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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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) (more…)