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 »

Barrington M. Salmon

Anthony Williams was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, and from a young age he set out to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. He began as a news reporter with the Government Information Service in 1977, soon after leaving secondary school, but a few years later he left journalism to take over the management of a family-owned banana plantation. After ten years, he returned to journalism and went on to become the editor of the Crusader, a newspaper in Saint Lucia. He was subsequently awarded a Reuters Fellowship in journalism at Green College, Oxford University. In 2007, he gave up full-time journalism to devote more time to creative writing. Along with freelance journalism, he does consultancy work and speechwriting part-time. He is the creator of Caribbean Book Blog and he recently published his first novel, Forbidden (e-book, 2011; see his post on the publication here). The following interview took place over the course of several weeks in December 2008 and January 2009 in a series of online exchanges. Read the rest of this entry »

A. Naomi Jackson

Tiphanie Yanique is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Her collection of short stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, was published by Graywolf Press in March 2010. She was recently selected as one of National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” and received the prestigious Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She is a professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature at Drew University. Last year, Yanique sat down with me for an interview over roti and mango juice in Flatbush on an early April day that teased with abundant sunshine followed by bone-chilling damp. We bonded over being two small-island women writers, and the children of both fiercely supportive grandmothers and mentally ill mothers. Only the bounds of the tape recorder limited the things that we had to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »

Katherine Verhagen Rodis

On 7 August 2005, Wayne Brown (1944-2009) offered his place of residence, near Kingston, Jamaica, as a site for our interview. He identified the challenges of being an aspiring writer in Jamaica and discussed how the newspaper medium has helped to mitigate those challenges. He also offered his thoughts on the “authenticity” of diasporic writing about Caribbean experiences. Brown was born Trinidadian but spent most of his life between the two nations. As a writer, he published poetry, short stories, and biographies and won the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry for his first collection of poems, On the Coast (1973). He taught English literature at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine and Mona campuses and creative writing in Jamaica. Brown was the chief editor of the Jamaica Observer’s Literary Supplement and his long-time running column “Our Time” appeared in the Sunday Observer and the Trinidad Express. Read the rest of this entry »