power Movement that, for a short while, almost brought the government to its knees. This event and its wider historical significance lie at the heart of his latest novel.

On Lovelace’s veranda, amid the Trinidadian birdsong, foliage, and voracious mosquitoes, with bright sunshine one minute and lashing rain the next, we discussed the role of the movement in his work.[2] We talked of its continuing meaning and legacy for contemporary Trinidadian society troubled simultaneously by different and similar sociopolitical divisions to those that characterized the post-independence era. As we talked, Lovelace kept a lookout for his car to go by; it transpired the car had been stolen the night before, and he was holding out hope that someone might yet drive it by. We laughed and cussed over this—yet it was a stark reminder of the troubled, crime-ridden society that contemporary Trinidad has given rise to, and the continuing importance of seeking change and renewed social consciousness. Recognizing that Trinidad is still haunted in many forms by its many historical demons, the continuing concerns with enslavement, indentureship, colonialism and the responses to them, Lovelace’s novel implores his countrymen and women to acknowledge and work through, with a fresh perspective and renewed vigor, the Black Power and independence era in order to move forward together as a society. Read the rest of this entry »

A Conversation with Evelyn O’Callaghan

Sheryl Gifford

Evelyn O’Callaghan is central to the foundation of West Indian feminist criticism. She has taught West Indian literature in the Department of Language, Linguistics, and Literature at Cave Hill since 1983, and she has served in various editorial positions for journals such as Ariel and Callaloo and is presently on the editorial boards of Anthurium, Ma Comère, and Caribbean Quarterly, as well as on the advisory board of Shibboleths. Her monograph Woman Version (1993) was published as West Indian women’s writing became more visible; in it, she establishes a distinctive West Indian aspect of feminist literary theory by reading women’s literature in its local context. Her more recent projects include the book Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: “A Hot Place, Belonging to Us” (2004) and a collaboration with Alison Donnell that addressed sexual diversity in the twenty-first-century Caribbean (“Breaking Sexual Silences,” 2010–2011). I had the privilege of speaking with Professor O’Callaghan at the University of the West Indies’ Cave Hill, Barbados, campus in August 2011. Read the rest of this entry »

A Conversation with Caryl Phillips, Part II

Bastian Balthazar Becker

(This is the second half of an extended interview with Caryl Phillips. For Part I of the interview, click here.)

Bastian Balthazar Becker: Pico Iyer has called you a “connoisseur of displacement.”[1] Several of the essays in Color Me English, most of all “Belonging in Israel,” seem to imply that the feeling of displacement, especially if it is historical, is produced, determined, and altered by the ways in which individuals and groups situate themselves within greater narratives of origin. You do point out in several of your works that the actual going back to the geographical point of origin does little to alleviate the pain of exile. The feeling of “wholeness” seems to be out of reach. Can trauma be healed if we change the narrative?

Caryl Phillips: You’re right. I’ve seen too many examples of people trying to go to a place to become whole. Instead, they realize that they have just complicated the issue and made it worse. You can adjust the narrative to fit. The narrative is not written in stone. There is no master narrative that you have to follow, unless you have to believe in a particularly rigid form of some belief system, of some faith. For me there is no master narrative. But people seem to subscribe to these master narratives which are set up to include some people and exclude others. I would argue that instead of giving up your life, giving up your job, traveling across waters or land, one could just adjust the narrative. And I think that is what writers do. They just change the narrative. Make it slightly less hostile. Read the rest of this entry »

Un bref entretien

Martin Munro

(English translation available here)

Né à Port-au-Prince en 1981, Marvin Victor est auteur, peintre et réalisateur de documentaires et de courts-métrages. En 2007, il a été le 2e lauréat du prix du jeune écrivain francophone pour son texte : Haïti, Je, Moi, Moi-Même. Paru en janvier 2011 aux Editions Gallimard, Corps mêlés est son premier roman, et lui a valu le Grand Prix du roman de la Société des gens de lettres. Il a aussi été finaliste du Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie.

Marvin Victor—entretien (par courriel, le 23 janvier 2012) Read the rest of this entry »

A Conversation with Caryl Phillips, Part I

Bastian Balthazar Becker

“Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions,” [1]Caryl Phillips claimed in A New World Order (2001). These thoughts encapsulate the core of Phillips’s oeuvre. In the course of his extraordinary career, Phillips, who was born on St. Kitts, raised in Leeds, and educated at Oxford, has published nine novels, five works of non-fiction, and numerous plays for both the stage and the screen. He has received the 2004 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for A Distant Shore, the 2006 Pen/Beyond the Margins Prize for Dancing in the Dark, and his novel Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Man Booker Prize. Although the subjects of his books range widely in terms of time and space, the themes of displacement, migration, and journey run like a thread through his work. 

I met Caryl Phillips on 20 June 2011 to discuss the publication of his latest collection of essays, titled Color Me English. The interview took place in Midtown Manhattan, in Phillips’s apartment that overlooks Central Park. As attested by other scholars who have interviewed him over the years, Phillips’s personal courtesy and generosity, coupled with the depth and unusual candor of his thoughts, make him a rare interviewee. Read the rest of this entry »

Conversations with Jan Carew

Joy Gleason Carew

Guyanese author Jan Carew is best known for his 1958 novel Black Midas. In 1964, Carew also published one of his most controversial books, Moscow Is Not My Mecca (US edition, Green Winter [1965]). And, as he learned much later, an unauthorized version of his book was circulated around the African continent as an “English language reader.” Carew’s novel was based on the stories of his cousin and other students from the Caribbean and Africa who had accepted scholarships to study in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Carew also drew on his own experiences as one of the first students from the English-speaking Caribbean to receive a scholarship to the Eastern Bloc countries when he went to Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s; and later, when he made two visits to the Soviet Union in the 1960s as a guest of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Following the publication of Moscow Is Not My Mecca, Carew was challenged by the Left and lauded by the Right, as each side tried to interpret his work from their often dogmatic and simplistic formulations. Carew, on the other hand, was exploring a complex set of relationships, which did not and still do not lend themselves to simple either/or divisions. Recognizing the potential of the Soviet experiment to provide much-needed support for the newly developing societies, Carew also felt he had a right to critique problems as he saw them and to call for reform.

Jan Carew is now ninety-one and in the process of writing his memoirs. This interview, conducted in Louisville, Kentucky, in July 2011, recounts aspects of his experiences as a student in Prague and, later, as a visitor to the Soviet Union, and his rising concern about the treatment of black students there. Read the rest of this entry »

Barrington Salmon

Anthony Winkler is one of Jamaica’s funniest and most gifted writers. Two of his stories have been made into films: His original screenplay The Annihilation of Fish was filmed in 1999, starring James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, and Margot Kidder. The Lunatic (1987), a satirical novel many consider his most famous work, was also made into a film (1991). Its main character is Aloysius, a mad man from the country who speaks to trees and animals. His life takes a dramatic turn when he meets Inga, a sex-crazed German tourist.

Winkler’s first novel, The Painted Canoe (1984), took several years to complete, and it was more than ten years before he found a publisher. His other works include Going Home to Teach (1995), an autobiographical account of his experiences during the 1970s at a school in Moneague, a rural Jamaican town; The Annihilation of Fish and Other Stories (2004); and the novels The Great Yacht Race (1992), The Duppy (1997), Dog War (2006), and, most recently, Crocodile (2009). He lives in Atlanta, and this interview took place for a delightful couple of hours by telephone in April of this year.

Barrington Salmon: When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

Anthony Winkler: I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was born. I wrote my first short story for Wednesday Magazine in 1958. It was a compulsion. I had to write and I wanted to leave a legacy. I had a cousin, Eddie Zaidie, who gave me a ride and reminded me that I had told him that one of these days he’d read my books, and it happened. It took a long time to get there. Things would happen to put me on the right path. Read the rest of this entry »

Anita Baksh

Lakshmi Persaud was born in 1939 in Tunapuna, Trinidad. With the exception of a short period in Jamaica, she has lived in the United Kingdom since the mid-1970s. Through the  publication of four novels—Butterfly in the Wind (1990), Sastra (1993), For the Love of My Name (1999), and Raise the Lanterns High (2004)—Persaud has established herself as a significant writer in the areas of literature of the Indian diaspora and Caribbean literature; she is currently working on a fifth novel. In the following conversation, which was recorded in London in August 2009, Lakshmi Persaud discusses her writing, her influences, and her experiences of living in Trinidad and the United Kingdom. The interview has been condensed.

Read the rest of this entry »