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.

Stephen Narain: Yogic Realism holds that writing can serve as a “conduit or yoga for union with the divine spirit/consciousness.”[5] How do you view the connection between your practice of yoga and your writing process?

Sasenarine Persaud: First, understand that yoga is of Hindu origin. Saying that yoga is of Indian, as opposed to Hindu, origin is the result of a concerted attempt to separate yoga from Hinduism and, then, to appropriate it—a plundering of Hinduism that has continued unabated for more than two thousand years. Hindus have gladly shared yoga with the world. We now hear of Torah yoga, Jewish yoga, Christian yoga, etc.—cultural appropriation. The essence of yoga is spiritual, where all facets of life are integrated in the search for the divine, which we call by many names. Yoga is popular because of the health benefits, a form of exercise and relaxation, but the search for/union with the Jivatma and Paramatma is missing.[6] In writing, preoccupation with “craft” is the equivalent of yoga for exercise and relaxation. Where writing, ultimately, is about truth and a connection to the spiritual, there is congruence with yoga. All of this fuels and is intertwined in my writing. My practice of yoga does not seek a separation between yoga and writing.

SN: You suggest that, at different points in one’s life, different forms of yoga—meditation (Jnana yoga), physical postures (Hatha yoga), selfless action (Karma yoga)—are suitable.[7] Your practice of yoga sounds fluid and intuitive. Describe its development and evolution through the years.

SP: Yoga is as fluid as Hinduism. Perhaps no other culture is as fluid and could have given birth to yoga. Growing up, it was everywhere and especially in the discourses of pandits in mandirs and during pujas on the Bhagavad Gita, which is a holy text of Hinduism and the seminal discourse on yoga. From an early age, I understood and accepted the great complexity of Hinduism, with yoga at its core—an aid in the search for self and Self. There were yoga sessions in temples by both local and visiting practitioners from India. An uncle practiced one form of yoga. There was the Raja Yoga Center. An aunt practiced another form of yoga. I read several books on yoga in Guyana, including the Bhagavad Gita and Autobiography of a Yogi [by Paramhansa Yogananda]. There were no strictures to practice one form over another. In North America, I witnessed the rise of the yoga with a lopsided emphasis on the physical and a continuing attempt to separate it from its Hindu origins and purpose—the spirituality, the seeking of union with Self, the search for that which is true, Samadhi. In Guyana, my turn back to Hinduism and yoga was both spiritual and political, fueled by the discrimination of Indians, the ongoing evangelical work of Christians to convert Hindus (what I wrote in one of my poems, “conversion is the highest form of disrespect,” is still true),[8] and the horrors of the PNC/Burnham regime. Gandhi, the greatest public figure in the last two thousand years, was a great Karma yogi, yet he considered himself a politician seeking truthhood, i.e., Samadhi. He was also a Jnana yogi and a Bhakti yogi. He read that seminal yoga discourse, the Bhagavad Gita, every day for the last forty years of his life; he demonstrated an application of various yogic paths, depending on the time and circumstances and his own consciousness in his search for truth and Self. Transpose Gandhi’s life and paths of yoga to writing and you have, perhaps, the most concrete example of Yogic Realism. My practice of yoga and my writing are inseparable and embody all of this.

SN: Your fiction frequently lacks the Aristotelian catharsis common in Western narrative. You describe the punctuation and verse breaks of your poems as murtis, Hindu objects that focus the mind during worship. You tie differences in crafting a story’s structure and voice to differences in practicing Hatha yoga and Jnana yoga. Discuss other formal effects of Yogic Realism.

SP: The end goal of yoga is Samadhi. This implies a change and a deeper understanding of something of self. Implicit in yoga is the understanding that understanding is a progression. It may be rapid depending on the consciousness of the practitioner; often, it is an incremental part of a whole. My characters reflect this. There is change, there is understanding, but not in the quick, easy way that most Euro-American-influenced literature and art want. Take the great Hindu saint, yogi, and writer Tulsidas. In his Ramcharitmanas, he (re)wrote the Ramayana so that it could be enacted in real life dramas as Rama Lilas, involving entire communities and spanning several days—[Derek] Walcott talks about Trinidadian Ramleela productions in his Nobel Prize address. This is a very yogic concept of writing and being. It may also be political. It is posited that Tulsidas also wrote the Hindi Ramayana, his Ramcharitmanas, to counter the massive forced conversions and brutality of Islam in India. The Western mind wants to see a play in an hour or two or three—instant gratification—and go home. Look at Shakespeare’s plays. None have the depth and fluidity of Tulsidas’s great drama. Nobody is at the same time and place, mentally and physically, all the time. Yoga-Hinduism recognizes this. That is why there is a multiplicity of forms and ways. What I write reflects this. I write prose and poetry; I write works that are long and short. Verses that are fixed in line length and verses that are not. If you look at my most recent book, Lantana Strangling Ixora, most of the verses are three lines. Why? Three is central to Hinduism: the three main forms of yoga; the triple manifestation of divinity, the Trimurti, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesha; the three forms of being, Sattvic, Rajasic, Tamasic; the three basic rhythms/taals in music, vilambit, madhya, and drut. In Lantana Strangling Ixora, three-line verses was the form that was right for this stage of my writing and how I wanted to say what I wanted to say. Much of my more recent writing is an extension of Jnana yoga, the search for knowledge of self and Self. Bhakti yoga, and the personification of spirit, is never far from the surface. In writing, poetry (or prose) that is not constrained by form is part of Yogic Realism; it is, also, Jnana yoga. Form unconstrained by form isn’t contradictory to the Hindu-yogic mind.

SN: You write with great affection about your father’s storytelling, often “tailored to fit a new land.”[9] How do the history, landscape, and culture of Guyana affect your construction of Yogic Realism? Does it?

SP: I’ve dealt with elsewhere how, in much of my work, place is muse. The landscape of Guyana and of every place I’ve seen and internalized is important. My work talks to history, especially the history of Indians and Hindus, all the time—and, of course, to politics. Burnham and the PNC forced me, and many of us, deeper into Hinduism and yoga. This made us stronger. Guyana was overwhelming Indian when I was growing up, although we felt like a minority because of British rule and, later, the Burnham/PNC regime. This and the plethora of Hindu festivals had a great impact on me and the formation of Yogic Realism. There is a history of Guyana that predates the coming of Europeans, Africans, and Asians. Wilson Harris makes a wonderful contribution to this presence. The Guyana in which I came of age was marked more by Hinduism than anything else, but that “anything else” cast a long political shadow over Indians. It was time of great ferment. If I were part of and yet not part of this other, who was I? If I wrote from this other, but didn’t quite write like this other, what was I writing? Questions which led me back to yoga-Hinduism and eventually to define my aesthetics, Yogic Realism. Everything I’ve seen and heard and touched and tasted has become part of me and yet in a deeper yogic sense is not part of me.

SN: You challenge the work of Salman Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, and many of the “anointed pandits” of the school of hybrid thinking. You suggest that their criticism conflates “outward cosmetic change” with deeper cultural “discontinuity.” Change, you write, is a “natural process of continuity, of ensuring that the strongest seeds survive, thrive, and flower—a honed sameness.” [10] What do you mean by this?

SP: Hybridity displays a kind of laziness of deep thought, the Euro-American need for instant and neat categorizations, rather than the constant search for self and Self—a very (but not uniquely) yogic-Hindu preoccupation. How many of the major proponents of “hybridity” are Hindus? Not Rushdie, not Bhabha, not Walcott—Indians who subscribe may have Hindu ancestry, but are Christians, communists, Muslims, etc. or engage in Hindu-bashing to find fame and favour in the West. Early [V. S.] Naipaul and Deepak Chopra come to mind. Regarding honed sameness, I turn again to A. K. Ramanujan, who recounts how on remarking to a villager that his knife looked old, the villager replied, yes. They had the knife for centuries: they had changed the blade at times, the handle at times, but the knife was the same, had stayed true to the original in shape, form, and function. And what about the memory-knowledge embedded in our DNA? The science of the mind—such as yoga—still baffles most scientists moreso Euro-American-schooled literary theorists. There is an ancient Hindu saying that the kamal gatta, no matter in which mud or pond it grows, still bears the beautiful, sacred lotus.

SN: Your relationship with Ugandan-Goan novelist and professor Peter Nazareth seems to represent an ideal bridge between creative and critical writing.[11] Please discuss the development and impact of Nazareth’s mentorship on your career.

SP: Peter has recently written about this in his fifteen-page introduction to my selected poems Unclosed Entrances. And I have talked about this elsewhere. What can I add except that Peter came along at the right time? He has always been there for me. Over the last two decades, he has been the only person I could turn to at any time to read and critique my work, which includes all my published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry during this period; three unpublished novels; a dozen unpublished stories; three unpublished poetry manuscripts—all in various iterations—and my essays. Peter gave me the confidence to write about my own work. His is a brilliant mind. He made me see that I had to do this, since the critics didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t have the depth of knowledge of Hindu philosophies and literatures, or the willingness to learn, to understand. What has been unique in our relationship has been his honesty in saying he didn’t understand or know about something when he didn’t and that mentorship is a process in which the roles are occasionally reversed. The outcome is a relationship of respect and trust.

SN: On the genesis of Yogic Realism, you write: “I never thought that I would come close to inventing anything . . . [,] least of all a term for my method of writing, and for a whole way of writing and art.”[12] You seem to be an accidental theorist! What gifts do you believe artists can bring to the table of theory and criticism?

SP: All theorists are, in a way, accidental theorists, and yet, in one deeper Indian sense, nothing is accidental. I can now look back and see that all my life has been leading up to Yogic Realism and to the literary space I inhabit. As artists, we are uniquely placed to articulate what we are doing in our works and, indeed, we have a duty to do this—especially when the critics can’t do it, or won’t do it. In an interview, the artist provides a window on the creative process. And this is what you have allowed me to do. Thank you.

Stephen Narain was born in the Bahamas in 1986 to Guyanese parents and moved to the United States as a teenager. A graduate of Harvard University, he is currently a Soros Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he is at work on his first novel.

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.

Sheryl Gifford: In your recent work on Caribbean autobiography, you explain that autobiography reflects the intersection and “contradiction of regional identities.”[1] What kinds of questions or contradictions arose as you established your scholarly identity within a male-dominated Caribbean critical community?

Sandra Pouchet Paquet: At the time of my first teaching appointment at the University of the West Indies, Mona, I felt welcomed by the male-dominated Caribbean critical community, which included people like Mervyn Morris, Edward Baugh, Gordon Rohlehr, and Arthur Drayton. There were differences in how we read writers and literary/cultural texts, but there was no hostility to contend with. The latter is more a feature of my professional life in the US. UWI, Mona, was a wonderful place to work. I have a reverence for people like Mervyn Morris and Eddie Baugh, because of the kind of people they are—they’re fine, upstanding men—and because of their groundbreaking work in the field. They became my mentors and teachers on another level; they created spaces for me to do everything that the job required and encouraged me.

There were also highly accomplished women like Velma Pollard, Jean Creary D’Acosta, Maureen Warner Lewis, Rosina Wiltshire, Merle Hodge, and Betty Wilson there as well. Maureen Warner Lewis was a classmate of mine at St. Joseph’s Convent, Port of Spain, and she was married to a Jamaican, Rupert Lewis, who was establishing himself in his own field at that time. These women were professionally accomplished, active scholars, writers and administrators and, to my knowledge, nobody was giving them a hard time. They created a space for me to know more about the field as I finished my dissertation. I got respect and an opportunity to prove myself. Issues of race and class were not impediments among the professional men and women I worked with. Their openness to different perspectives was always clear.

My emigration to the US to live and work was more difficult. For a period of ten years or more I was caught up in establishing and maintaining a professional profile and raising a family. I did not return to the Caribbean campuses to participate in conferences, etcetera, though I actively consulted on examinations at various levels. So I was a stranger to a new generation of scholars like Evelyn O’Callaghan, Carolyn Cooper, and Mark McWatt. My appointment as a Caribbeanist and director of the Caribbean Writer’s Summer Institute at the University of Miami reintroduced me to the Caribbean literary and cultural community. It increased my critical participation in various conferences; it opened up opportunities for professional exchange that enriched my professional life enormously.

SG: You describe autobiography as “emancipatory and adversarial” for writers such as Claude McKay, George Lamming, C. L. R. James, and Derek Walcott.[2] As a female Caribbeanist contributing to a patriarchal scholarly community, how might critical inquiry been emancipatory and/or adversarial for you?

SPP: Your question assumes a parallel between the critical quest and the autobiographical quest, and I accede to that. My work allowed me to link my emotional and intellectual lives. It kept the Caribbean close, and renewed this connection continually through my engagement with the finest minds in the region. My personal and professional quest to know and understand what it means to be a Caribbean woman/person of my generation, class, and color merged in a way that is my great good fortune. I was living away from, in a sense, my original place, and it can drift away very quickly. How do you hold on to [that place]? How do you grow with it? You don’t just want to know it superficially. For me, it was growth. And fortunately personal growth meant professional growth, and I felt very lucky that I had those opportunities.

SG: Your connection to Trinidad—home—framed those opportunities for you.

SPP: Yes. After graduating from high school, I had been taking UWI extension courses, doing art history and dabbling in intellectual exchange, but I was uncommitted to a field of study as a life course. We were Catholic, and the Catholic institutions were prominent and excellent. The nuns who taught us were also women who had been educated. They had at least first degrees, and some of them had a second degree or a degree in education, so they recognized intellectual possibilities and ambitions before young people did and took them seriously. The principal of my school had been my English teacher in sixth form, and I had done very well. She thought that I should be at university, and she said, “I am going to refer you to Canon Max Murphy for a scholarship to the States.”[3] There were quite a few of those [scholarships] at the time; Elizabeth Nunez describes her experiences on a similar [one].[4] I went through all the motions and got admitted to college with all my expenses paid, just about. My mother was thrilled, and my father was proud, and I decided that I wasn’t going anywhere! Quite simply, it was because I felt a kind of fear that I wouldn’t be back, a hard-to-define fear that things would change, that I would lose what I valued most, which was my sense of belonging to them and to the place. My mother reasoned with me; she’d say, “Look at this as a great opportunity. You haven’t yet found your direction in life. Try it for a year. Give it your best. If at the end of that year, you don’t want to finish and just want to come home, you can pick up your life [here] again.” So I went, and of course one thing led to another. She probably knew that it would work out that way, but I needed that push.

Yet I did not have the fraught experience that Elizabeth Nunez describes. The US hospitals were recruiting medical graduates for the internship programs here, because even then they were short of doctors, and my sister, who had finished medical school in Ireland, came to the States and went to Bridgeport Hospital in Connecticut to do her internship. I was at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, so she was close by. She got a car and she’d drive up on a weekend, any weekend she wasn’t working. She insisted I get my license and she would leave me the car at times, and I would drive down to see her. I think she needed me as much as I needed her, and it was a wonderful time for us. We left the sisterly squabbling behind and became very good friends.

SG: Did you have opportunities to return home?

SPP: Well, my loving, generous sister said she wouldn’t go home without me, and whenever she went home, she bought me a ticket. So I returned for short periods, like during semester breaks. Mainly, I took advantage of the scholarship and went to school every summer. They found me advanced beyond my freshman class, which made sense because I didn’t start college until I was 21. Because I was older, and also had the benefit of the A-levels at my high school and had never stopped reading and learning, they gave me a year’s credit and set me up in an honors program that allowed me to individualize my schedule with the dean of the college. I graduated in two and a half years, and I went straight home. I didn’t even come back for graduation.

SG: How had you changed since you’d left?

SPP: By the time I went back, it had become apparent to me that I wanted to teach. That was my milieu; I really loved the environment of teaching and learning. So I set about getting permission from the Ministry of Education. There was some difficulty [with that], because the nature of the degree that you got from a US university or college at that time was different on paper from what a British university would have given. Because I was an honors student and I’d gotten an honors degree, the resistance was dropped. A position became available at the convent where I went to school—somebody [there] was on maternity leave—and I taught there for one glorious semester. I loved it; I absolutely loved it. When the teacher returned, I was out of a job. The Ministry of Education posted me to Mausica Teachers’ Training College as an English lecturer. I loved teaching older students in a more specialized situation. I was there for a year, and then somebody said that I couldn’t possibly be teaching in a training college without an education degree. I got reassigned to the Diego Martin Secondary School, close to where I lived, and then I didn’t want to teach high school anymore: I’d just had it with sending kids down to the principal’s office for misbehaving. I was taking away razor blades from children in class when they threatened each other, and I didn’t want to manage rebellious teenagers. I wanted an opportunity to do what I had been doing, that is, teaching language and literature, so it became clear that I needed to go to graduate school.

But my life in Trinidad was very good, very rich. My experience at the teachers’ training college was a life-changing experience for me; it took me into social worlds that I otherwise would not have had any chance to enter. The students there were very accepting of me and put up with my peculiarities, [particularly] my American-ness, because my education was American. They took everything I could give them, and it was lovely. Then I came up here to visit my sister, who was then doing her residency at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, and one of her fellow residents told me that the University of Connecticut was looking for people like me. They needed diversity, and in a hurry. At the time I never thought that I would be taking a position away from an African American; it just went right by me. So my sister drove me up to Storrs one day, and I made my application and got my letters in. Before I returned to Trinidad I had a teaching assistantship, and the die was cast.

SG: Was that when you decided to stay in the US?

SPP: No, at the University of Connecticut I fell in love with the man I’m married to [Basil Paquet], and we became inseparable. We were both literary people. He wanted to write—he’s a very good poet—and he loved my world, everything about it. We got to know Derek Walcott and George Lamming very well, and he loved their work, and they took him very seriously as a poet. They took us both seriously. That became very important to me later on, when we moved to the Caribbean for about four years. It was an easy decision; [Basil] had become increasingly frustrated with the state of the Vietnam War, and it was driving him crazy. He was a medic and a conscientious objector who refused to carry arms in the army. In Vietnam, he was assigned to a hospital because he was identified as someone who could handle a certain level of training, and they trained him to work in a neurosurgical unit as an assistant. He came back to the USA very frustrated with the state of the war. We were both writing and teaching part time. He got an advance on a novel that he wanted to write and I got a dissertation fellowship, [and] we packed up everything and went to Trinidad. We ran out of money in a year, and that’s when I applied for a job at UWI, Cave Hill, because there were no positions open at the St. Augustine campus in Trinidad. Elaine Savory got the job in Barbados, and I asked to be considered for a position at UWI, Mona. I spent three years there finishing my dissertation, teaching, and learning so much. It was a terrific experience that also defined me professionally. It was a sensitive time in Jamaica when every American was perceived as a CIA threat, and I had a white American husband and was very conscious of that. Our colleagues [didn’t see him negatively], though; everybody seemed to like him and didn’t hold it against me once they got to know him. It was a wonderful place to work. We had a rich social life with people we met in the department and university community. Jamaica is extraordinarily beautiful, full of surprises, and even though we were there during the Gun Court days, everybody around us took it in stride, so we did too. We never ran into any difficulty in terms of direct confrontations or anything like that.

SG: How did your work in that particular setting engage other scholars and writers?

SPP: Well, two of the people who facilitated my entrance into the UWI world were George Lamming and Derek Walcott. They didn’t have to do it, but what they said in effect was, “We take her seriously, and we hope you do, too.” They identified me as a young Caribbean scholar who was worth paying attention to. I believe male creativity operates differently, and the more you learn about men who are poets and novelists and critics, about what inspires their writing, in a sense the better you’re able to define yourself. You’re defining yourself with and against them. I don’t know to what degree I engaged others as scholars. What I was particularly grateful for was a growing acceptance of my status as a US-trained scholar with a different perspective and different teaching and learning and publishing opportunities.

As far as the women were concerned, I hope I offered respect and good fellowship, and modeled a critical approach that served our common goals. In turn, the community of women inspired and fortified me, and [they] taught me a lot about how one might perform feminist scholarship.

SG: Donette Francis characterizes Caribbean feminist criticism as having “fluidity between the creative writer and the critic.”[5] How extensively has “fluidity” characterized your relationship to the creative writer?

SPP: I think Donette Francis is right in respect to [a particular] generation of critics and the sympathetic, largely respectful naming relationship between the creative writer and the critic. Certainly, this was a driving motivation behind the Caribbean Writers’ Summer Institute. I don’t know that I would go so far as to characterize the field of Caribbean literary criticism in these terms, though many [creative] writers are also published literary and cultural critics. Where this exists it confirms and stimulates the fluidity that Donette recognizes.

SG: You began your tenure at the University of Miami as West Indian critical feminism started to develop. How did the appointment at UM benefit your scholarship, and vice versa?

SPP: My life as a Caribbeanist really began anew when I came to the University of Miami. I don’t know if there was another position like it in the US at that time, but the English department [had] hired me as a Caribbeanist to develop the field at UM. We had an enlightened chair that saw it as a field to grow in all kinds of directions and as complementary to his specialty in Joyce and Irish literature. That was the late Zack Bowen, a brilliant and affable scholar and administrator. One of the reasons they brought me here was to direct the Caribbean Writers’ Summer Institute. I had this wonderful teaching situation in which I taught graduate courses in Caribbean literature; on an undergraduate level I taught Caribbean and African American literature. I was finally able to breathe deeply as my professional life as a Caribbean scholar began again in earnest. My children were also older, so [I] didn’t have to lean over them while they did their homework, and my husband was very supportive; he loved the work, he loved the writing, everything, and [he] shared in the richness of the experience.

SG: The Caribbean Writers’ Summer Institute enhanced the university’s reputation for having one of the most desirable Caribbean literary studies programs in the US. How did you develop it?

SPP: The institute was meant to create a Caribbean space in a North American institution, and Miami, even at that time, was being redefined in Caribbean terms. So it was a good place; the climate was right and the environment was relaxed. The idea was that we would invite Caribbean writers, wherever they were domiciled, to be in a neutral Caribbean space, learn from each other, hone and refine their skills, and expand their experience beyond wherever they might come from. People who were domiciled in the States, like Edwidge Danticat, also attended. We attracted a lot of people, like Velma Pollard and Zee Edghill. Robert Antoni was a part of it; Michael Anthony and Funso Aiyejina were part of it. It was a space that allowed these writers great opportunities for escape from the demands of daily life. Six weeks was a good length of time to spend in an intimate workshop setting or in lectures, public readings, and group activities. I think that it worked out very well. Not that there weren’t clashes and conflicts, but they were managed so as not to disrupt the overall direction of [the Institute].

SG: How did you maintain that overall direction as contexts changed?

SPP: I wanted [the institute] to be a place where scholars would come and move on equal footing with writers, and the writers with other writers, and I envisioned that as a money-earning enterprise in which the scholars funded by their institutions would support struggling writers. I tried to introduce this kind of financial dimension, and we worked that angle as best as we could. It was a tremendous opportunity for many young Caribbean scholars and scholars of Caribbean writing. For the first time in the US in many cases, [these scholars] were having breakfast and lunch, and going for walks and shopping with people who had the same interests.

The idea of creating an environment that would maximize learning possibilities worked very well until we ran out of money completely. I was not able to secure funding for the Institute. We came very close to a Rockefeller Foundation grant, but that ultimately went to Puerto Rico. I have no quarrel with the University of Puerto Rico for getting the support to build a Caribbean studies program. It was competitive, but even when they told me that they’d used our program as a model, I said, “Well, dissemination means everything.” I continued to have a wonderful working relationship with UPR. I couldn’t get any national funding, because ultimately the primary beneficiaries of funding were noncitizens. We spent every penny we had bringing writers and scholars together.

The university had also started to get anxious, because it seemed to them that we were creating a school within a school that didn’t fall under the parameters of anybody’s control, though it was within the Department of English. It was beginning, I think, to acquire a kind of permanence. I think the University of Miami was the right time and place for it, and I can honestly say I did the best I could with the opportunity, but the one thing I couldn’t do was come up with funding. I didn’t know how to ask for money, and strategically I didn’t know about grant writing. I wasn’t trained [in those areas], and I was dependent on others [to secure funding]. The president at the time attempted to do some fundraising for us and things like that, but it didn’t materialize. I may not have been the right person, but I did the best I could. Maybe at that point what I should have done was design a program which they would fund and then figure out where we would get the rest of the money from, but at that point, I was utterly exhausted, and I’d neglected my own scholarship.

SG: What did you decide to do?

SPP: I took a sabbatical and finished my book. I’d come here with a manuscript for Caribbean Autobiography, and I spent the year finishing that and getting the contract for it. The University gave me a half-year sabbatical, so that helped. I took six months on my own, without support. The manuscript took a shape and a form that were manageable and therefore publishable. I put everything into it that I could, and as much as I’d learned in the five years since I’d first started [at UM], and I felt myself coming into my own as a Caribbean scholar. Then I applied for promotion, and our department’s growth and development took a different turn. The graduate program in Caribbean literary studies started to take off, and I got help in the person of Patricia Saunders. But I was still tired, and everything was still intense. Every time I had an opportunity to add a new dimension to our program, I agreed to it. For example, the journal [Anthurium]; how could I say no to that? It just about destroyed me, because I needed a larger support network than the department and college would provide. I told Patricia Saunders finally that when she was tenured, I was going to retire. I don’t think she believed me; I think she thought I was going to be there forever. But she’s very, very good at managing everything. She just did one better than I was able to do; she got authorization from the new dean for a senior hire to replace me. With a second person in the English department at the senior level, I think the program [will] regain its strength. It will move on. I gave it everything I could without losing my sanity. Ever since leaving the Caribbean, my life has been work and family. Having family was terribly important to me. I [didn’t] care if people said, “Oh, you’re into babies now.”

SG: People said that?

SPP: Yes. My uncle Carl would say, “You have to decide, Sandra, whether you are going to pursue an education and a professional life, or settle down and have a family. You can’t do both.” But I never envisioned life, once I met Basil, without children. Once I got started, I never envisioned giving up my own academic career, either. There’s no person I’m more sympathetic to than a student who is pregnant and trying to finish her dissertation. You just have to be very patient and prepare for the fact that it sets you back, so age-wise you won’t wonder what happened to you later on. You make choices because they’re important to you, and you need to have a ready answer to others’ questions [about them]. It wasn’t one or the other [for me]; I had to have both. I thought that made me a feminist.

SG: You’d done exactly what you wanted to do.

SPP: Yes, but feminism isn’t the same story from year to year. Different impulses drive the movement. As a teacher, you know yourself as a feminist very early, because your students won’t give you any leeway anyhow. You have to have an honest relationship with them and their expectations of you or you’re not going to be able to teach successfully. Still, it happened from time to time that I would be accused of being patriarchal!

SG: What led to that charge?

SPP: They asked, “How can you assign this book for us to read?” I remember distinctly one conversation about [Jacques] Roumain’s Masters of the Dew.[6] I thought I was doing the teacherly, appropriate thing by talking about structure and design and how the book arrives at its meaning. The objection was to the violence, and to the knife images that were associated with sexual encounter. I have no quarrel with that; I think that perception is entirely up for discussion. It’s so marked currently, particularly to their sensibilities, and you’ve got to believe their sensibilities are as valuable as anybody else’s. When I asked, “Should I drop this book from the course?,” the answer was, “Yes.” I said, “No way! How am I going to teach you about this extraordinary sensibility, this extraordinary writer? How else would you know [about it]?” The response was, “We don’t need to know!” That was here in Miami. There were two students. They sat together and the student who was the mouthpiece was very successful. She was actually doing Irish studies, and she was a very outspoken feminist. I understand what a student is doing—I’ve been at it for too long—the whole process of testing ideas and looking for a place. I think her criticism was in many regards appropriate. It was in a class of fifteen or sixteen, so it didn’t become an issue. But I never forgot that. It became one of those markers that made me think all over again when I assigned texts about how I would lay them out, because when students are alienated, you lose them. It diminishes your capacity to teach them. You want to avoid that as a teacher, because you want everybody in the class, particularly at the graduate level, to be thinking positively. Not imitatively, but feeding off your ideas.

SG: Your student wasn’t protesting violent masculinity in her context, but learning about another context’s masculinity and violence. Was her objection characteristic of feminist thought at the time?

SPP: I think it was the moment. There was, it seems to me, a wave of outspokenness in the department at that particular time, or within that class of students. Perhaps they felt oppressed or inhibited. They were exercising their rights. Maybe they wanted me to be a little more outspoken and authoritative, and I was. I just loved [Roumain’s] book. When you read Marie Chauvet’s trilogy, you understand where all that imagery is coming from.[7] Roumain is promoting a nationalistic moment, and Chauvet is not. She’s not dispensing with it as a value, but she is deconstructing it with a vengeance. I wish I’d had that book at the time; it would have been the perfect complement. [My student’s] response is not the norm. The norm is exactly the opposite: students want to know the way you read, and what you see, and why you see it the way you do, and then they can play off their own perceptions against where you stand.

SG: Your confidence in your stance inspires students to think about their claims on identity. In this way you’re not unlike Mary Seacole, whose work you discuss in a 1992 essay. Her conviction in her identity as a subject of Empire strategically challenged others’ “boundaries of race, gender, and privilege.”[8] How have you positioned yourself as a Caribbean subject in the US?

SPP: As an immigrant Caribbean and one-time African American studies scholar, one is acutely aware of the square-peg-in-a-round-hole syndrome. I knew myself socially and professionally to be the proverbial “gate-crasher,” an individual whose survival depends on challenging the boundaries of race, gender, and privilege within the parameters of the state and its institutions.[9] I once had a lawyer tell me rather gleefully that I fell into all four of the most discriminated against categories in the US: I was black, a woman, an immigrant, and over forty. He thought it was hilarious, but it changed my self-perception utterly.

SG: How?[10]

SPP: As I remember it, he found my naiveté about my status funny. He was right; I’d thought of myself as a child of relative privilege and good fortune that would do well since excellence in performance would be the measure of my success in the US. But this is a Seacole-type perception of what the “I” can do; the weight of the categories of discrimination he identified made me not just know, but feel, how vulnerable I was in each area of identification and deepened my commitment to making my achievements open the doors for others. I don’t mean to sound so smug, but this was an ongoing learning process, the struggle of a lifetime.

SG: You also realized that you held the same contradictory place Natasha Barnes describes Sylvia Wynter as holding. Barnes says that Wynter’s “ideological commitments [of feminism and nationalism] reveal an impasse.”[11] As a woman critic who has contributed seminal scholarship on George Lamming’s work to Caribbean literary studies, how would you characterize your work in relation to feminism?

SPP: First, let me say that a “contradictory” place is exactly where you want to be if you are someone like Sylvia Wynter. As for the idea of an “impasse” between feminism and nationalism in Wynter, maybe so, but an impasse is a moment in time; it does not describe a permanent state of mind and thought. George Lamming was my first teacher of Caribbean literature. He opened my mind to new avenues of thought; he underscored and updated my very nineteenth-century British understanding of feminism; and he introduced me to Black feminist writing in the US and European thought on sexual politics. My enlightenment as a feminist scholar takes off under his direction. He was very self-aware about his own learning curve, which culminated in his fiction with Water with Berries on the one hand, and the magnificent, empowering Natives of My Person on the other.[12] I see my work on Lamming as a process of deepening understanding rather than as contradictory. Feminist thought was not a barrier to Lamming, and that was my grounding.

SG: And your scholarship on his work reflects that sense of possibility.

SPP: For Lamming the Caribbean has to be seen as a whole, and you can’t shut out any aspect of the experience. If you do, there’s something you don’t know and something you’re not seeing or understanding. You have to conjure it all up, and you have to see it whether for the better or the worse, often [for the] worse. So he’s very careful about, for example, the white voice. You can’t ignore it. You may not want to pay attention to it, because there are other things that you want to do, but you can’t ignore it. It’s a part of who you are as a Caribbean person; it just is.

SG: What aspect of the Caribbean experience do you want to better understand, and how do you think it will deepen your understanding of yourself?

SPP: I have my own writing to do. Some of it is personal, and I’ve gone back to autobiography. I really haven’t had a space to figure that out yet, and I feel no sense of urgency. The thing that’s absolutely driving me crazy right now is this passion I have for the Amazon. I’m fascinated with it. I feel I’ll discover something about myself when I take a closer look at that world that antedates the colonial world. I think something happened to me when I went on a trip to Guyana and we went through the interior. Something stirred me, excited me. It has to do with the landscape; I felt as we went up the river that I was recovering something. Everything was familiar, but it was on such an enormous scale that it was unrecognizable. It felt very deep to me, and that’s not an unusual response to Guyana and the interior, and I started reading about it for the sheer hell of it. I was stirred by one of my former grad students who’s done some interesting work about voice in relation to the literature of Amazon region, and I kept looking for different angles to see what she could do with it.[13] I got swept away, and I haven’t returned from it yet. It’s pulling me in, and I just have to go with it. I have no reason not to go with it.

SG: You’ve always found that tension between the familiar and the unrecognizable intriguing, haven’t you?

SPP: Yes. As a Trinidadian born into a particular family at a particular point in time, this sensibility was embedded in me as far back as I can remember. This is how I know myself. This is who I am.

Sheryl Gifford is a PhD candidate and an instructor of English at Florida Atlantic University.

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.

Sophie Megan Harris: The character of the “PM” is a figure that comes back time and time again in your work. In your novels, and in Is Just a Movie in particular, how much does this figure parallel that of Dr. Eric Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, who was in power throughout the post-independence era and in 1970 when the Black Power Movement arose?

Earl Lovelace: Well the “PM” character is not a direct representation of Eric Williams. It is kind of an embodiment of the qualities of all the political leaders in Trinidad and Tobago since independence. Yes, he mirrors Williams to a certain extent, but it is not solely representing him, but all of them.

SMH: Do you think that the way that Williams and the PNM [People’s National Movement] ruled helped to generate the powerlessness of the Black Power Movement in the end?

EL: Right, well, Williams’s agenda was really a centralization of power. [Pause] How do you see Williams and how is he represented in the novels?

SMH: It seems to me that he started out with the best intentions for Caribbean people, declaring that “massa day done!” but then it all collapsed. He’s represented as very complex. Yet you also seem to satirize him and reflect on his innate paradoxical nature. He comes across in all the books as wanting everything exactly his way, with no patience for anybody standing in his way.

EL: Or perhaps he had a vision, his own vision. I think he was part of the colonial system; he was himself colonial. That was what he was, and to ask otherwise would be asking him to be not himself. This was how he did things.

SMH: There is this idea running through much of your work, your essays in particular, that certain Afro-Caribbean people have a tendency to act “Self for Other” as a result of their historical development under the colonial system. That is to say that they have an instinct to behave as though their actions, judgment, and selves can only be legitimately seen, evaluated, and valued by some outside force, a more powerful Other contrasting with the Caribbean Self’s position of “lack” or powerlessness, rather than by themselves and for themselves. Do you think that the Black Power movement of 1970 was perpetuating this dynamic, looking towards the government to change things and value their cause, towards the external rather than the internal? How do you deal with this in your new novel?

EL: I think that when one looks at the movement, one has to realize that this was a movement that was trying to answer certain questions in order to achieve what it wanted, “What was power?” being one of the most important and troubling of them. Perhaps at the time we did not have enough distance from the events to answer those questions, and that is what the new book is doing: looking back with a new perspective, in order to take it at some distance, to ask certain questions again.

SMH: Questions about independence?

EL: Yes, because I mean the movement happened eight years after independence. People were looking at what we now had and were asking, “Where we goin’?” The movement itself was talking about Africa for the first time and seeking to fill the gap of information about who we were.

But I believe there was something behind everything else, a deeper tradition and heritage of Afro-Caribbean resistance against oppressive powers from above. As such, the 1970 movement was part of a larger movement which had a much larger set of expectations related to this deeply entrenched heritage.

SMH: You mentioned that in 1970 one of the principal shortcomings of the movement was the fact that it was centered around an idea of “lack.”

EL: Yes, it was about what Black People “lack,” as opposed to what they had done and I think that was one of the problems. I think it was probably one of the central problems. Even in Is Just a Movie, though a lot has been made of this preoccupation with “lack,” I don’t think as much has been made of what we have done as it could have. It’s an important point that and is something that requires a whole lot of thought. So when we are talking about Black Power, we should look at what people have done, not only what we lack. At the time we were all happy to say what we lacked, because we knew what we had—the steel band, carnival, etcetera—and who we were talking to. But I think we underemphasized the value of our own achievements at the time.

[Pause]

The thing is, how do you help people to see themselves as human?

SMH: Isn’t that one of the central themes in your work?

EL: I don’t know if I have ever said this before. But I can now see that carnival, for example, is not just to help you see me. It is to help you see yourself.

SMH: In Is Just a Movie Dorlene starts to throw herself into the music—into the steel band—and when people in the community hear it they come to realize, “Oh, this is me!”

EL: That is part of it. There is more than that, but it’s definitely along that line. “This is me. But who am I?” I think that is important, the idea of helping you to better see yourself, and that is one of the offerings I make in the novel.

SMH: Do you think the rhetoric of the movement lost momentum as the time went on? For example, in Is Just a Movie, in the scene where Clayton Blondell arrives in Cascadu and tells Dorlene that he founded the Black Power Movement. It is some years later and here comes this man trying to revive some of the old slogans and messages, with a strong preoccupation with the “back to Africa” notion of the old movement. It seems as though the language is being recycled, repeated, that it has all been said before.

EL: Well, what was Clayton Blondell’s rhetoric for? It seemed to me it was for self-advancement. And I think that, perhaps, is the point, that we need to reorient ourselves in the right way.

SMH: Right, and even if he is espousing this Black Power rhetoric, do you think he is opposed to the character of Sonnyboy in Is Just a Movie? Does Sonnyboy represent something else?

EL: I think Sonnyboy is going somewhere else. In fact I want to believe that the whole community is going somewhere, is trying to get somewhere, right from the very start. I mean, they might have taken the wrong alleys, you know, or been frustrated in terms of where they are going or want to go. But I think Sonnyboy wants to go somewhere, in the same vein as people in the Caribbean who have been engaged in rebellion and revolution against the status quo from the beginning.

And whilst we want a settled society and all the rest of it, we also have to acknowledge resistance and rebellion in its many forms. If we don’t acknowledge it then we have no explanation for certain forms of what is perceived as anti-social behavior from black Trinidadians, or the only way we can explain that behavior is as crime.

SMH: Not as resistance.

EL: Right, and then we lose all other benefits of resistance within this society, and the whole society remains simply a colonial construct. All the things that have developed as part of resistance, which is to say the steel band, the carnival, the language, all these things that help to articulate a vision of another, a more human world, all of it becomes something for a joke, only entertainment. So I think it is very important that we acknowledge that resistance for what it truly is. Once that is acknowledged, let’s say somebody like Sonnyboy in Is Just a Movie is on a revolutionary path, then, and has to think, “Well, where am I going?” The Black Power Movement had the potential to give us a vision of a better world.

But what happens in the book is that the Black Power Movement is stymied and seems to have nowhere to go. As such, many of its proponents seek refuge in a return to Africa. So Clayton is not so much about Black Power; he is about returning to Africa. And this sense of returning is, in my view, locking off the potential for building something here in the Caribbean, for everybody. So now we have to ask how we can navigate through that.

SMH: Sonnyboy is a very interesting character, because there is this constant line between him being a revolutionary, a warrior, and him just being a “badjohn.” Is he trying to straddle that line in the book?

EL: Well, yes, because what is a revolutionary? When a revolutionary is not acknowledged as such, he is seen by the society he is seeking to change as a kind of renegade too, you know?

SMH: I suppose it is a fine line.

EL: Well, it’s not so much a fine line; it’s somebody who says “no.” A revolutionary says, “I’m not going down this road, and on behalf of some higher ideas, not because you’re not paying me. It’s because you’re not acknowledging me, or you’re debasing me . . .”

SMH: Trinidad has two major ethnic groups, among other various minorities: Afro-Creole or black, and East Indian. What about the role of Indians in the Black Power Movement of 1970?

EL: It’s been a different experience; they’ve had a different experience of the place. I think the movement was more African, but there were Indians involved, and there were Indians who sympathized quite apart from those who were actually involved. I mean, you don’t get up one morning, just so, in a society that has had a certain history, say “Black Power” and everybody jumps. I mean, the people who jumped had a whole historical connection to the lacks that were being articulated by the people who were seeking this. Indians themselves weren’t concerned at a certain point, because nobody was articulating the interests of Indians. But soon the Black Power militants began to say, “Africans and Indians unite,” and the effect of that was to invite the Indians to what they perceived as a common struggle.

SMH: Do you think it is necessary in Is Just a Movie to revive not the movement perhaps but its sentiment? Do you think time has erased that?

EL: No, I don’t think it is gone. I think it needs to redefine itself. What is it now? I mean, Black Power then was also part of a global movement, of what people lacked. In our context now, when we begin to look at the achievement, there have been things done to combat some of the things that we were against—the discrimination against Africans, the assumption that we should occupy some kind of lesser place, not having access to certain things—all that has gone. I think a big point for me, which is the point of Is Just a Movie, is that the resistance and rebellion have not really been acknowledged in the whole society, and this has prevented the society really from coming to grips with itself and with its history, and therefore from being able to move forward. Imagine, it’s only last year that we had a conference on 1970 in Trinidad and Tobago. After forty years. This book was begun, you know, a little while ago [laughs], and I had been thinking about revisiting all this, in a kind of way, to see and show where we had come from.

SMH: And this is what you are trying to deal with broadly in the novel?

EL: Yes. What is Black Power now? What new society are we about? This is what, in a kind of way, I have been writing about: What is this new society and how are we going to shape it? What do they mean when they say a ‘human society’ and all this old talk, what does it really mean? We need genuinely to revisit these things again and again, and genuinely to reformulate again and again what it is to be human and how we are progressing. And that is why I am revisiting Black Power, looking again to see where we have arrived, how we have addressed it and what the fallouts from that are.

You know, I was in the United States when Black Power began to take hold in the late sixties [1966–67] amidst the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, and the likes of Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. It was quite exciting. It was different from Trinidad, but with the same basic emphasis on what had been done to and taken away from black people, or what they had been kept away from. It was about “lack,” without emphasizing too much the things that people had done. This was also linked to a lot of other things like the Hippie movement, which was about white youth making a more human address to living in general. It was a lot of words ultimately, but it was important, you know, for people to feel it in a personal way. Both when I was at Howard University there and when I came back to Trinidad after that, somehow it wasn’t all thought out, but people were feeling for something to change. However, when you went back to the US a few years later, you were shocked at how conservative they had become. The forces of the status quo are very powerful. They don’t sleep. They don’t rest.

Sophie Megan Harris earned a BA in Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge and an MA in Caribbean and Latin American Studies from the University of London. She completed her dissertation, “Re-Imagining the Independence Experience in Trinidad and Tobago: The Black Power Movement in the Work of Earl Lovelace,” in September 2011.

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.

Sheryl Gifford: You chose to open Woman Version, a seminal text in Caribbean feminist critical history, with Velma Pollard’s “Woman Poets (with your permission).” How might that poem relate to your experience as one of the first critics of Caribbean women’s writing?

Evelyn O’Callaghan: When I started researching Caribbean women’s writing as a distinct group, or genre, I suppose there was a certain amount of condescension among the male critical “big names” about this “charming new literature.” That said, if it wasn’t for Mervyn Morris, I would never have started reading Erna Brodber’s work, and if it wasn’t for Erna Brodber’s work I would’ve never gotten into Caribbean women’s writing. I was a “dyed-in-the-wool” fan of West Indian literature, but that would have been the canonical male writing, from Roger Mais and V. S. Reid onward. It never occurred to me until I read Brodber’s work how different the writing was, and then from there on, it was just an easy broadening of the net to include other Caribbean women writers and women’s writing. So while I still think there was a certain amount of “ghettoization” of these writers among the critical mainstream, there was also very encouraging support from established critics in Jamaica, in the Caribbean.

And from abroad, too: Woman Version would never have been published without the encouragement of Stewart Brown, the eminent Caribbean critic and poet in his own right, who said to me, “You know, you have all these essays on this aspect of West Indian lit. Why don’t you put them together in some kind of coherent form?” So I think the time was right for the work to be given serious analysis, and I think the time was a different time than that about which Velma was writing. In other words, the writers faced a lot more difficulty in having their voices heard than we did in writing about their work. I think that they braved the first wave of, “What is this stuff?,” and by the time they had established a voice, by the time I came along, there was no need to argue the case anymore. They were worthy of studying, worthy of any kind of analysis that any of us cared to bring to it.

SG: Yet critics initially valued West Indian women’s writing using an outside—namely, African American—feminist critical perspective, though this literature characterized by its connection to place had established a voice within it. If the literature was worthy, why wasn’t it first read contextually, or as the “remix” or “dub” version you proposed in Woman Version?

EO: Because it needed legitimacy. That was the time when you had to be part of a theoretical or other school in order to be taken seriously abroad; therefore, we had to affiliate ourselves with some stream, some mainstream of critical theory, and at the time African American literature seemed the obvious place to go for critical models, not to mention the fact that scholars of African American women’s writing were very quick to appropriate Caribbean women’s writing. Still are, and that is a problem I have, because the work constructs an entirely different reality; it’s developed out of an entirely different tradition. I think that probably it was a combination of those two factors: the [need for legitimization and the] readiness to appropriate it as part of “black women’s writing” generally. But it didn’t do our writing any favors. And that’s why in Woman Version I think I tried at the time to say, “Well, we don’t need to read the work only in that way. We don’t need to buy into somebody else’s canon; we can look at our own and find ways of adapting as creolization always does: borrows and adapts.” [Yet] there was at the time a strong suspicion of “theory” in West Indian academia. I’ve actually heard it said at a conference, [that] this “theory business” is a bit like homosexuality, it’s a Western fashion that you’re bringing to impose on us, it’s colonization all over again. But really what that meant was, “I can’t be bothered to read it and understand it, so I’ll just criticize it as foreign.” There was a knee-jerk reaction, and I remember having long arguments with my colleague Glyne Griffith, who [was] here, about this, and [us] both agreeing that you had to do the work first. If you’re going to dismiss European or French feminism, you’ve got to read it first. You’ve got to engage with it, and you might discover some [approaches that] can be applied to West Indian literary analysis. So I think the writing needed the legitimacy of a kind of a . . .

SG: . . . a more recognizable critical frame, albeit a developing one?

EO: Yes.

SG: In your article about Frieda Cassin’s With Silent Tread, you describe the West Indian academy’s perception of that “theory business” as “imported, white, and thus irrelevant to the material culture of the local context.”[1] How has the academy’s perception of theory and its relevance changed, and might any particular changes be attributed to Caribbean feminist criticism?

EO: Well, it’s not the kind of rarefied and suspect practice that it was in the nineties. Decades have gone by in which students have, in the Caribbean as well as in the diaspora, been thoroughly grounded in all kinds of theory. And it has been owned in the Caribbean; there are strong West Indian voices that have contributed long before the term had currency. Wilson Harris was poststructuralist long before there was such a term. I don’t think we’re as nervous of theory as we were, I don’t think it’s in any way seen as a foreign imposition any more, yet somehow—I’m speaking just from my experience—somehow I don’t think theory is quite as “cutting edge” as it used to be. I find people are no longer required to show their theoretical credentials up front when they are writing about literary work. [Has] the theorizing of Caribbean women’s writing made a difference? Well, I think there’s no going back to a pre-feminist position here. It’s very much squarely in the mainstream, at every level of literary analysis from, I would say, secondary school right up to the postgraduate level. I think it’s done its job. That said, I find that if you’re reading the work of some of the newer critics now, it doesn’t seem to be as theoretically dense as was the fashion in the nineties. [Like] Bhabha; much as I love his work, I think the language he uses just turned off so many people that they called for a more grounded analysis. And certainly that’s the case in the Caribbean, where you have a duty to try and reach the widest number of possible readers, and that’s going to be a very small number of readers for obvious reasons here. So, to fence yourself off into the very specialized language of literary jargon is counterproductive for the majority of us who are actually involved in teaching as well as writing.

SG: Your teaching clearly informs your scholarship—in the first few pages of Woman Version, you describe how your female students’ responses to the literature defined your search for a syncretic approach to Caribbean women’s writing. And in a later article, you ask how women’s literature can be taught to effect social change.[2] How does your critical approach help you accomplish that?

EO: When you confront students with challenging fictions, and then you make a link with current political- or gender-related issues that are problematic in this particular place at this particular time, they respond very well. When you use the same fiction or poetry or drama to serve as a tool for an arcane theoretical unpacking, they turn off. I’ve really had to develop my teaching practice to, as Sidney said, “sugarcoat the bitter pill of philosophy,” to [make] them receptive and then open their minds. And again, the changes since the nineties are phenomenal. We have a much more confident, to a certain extent open-minded, sexually liberated (and not hypocritical-about-it) group—I’ve seen them develop considerably. However, there’s a clash for some with fundamentalist Christianity. Some students’ beliefs make transgressive stories [of texts], particularly when it has to do with the representation of alternative sexualities, in which I’m more interested of late. Non-heteronormative sexual desire is absolutely taboo for these students, and there’s no point in engaging in a debate. However, the majority of them do engage with the writing. Perhaps it’s to do with the way that I am asking the questions, presenting the literature. Perhaps I’ve learned a little bit more over time. For example, there’s still a great deal of homophobia here in the Caribbean. If you go straight into the class and wear your politics on your sleeve and say, “You know, this is wrong, homophobia is wrong, and we’re going to [read] Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” say, or one of Patricia Powell’s novels to prove it wrong, you’re going to have a confrontational encounter.

SG: Immediate resistance.

EO: Exactly. If you, by contrast, start off by asking, “Have any of you experienced name calling, or being marginalized because of, say, your weight, or your race, or your class?,” they begin to respond positively to that, and of course follows several personal anecdotes and then you ask, “Well, then, how is it possible that having experienced that kind of discrimination, that kind of marginalization, you feel able to do it to somebody else who happens to love in a different way than you do?” Or, you go in and you just teach the text as neutrally as you can, and then ask for their responses, and even against their beliefs, they will come up with sympathies for characters they should doctrinally demonize, with questions of right and wrong that enable that whole area to be unpacked in the classroom.

SG: So you begin with those binaries they already accept, or their “oppositional logic,” and you use that as a way to get them out of it.

EO: Precisely, precisely. And I do believe—I’m not paying lip service to it, I’ve seen it happen—that reading literature in a sensitive and informed and critical way, not just consuming it like a soap opera like they watch on TV, can open minds, can change ingrained ways of thinking, can [help them] envision, as Jacqui Alexander says, “another kind of citizenship.”[3] And if the only thing I have managed to do over my working life is to make those changes in a couple of people, then I think I’ve done a good job. Up till last semester I saw evidence of this. I was in England at a conference in Essex, and I checked my e-mail, and there was a student from . . . oh, I think she’s from St. Vincent, who was writing to say (and this is after one semester of Caribbean women’s writing in which we dealt with marginalization [and] the demonization of homosexuality, or alternative sexualities), that—I think it was in Uganda—they were proposing outlawing homosexuality and making it punishable by years in prison, or flogging, or something, and she was furious about this and wanted to sign an online petition censoring the law. She was trying to whip up support among her friends and they all turned on her, apparently, and asked, “Where is she getting these kinds of ideas?” So she was writing for some kind of backup, some kind of support . . .

SG: . . . an explanation for her actions that might also get her friends to reconsider their support.

EO: Indeed. I said, “Well, for people who have for four or five hundred years experienced racism and marginalization and dehumanization to turn around and do it to one of their own, surely there’s something wrong there.” And maybe she did take that, maybe she didn’t. But the fact is that in one semester, her thinking and her courage in expressing a different way of thinking had changed. This particular writing is speaking to them in a way that I don’t think that of V.S. Reid would, or even Derek Walcott. Caribbean women’s stories are about having your first period, stories about difficult relationships of a daughter with [her] single mother, stories about illegitimacy and how sex can lead to a girl’s dropping out of school. Everybody has some friend who’s a little different in terms of their supposed sexual preference. These are stories that relate to them, and I think that they can engage with them in a way that allows them to see the writing as actually or possibly inflecting their own experience so that it’s not simply part of their formal education. In fact, the hardest thing for me is to keep students focusing on the works as texts!

SG: Why?

EO: Because mostly they want to relate to them as true stories. They want to get into arguing about why didn’t she do this and why didn’t she do that, and I have to say to them, “Guys, this is a construct. [It’s] only made of words put together in a certain way, and you are here to unpack it, not to assume that there is a given answer and that it’s all like a nice film with a beginning, middle and end.” When I say they engage personally, I mean they really engage. They start quarreling! I hope I’m not disturbing other people nearby, because it gets very hot.

SG: And that engagement becomes a tool to broaden their perspectives.

EO: Yes. You have to do that, play devil’s advocate, or encourage somebody to say something you know will set off a reaction in the rest of the class or with others. I’m not under any illusions: it’s a second-year survey course of Caribbean women’s writing. The serious work gets done at the graduate level, or [in] final year courses, which are advanced seminars. But this is my one chance to reach as many as possible, young men as well as older women, and expose them, because they’re never going to get exposed to it again. There are not that many other courses that are focusing on Caribbean women’s writing, so this is my chance to “get to them.” And I will cater to the majority, so I don’t attempt particularly sophisticated analyses. My intentions [are] quite political; I want to open their minds, question certain things that they think about gender and identity in particular, and suggest the possibility of other ways of being [and/or] being woman.

SG: To what degree does an African American critical framework inform their understanding of the literature?

EO: African American writing is obviously very popular here, and a lot of the critical studies that they have read about West Indian texts does come from the US academy, and much of it does speak about these commonalities, so that there is that temptation to homogenize the specificity of the writing. But the corrective is a grounding in postcolonial theory, which has become very strong here; we call our department “Literatures in English,” not “English Literature” anymore. And the postcolonial demand to always historicize, always specify, helps to counteract that assimilation into the African American tradition, because they know perfectly well that the problems faced by, say, Dionne Brand’s characters in Canada are very different from those characters in a Barbadian [or] Grenadian setting. The temptation to homogenize, to essentialize black women’s writing . . .

SG: . . . and experience . . .

EO: Yes. And the writing of the experience is always there, but is one which they’re always pulling against. Remember that the students, like a lot of us, want easy simplicities. We don’t want things to be complicated. We like our binaries. They like to know that there is this one thing called identity, and it is shaped entirely by race or gender, and that therefore all of these kinds of people are the same [and] have the same politics, and all [they] have to do is learn one or two clear statements about this and [they’ve] solved the problem of who they are. They don’t like having to unpack that complex weave of cultures that has made up the Caribbean, because it demands unraveling it, demands looking at the sophisticated and intricate patterns that emerge in this writing. Such analysis isn’t easy to synopsize, meaning the texts are not easy to use for propaganda purposes. I stress the need to fight the urge to essentialize, so much so that students are delighted to say to me, “You’re essentializing, Miss!” I just keep trying [to tell them that] each case, each text, each writer has be read within [a] context, and that context is not something that you can just dispense with. [Essentializing] of gender and race is reinforced everywhere. It’s reinforced in popular culture, it’s reinforced in media, and it’s reinforced on the bloody internet over and over again.

SG: Speaking of that, you recently collaborated on a project with Alison Donnell that addressed the reinforcement of normative sexual identities in the Caribbean.

EO: Yes, the project is called “Breaking Sexual Silences,” and it was just a one-year, very intense effort to open up the question of alternative sexualities in a more quiet space outside of the huge battlefield with its very decided, drawn sides that has blown up over the issue of homophobia in dancehall music. We wanted to take it out of that sphere. [Alison] had done work on this before, and will continue to, I’m sure. There is a strong feeling that the intervention of the Western anti-homophobia, gay rights lobbies have done no favors for correcting the marginalization of homosexuality in the Caribbean; quite the opposite. Such groups have wagged their fingers and said, “You savages, you’d better change, or we’re not coming to your country to spend money.” And they remind us that the pink dollar counts. What we were trying to do was look at the field of Caribbean writing by men and women, and say, “Look, alternative sexuality has been treated here, it’s been discussed here, it’s been exposed here, it’s been aired here, but in a quite different way.” And the literary discussions are not for proving ourselves to an outside audience or judge, but instead engaging with the subject in a local context by people who are involved. That was what we tried to do—quite bravely, I think. We tried to shake things up a little, move away from the “Boom Boom Bye” uproar. You know the song I’m talking about? It’s a very popular Buju Banton song which basically incites murdering “batty men,” killing gays. There’s an element of that rhetoric in dancehall, without a doubt. But we’re trying to say, “Leave that aside—not all of us are proponents of that political perspective.” Many of us think a bit more carefully about these issues. And quite a few of our younger writers have actually expressed them.

We were also talking about opening up conversations about sexuality generally, and issues of sexual preference secondarily, because there’s such a contradiction, especially in Barbados, between the valorization of liberated female sexuality and the depiction of the female body as lush, very much exposed on the road, in carnival and dance and so forth, which contrasts with a kind of prudish, almost Victorian idea of what constitutes correct female behavior, especially once you’re in a partnership. Probably the best achievement of the project in local terms was when we had Oonya Kempadoo visiting. [She] was reading from her novel [Buxton Spice] about children exploring their own sexuality and laughing about it and treating it as something natural, which makes for some uncomfortable listening, because she’s very up front. And then Thomas Glave [read] from his anthology Our Caribbean, which consists of gay and lesbian writing by people from the Caribbean.[4] He chose quite raw, quite explicit material to read, and we had an absolutely packed house on a Monday evening. They sat on the floor, they stood at the doors, and it was wonderful that people from all walks of life had come to the university to hear these voices. I’m quite pleased about that, because it means that the “ivory tower” impression of the university is being revisited, and we were trying to present it as a safe space for the discussion of more progressive views legitimated by a body of respected and talented writers, and to suggest that you don’t have to be an academic to read novels that deal with these issues.

SG: You were able to challenge violence, traditionally the sole response to alternative sexualities, on many levels.

EO: Yes. It’s terrible, because you do feel implicated when you’re at a party, or a fête, and you’re dancing and all of a sudden you hear the lyrics that you’re dancing to. And then the whole party will be jumping and putting up [hands] in the air to words that are actually inciting violence and hatred. So it’s not just about the actual violence, but the popularizing and disseminating of the rhetoric of violence, and [countering] the smug self-righteousness that justifies it. You read the letters in the local newspapers, and at least every two or three days will be some religious letter writer, or preacher, or reverend, or “A Christian” saying that we’re being punished for something, we’re going against the Bible, moral standards have fallen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As I’ve written somewhere . . . probably [in] Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean—it’s just come out, edited by Faith Smith—the biggest student association on all three [UWI] campuses is the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. There’s a very strong evangelical movement worldwide, and especially in developing countries, and I think that there’s always a return to tried-and- true beliefs in times of turmoil and unease. As long as it doesn’t condone any attack on other people, that’s fine. When it does, then I have issues with religion. And that’s not a popular thing to say in the classroom, I’ll tell you that.

SG: Even though your issue is with the situational rejection of fundamental Christian principles?

EO: Yes. “First, do no harm”—that’s the message of Shani Mootoo’s latest novel, and I think that whatever you believe in, whatever your faith, that should be a central tenet.[5] If it isn’t, then I have problems with it. I try not to get into that in the classroom. Their religious convictions are not really something I think is any of my business, but they know where I’m coming from.

SG: You’re also engaged in breaking critical silences; for example, your work on writers like Frieda Cassin counters the myth that Caribbean women’s writing emerged relatively recently. How would you characterize your critical work and its effects?

EO: When I think now of what we’ve achieved over the last thirty years! Nobody would dream of referring to the West Indian canon in terms of the boys only. Ever again. Ironically, a couple of years back, I came to think, why am I teaching this course, Caribbean Women’s Writing? Every course on West Indian literature now includes Caribbean women’s writing. Am I just doing something that’s passé? Should I now be [taking] a more comparative approach? And then the issue of alternative sexualities became interesting to me, or just more urgent, I suppose, and I felt that Caribbean women’s literature was still a good body of work to use in addressing this issue up front. Yes, [work on women writers] is a small field within the larger body of critical studies; there’s a huge industry of [Kamau] Brathwaite studies, of [Derek] Walcott studies, of [V. S.] Naipaul studies. But there are writers that were very prominent in the canon when I was first at Mona in the early eighties that have fallen out of fashion. Alison Donnell’s work engages with that, with which critical moments established certain writers at different times, and how it changes. Still, I think that there’s a small but hardworking group of critics that has put women’s writing very much on the map—Elaine Savory, Carole Boyce Davies, Denise deCaires Narain, and many others—and that it will never be omitted again. I think that the critical legitimacy of our work over time has been a good strong matrix for that development. Funny, I never think about these things, you know? It’s just part of what I do, but when I look at books on my shelf, that whole top shelf is all feminist theory, African American women, and madness, the next shelf is early English and early writing by women, right through to West Indian postcolonial and specifically Caribbean women’s writing. So it’s there, you know? It can’t be “un-there-ed”; it can’t be taken back.

To return to your question, because I am an academic as well as a feminist, and because I have an old-fashioned view of research in certain respects, I also feel the need to keep digging at the other, more scholarly side of the writing. So my last book was all about early [nineteenth-century] Caribbean women’s writing. I enjoy that kind of archival scholarly work, too. The Frieda Cassin edition was a part of that project, and I have just finished an introduction for Peepal Tree’s reissue of Elma Napier’s book A Flying Fish Whispered. Elma Napier was a writer in the thirties. She’s Lennox Honychurch’s grandmother, in Dominica, the first of a long line of famous Napiers-Honychurchs, and she has written two novels, and this one, I think, is quite interesting from an ecofeminist angle. I’m always working in the background as well as the foreground, looking at contemporary, cutting-edge women’s writing and what it brings to the table in terms of political issues and gender and sexuality issues, but also shoring up that tradition by seeing how far back we can trace it and how it has developed.

SG: And those voices from the past can’t speak until you do that work. You’re stretching out what being a Caribbean woman writer means by uncovering what it meant, extending the history of that voice.

EO: Yes, exactly. By stretching it out, you are expanding the term. This focus is not a popular move for some critics, one of whom asked me, “Why didn’t you call the book White Women’s Writing?” And I said, “Because Mary Prince is not white.” Neither are the Hart sisters, Mary Seacole, et cetera. The implication is that including long-dead white women within a study of West Indian literature is suspect. There’s always that temptation, that knee-jerk reaction, to say that opening up a category too much renders it meaningless. But for now, I think Caribbean women’s writing can be broadened in terms of who’s in and who’s out in a productive way rather than a “flattening out” kind of way. And I hope we can continue to do it, because [I have encountered] lots and lots of writing, not always of the same quality, that is completely unknown. And I like digging, so the line is not exhausted by any means yet, in my opinion. Of course, in the here and now, new talents keep emerging. I really like Kei Miller’s work, and Marlon James’s also. I think that [they] are some of the male writers [who] are going to even up the balance a little bit, because I think they’re good writers, and they’re accessible, and what they’re writing about is important to Caribbean women as much as men.

SG: You mentioned wondering how pressing gender issues are in contemporary West Indian literary scholarship. What have you concluded? Are gender studies passé?

EO: I’m very torn about that because sometimes I do feel work on gender is regarded as almost passé. There’s always a time, as feminists understand, when you have to prioritize the work of the marginalized at the expense of any links to, or developments out of, other traditions. And that’s necessary to give the marginalized writing space, to allow its voices to be heard. Caribbean women’s writing needed that authority, needed that kind of respectability in order to be taken seriously. But now, I think that perhaps the work—I hope I’m right in saying this—is so much part of the mainstream that it sometimes seems counterproductive to separate women writers out into a group. I mentioned that this is what I thought about a couple years ago in terms of changing this course on Caribbean women’s writing, and perhaps teasing out more and more connections with the same kind of issues, the same kind of stylistic conundrums, in writing by men of the same generation. But something always holds me back . . . because I see how students respond to these texts in a way that they do not respond to the traditional works of West Indian literature. There’s still some kind of excitement and novelty for them encountering this literature that I feel I should nurture, even though for me, the work is as canonical as that of Brathwaite. And so I keep teaching the course. It’s my area, [and] I’ll always be interested in it. The only [other] thing that interests me that I would like to develop outside of this field of Caribbean literature, specifically by women, is the idea of visual representation. I’m fascinated by that field and have been doing a bit of research. Oh, and ecocriticism too. But they’re easily adaptable—they’re easy enough to incorporate into the study of Caribbean women’s writing. For me, anyway. I’ll find a way.

Sheryl Gifford is a PhD candidate and an instructor of English at Florida Atlantic University.

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.

BB: When you write about the Middle Passage, you render the event as an experience in the first-person singular, as your personal memory. You call it the one journey you wish you would not have had to undertake. You further write that subjecting a people to a forced migration is to cause “decades or centuries of heartache.”[2] Since the writer, as you argue, is the person who tells the tribe who they are and where they are from, can the writer be a healer?

CP: That’s the journey that seems to me to be the most difficult, the most problematic, because it is the involuntary one. It has consequences, not just for the people who made the journey; it has huge consequences for the continent of Africa. It essentially caused a brain drain that the continent is still trying to recover from. If you have any affection for Africa, which I do, and you’re spending time in Africa, then you can feel a sense of loss. You are in a sense a representative of loss. There is the idea that in the end all journeys are positive. The Middle Passage is the one that still leaves me with a question mark.

Every narrative I write about Africa, every time I am in Africa, I try to get my head around the fact that between 8 or 11 million people left this place involuntarily, and what does that means. Yes, it means Mohammed Ali, it means James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Dizzy Gillespie, and Michael Jordan. But what does it mean for Africa? What are the consequences? It seems to be ongoing.

BB: Let’s talk about Mohammed Ali. You used to work with a poster of Anne Frank above your desk, and you have expressed that her story inspired you to write a novel about the Holocaust. More recently, however, the poster next to your writing desk was one from “Rumble in the Jungle”—the 1974 Ali-Foreman fight in Kinshasha, Zaïre. What do you associate with this moment and what inspiration do you gain from it?

CP: Ali is the great American sportsman of the twentieth century. I don’t think that anybody combines such social activism, political principle, and courage along with his sporting excellence. He is a towering example of moral responsibility. One does not necessarily have to believe in everything he said or believed in, but when we talk about changing the narrative and making the country adjust to your narrative, he is the great example of that.

BB: Interestingly, Ali managed to merge a Muslim identity with that of an American star. Foremost among the concerns which strike me as new are your reflections on the nature and rise of Islamophobia. For someone who has hitherto focused primarily on the trials of people of the African diaspora and on anti-Semitism, what are the challenges in trying to scrutinize and analyze this particular form of xenophobia? You seem to imply that Islamophobia is based on a different set of anxieties than, for instance, Negrophobia.

CP: Well, actually, what I think that comes from is, again, 9/11. I was extremely aware of the fact, immediately after September 11, of how people started to talk about Muslims in this city. And I found it absolutely offensive. I remember playing golf up in the Bronx with a guy who is a very well-respected journalist in this city and he made some comments about the Muslim guys in the corner shop in Brooklyn and how they were laughing at him, he thinks, behind his back. And I remember just stopping and looking at him and thinking, “You know what? I don’t really need to hear this shit.” Obviously I’ve heard anti-Muslim sentiment before and it was framed in a way that reminded me of things that I’d heard when I was growing up in England about blacks, about the Irish, about Jewish people.

So I guess it got me thinking about my own response over the years to Islam, to Muslims, looking closer again at Europe. This whole question of faith, of discrimination based upon one’s faith, which I do think is different from discrimination based upon one’s skin color. Because as we know, Islam rises up above skin color. Islamophobia is a slightly more sinister way of othering people. I don’t think it is as problematic in this country as it is in Europe. I think in this country it’s a typical kind of knee-jerk, ignorant response. But I have slightly more faith in this country, that it can be worked through. I am much more worried about Europe. In that sense, I took that anxiety from 9/11 here and then began to look at Europe, because I could not figure out what the stumbling block was in Europe. That’s how I began thinking about it.

BB: In your novel The Nature of Blood [1997], various strands of the plot explore conflicts between Christianity and Judaism, yet Islam seems to be conspicuously absent from the narrative. After all, the Venice in which both Othello and the Jewish community exist as internal “other” is at war against the Ottoman Empire. Othello himself is, of course, the “Moor of Venice,” a fact which does not receive a lot of attention in the novel. At the same time, the absence of the Palestinian people from the novel’s references to the establishment of Israel is notable.

I have always been somewhat puzzled by what I thought of as a striking silence, but now, after reading Color Me English, I wonder whether the theme of the West’s relationship to Islam does not actually cry out from the margins of your novel?

CP: That’s on your part a legitimate reading of what’s going on. I think the most honest thing I could say in response to that is that if I was going to write the novel again today, Islam would probably be slightly more in view. The novel was published in 1997, so we are talking about fifteen years ago.

Within these fifteen years Islam’s relationship to Europe and European history has changed. Not just in Britain. France obviously, Spain obviously. But in Britain there are generations of troops now who are coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq with seriously warped ideas of what Islam is, what Muslims are, and they are bringing these ideas back into British society. They are feeding British society. Spain and France don’t have troops in Afghanistan. True, they’ve got other issues to deal with, historically and in a contemporary sense, with Islam. But Britain concerns me because I’ve seen those soldiers. I’ve sat in pubs and listened to how people talk. I’ve turned on the TV and seen the images and the legitimization of a kind of anti-Islam discourse, which is scary, and which I believe fifteen years ago wasn’t present. In fact, I believe that fifteen years ago it would not have been tolerated in the way it is now.

I think it would be hard for me to write that novel now without at least taking that on board. I think the chief oppositional dialectic in the book would still be Judaism and Christianity, but there is no question that the very term Moor of Venice would have slightly more resonance now than it had in my imagination when I was writing.

BB: To stay in Europe for a moment: Several of the essays in Color Me English express a concern for the health of European civilization. In your essay “Blood” you write that it would only take “one madman somewhere in Europe” to trigger a series of catastrophic events is Europe.[3] Why does European history sometimes seem to be eerily circular?

CP: I hate to say it, but it’s tribal. To me it has always appeared to be tribal. I was not long out of college and I was traveling across Europe on trains. I was always struck at the speed with which languages changed as you crossed borders. And how the only way in which people defined themselves was in opposition to people who were not them. Even if it was only a matter of the next village across the valley. It’s tribal.

And if you throw into the mix religion, it has historically always been like throwing a flame onto a pile of dry hay. I don’t think race alone is going to do it. Race has provided rebellions, street uprisings, anxiety, clashes with the police. But if you look at the situation historically, which mercifully Europeans can do a little better than Americans, you see the truth. The worst conflicts in Britain, the most serious conflicts, were not race. I grew up in Britain. I lived through riots. I lived through those uprisings in Notting Hill and Brixton. But it’s the IRA. That’s what happened. The [conflicts] that caused the most deaths, the ones that caused the most civil unrest, that brought the army onto the streets, were when you introduced religion.

That’s my concern about Islam. If you start attacking a people based on their faith it is very different from attacking a people based on the color of their skin. And to be honest with you, I worry that the Madrid train bombing and what happened on July 7, 2005, in London will not be isolated instances that get buried in history. We’ve got more to come.

BB: Your reflections on the 7 July, 2005, London bombings raises the question whether society pushes immigrants into seeking a sense of belonging in radical ideas if it does not open spaces into which the newcomer can integrate her- or himself. Rather than merely expecting the arrival to subject his sense of self to the narrative of the nation, you seem to suggest, national identity needs to be mutable enough to offer the newcomer a space within which she or he can exist comfortably. How can the writer assist to unbolt these spaces within the nation’s history, memory, and identity?

CP: I think the United States is more mutable as a society than most European societies. Most European societies are flexible and they are open to change, but are they open to transformation? Social changes are outstripping the patience of a people to see the reality which is in front of them. We’ve got so many examples of this in European history. That’s my worry. That the change is happening very fast in Europe but the societies are not that mutable. They are still staring at the village in the next valley and worrying about them, rather than looking about themselves and who they are and what they need to do.

What can a writer do? Well, you know, you write what you see, you write what you feel, you write what you think is important. What I think I am trying to do, and particularly the work that I am doing right now, is an extension of what I’ve been doing all along. It is most clearly seen in a novel like The Nature of Blood. If you juxtapose narratives that look like they don’t fit together properly, you are trying to force people so see something new by seeing something familiar. And I suppose that’s what I think should be happening, in British society. People should be seeing something new without losing sight of the familiar. Take a novel like A Distant Shore [2003]. I can tell a story about an English woman in a small little town in the north of England, settling into a bungalow. This seems very familiar to a lot of readers. But then introducing the story of an African migrant, who has a whole story, is to introduce the unfamiliar. You juxtapose those two. Or push it even further, as in Crossing the River or The Nature of Blood, where it is in the structure of the piece.

So I am trying to think structurally and formally as well as thinking about the characters and the themes of the piece. The biggest problem I always face when I am sitting down to work is formal: how to tell the story in a way that it is at least suggesting something new, whilst not losing sight of the familiar.

BB: In the autobiographical essay “Color Me English” you remember the arrival of a new student at your school, of Ali, the first Muslim you ever talked to. You suggest that initially you did not see the commonality between your own position as a visible “other” and that of Ali. Yet ultimately you arrived at a moment in which cross-cultural empathy allows you to recognize the similarity of your positions. Missed connections, especially between individuals of different marginalized groups, seem to be a recurring theme in your novels as well. What keeps us from realizing, and what allows us to realize, how much we share with others?

CP: What keeps us from doing that? We’re basically stupid. And we are slightly cowardly, as well. Because all of us were bred to be wary of those who are not like us. It seems to me to be part of how we grow up. If we are lucky we grow up in an environment which encourages mixing across all sorts of lines of gender, class, sexuality, or race. But most of us are encouraged to be suspicious of something. We overhear things that our parents say, we overhear things that kids at school say, we overhear things that teachers are saying or implying, and it breeds in us caution. It takes a lot for us to step out from behind our prejudices.

Obviously, the act of writing a novel is different for each novelist, but certainly for me one of the things that I want to do is to try to encourage people to reach out and meet people who are not like them. I want to try and encourage people to do that in their real life. Can that happen? Do I have any evidence that it has ever happened? No, but that’s my goal. Going back to A Distant Shore, where someone finds the courage to speak to the neighbor that they have not spoken to before. Reading that book and looking through their neighbor’s window, they might think, “Maybe I should go over there and introduce myself.”

Because we are all like this. I am just as guilty as the next person. I looked out of the window this morning . . . and I saw a guy walking his dog, and he took the dog to a tree in the woman’s garden across the street, and he did not clean up after the dog, and then he let the dog walk through the plants. I see this woman come out in her dressing gown every morning and lovingly water the plants. And I looked at this guy, and I just thought, “You complete jack-ass.” And then I looked again at the guy’s face, and he was a really sad, lonely old man, and I see him all the time. And then I thought, “Oh, maybe I should say something to him . . . or maybe I won’t say anything to him.” And I am still thinking about it now, eight hours later. I am thinking, “Maybe I should say something to that guy.” Maybe nobody has ever said to him, “You don’t do that, pal.” You know, in a nice way, and have a conversation. I don’t know. I just think we are all of us bred to retreat to our position of cowardice, or blindness, or prejudice. And the glorious thing about literature is that it digs us out of our ideological burrows. It encourages us to engage with Madame Bovary, who is not like anybody I am likely to meet, or with Anna Karenina, or with Oliver Twist. It should dig us out of these burrows and if it is working properly, it should help us in our day-to-day life, to look with more clarity and more generosity. That is a huge claim, but it seems to me more urgent than ever because we live in this world that seems to be riven by more division than ever before. It is actually remarkable that as the world becomes increasingly plural, heterogeneous, confused—you don’t know who you are going to be sitting next to on an airplane or on a bus, and you are more and more startled by the different languages that you are hearing on the street—while this is occurring we seem to be retreating from each other just at the moment when we have the opportunity to open up. That is why I think that literature is really important now, because it is not only offering us a chance to encounter other people in the books, but it should be making us confident about making that [happen] in our daily life. But as I said, I don’t have any evidence that it is; I just have hope.

BB: You have described Europe’s continued obsession with a mythical homogeneity and purity as a fatal “failure of the imagination.”[4] Europe, it seems, still needs images of the “outsider” to define herself. In works like Foreigners (2007), you have undertaken steps to show that those whom Europe defines as “other” have actually for centuries been a part of her. What story would you like Europe to tell herself about herself?

CP: Well, you’ve said it. The African has been there all along. Romans sent black soldiers to Hadrian’s Wall. We know that Henry VII had black trumpeters. You can say that, and historians say that now, and they have been doing so for some years, and that’s terrific. But as a writer, as a writer of the imagination, you’ve got to work that into a narrative in a way that appears to be new and also appears to be disrupting a familiar story. You can’t tear it down completely, because Europe is very resistant to that kind of assault. You get an occasional assault in societies like Columbia with [Gabriel García] Marquez, or Cuba, or in African literature. You get assaults in places where the infrastructure of the societies themselves are subject to rising and falling and collapse, countries that have revolutions, where you wake up in the morning and the country has a different name—the government fled overnight and it’s a new government the next day. In countries like that it is a lot easier to be apocalyptic in terms of narrative, because it kind of matches what is going on in the country.

Solid countries, countries in Europe, sell themselves on their history. You know you go to Versailles, you go to the Tower of London, you go to the Alhambra. It’s a lot more difficult to tear down a narrative. So you are doing work from inside. You are trying to be as radical as you can, formally, structurally, thematically, but you can’t do what [Alejo] Carpentier could do, or Marquez could do, you can’t rip the whole thing down and begin again. Among the novels that have tried to do that in Britain, perhaps the best example is [Salmon Rushdie’s] Midnight’s Children, but that’s not about Britain. That is a British writer using these techniques of deconstruction but not imposing them upon Britain. So I think I am trying to push towards assisting this process of rethinking the narrative, the national narrative, not just in the types of stories I am telling but in trying to think about how to tell them.

BB: Your novels are known for their fragmented narratives. You have expressed in the past that you had long tried to write a book with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but that in the end you always arrived at a point where you deliberately dropped the plot to let it shatter because of your lack of trust in the linearity of time. Interestingly, your latest novel In the Falling Snow (2009) appears to be less “shattered” than some of your earlier works. What happened?

CP: In the Falling Snow has a linear narrative, but within the narrative it frequently moves back and forth. I wanted to see if I could write in that particular way and this story presented itself in a way that it didn’t have as much on the fringes to play with. It had the father’s story to play with, where we could use language and vision, we could use time, and we could go into something that was slightly more formally challenging. But it was a pretty battened down, pretty straight forward, pretty clean, linear narrative. That’s how the story came to me and so I went with it. It would have seemed perverse, in a sense, to have said, “Ah, you know what? People are not used to me doing this. So, having finished the draft I am now going to have to jumble it up or add something.” I just thought, “You know what? That’s what it is.” I have a notion of why I did it, But it won’t be clear until I write something else.

BB: Some of your more recent fiction—A Distant Shore  and In the Falling Snow—has primarily focused on contemporary Britain. The United States, which was the subject of a section of On Higher Ground [1989], of Crossing the River [1993], and of your novel Dancing in the Dark, is dealt with in your fictional work mostly historically. While these bygone eras obviously have great implications for the present day, the urgency of the tone of your reflections on the current developments in the United States in Color Me English seems to call out for a novel set in the contemporary, post-9/11 United States.

CP: Well, that’s not what I am writing at the moment. But that is something that I would quite like to do. I would like to write something about America in the present, as opposed to Dancing in the Dark, which is very much about a bygone age, although obviously I felt that as a novel it was partly about right now.

BB: Writing a new novel always begins for you with an obsession. Are you willing to give us some idea on what kind of story you are obsessed with at the moment?

CP: I’ve been wanting to write something for a long time about Emily Brontë. So that is what I am writing about. I grew up very close to where she did. I mean, ten miles away. I’m writing, thinking about her. And out of Emily Brontë comes a lot of things, not just Wuthering Heights, but Liverpool, Heathcliff, and the moors. That is where I grew up, you know, that West Yorkshire area. The only thing I can tell you is that’s it’s not going to be a narrative that is as tight and as pared down and linear as the last book.

BB: In your essay on James Baldwin [in Color Me English], you suggest that if a writer exposes his private life too much to public scrutiny, he risks that society will try to impose an increasing amount of expectations and restrictions on the author’s identity and writing. How do you deal with your growing fame?

CP: Well, I don’t think of myself as famous in even vaguely the same way that he was. You learn a lot of things from being around other writers. I was very lucky that he was the first writer that I really got to know. I remember walking down the street with him in France and people coming up to him and asking for his autograph. I remember meeting him in a bar in the early eighties on Seventh Avenue by Fifty-Fifth Street, on a wet, snowy Sunday night. There was a woman sitting and drinking at the bar by herself. Her eyes nearly popped out of her head, and she came across to Jimmy. That’s real fame. It didn’t matter what country he was in.

But I also saw what it did to him. And I saw it close up. You have options, and at certain times in your life you have options as to whether to do this or whether not to do this. You can always say no. If you do too many public things you become, as Baldwin once said, you become a “dancing dog.” You can always say no. Sometimes it’s good to say no.

BB: Well, I am very glad you said yes to this interview. Again, thank you very much for your time.

Bastian Balthazar Becker is a PhD student of English literature at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, and teaches at Brooklyn College. He has pursued studies in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Atlanta, Georgia, as well as in Tübingen, Germany, and has lived and taught in Alexandria, Egypt; Lima, Peru; and Toulouse, France. His primary academic focus is on postcolonial narratives, comparative approaches, and collective memories. He is the author of Re-Signifying Lynching’s Memory (2009). His work has appeared in the South Atlantic Review and in Social Text, and he contributes on a regular basis to Kritikon Litterarum.

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)

Martin Munro : Pourriez-vous vous présenter à nos lecteurs ? Qui êtes-vous ? Où avez-vous passé votre vie ? Où vivez-vous maintenant ?

Marvin Victor : Je suis né en décembre 1981 à Port-au-Prince. Je vis entre Haïti, les États-Unis et la France. Autant dire nulle part : je chemine dans la langue, dans la création . . .

MM : A quel âge et dans quelles conditions avez-vous commencé à écrire ?

MV : J’ai commencé à écrire très tôt, vers treize–quatorze ans. Dans la fièvre, dans une sorte de douce folie liée au sentiment de la langue, des phrases, des histoires que je lisais à l’époque ; je ne savais pas ce qui m’arrivait, c’était comme si je tombais malade ; une maladie foudroyante, incurable, avec laquelle j’ai appris à vivre . . .

MM : Quels auteurs, haïtiens et étrangers, vous ont inspiré ?

MV : Jacques Stephen Alexis, Proust, Céline, Balzac, Borges, Faulkner, Joyce, Kundera, García Márquez, et tant d’autres. Ce sont mes souffleurs. Car, à mon avis, tout écrivain a besoin d’une mémoire littéraire, sinon c’est du gâchis, de la perte de temps. Il n’existe pas d’écrivains spontanés.

MM : Quand avez-vous commencé à écrire Corps mêlés ?

MV : Je prenais des notes sur le personnage central, Ursula Fanon, bien avant le séisme. Cette femme existait déjà dans mon imaginaire ou, si vous voulez, dans mon imagination. Elle flottait comme d’autres dans mon esprit, dans mes carnets, tandis que j’écrivais un autre roman, avec un personnage féminin plus jeune. Mais, à un moment donné, Ursula Fanon s’était imposée à moi, surgie de l’ombre. Donc, j’ai laissé tomber cet autre roman, pour passer à Corps mêlés que j’ai écrit assez vite, sans doute parce que le personnage de cette autre femme était mieux préparé, avec la violence de son lyrisme, sa propension à une mélancolie somme toute retenue, et son don pour le songe . . .

MM : Comment le séisme a-t-il changé la rédaction de ce roman et votre approche à la littérature plus généralement ?

MV : Le séisme n’a pas changé grand-chose, même pas le décor, sinon l’ambiance de la ville dont les protagonistes semblent vouloir parler, et à laquelle ils ne peuvent échapper tout à fait. Bien que toute l’histoire se déroule dans un huis clos, dans un appartement encore debout, et dans le passé, autrement dit dans l’enfance, à Baie-de-Henne, de cette femme et de cet homme qu’elle est allée voir et à qui elle raconte sa vie sous forme d’un long monologue intérieur empreint d’une violence du propos qui lui tiendrait lieu de souffle, de fil conducteur, voire de fierté, de dignité. Car, pour ma part, la littérature est une affaire de langue, ce travail acharné sur la langue, et non sur un événement quelconque, quoiqu’il faille un prétexte, bien évidemment, une sorte de socle pour porter cette langue.

MM : Que signifie pour vous la publication de votre premier roman dans la Collection Blanche de Gallimard ?

MV : C’est entrer par la grande porte dans la cour des grands, tels que Proust, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Sartre, Claudel, Saint-John Perse, Malraux, Kundera, pour ne citer que ceux-là. Cette collection est celle où tout écrivain qui écrit en français voudrait publier, sans doute pour le prestige, et la proximité de ces grands auteurs qui, mondialement reconnus, ont fait l’histoire de la littérature française du vingtième siècle. Le pouvoir d’attraction de cette collection est énorme ; tant et si bien que chaque année plus de plusieurs milliers d’auteurs envoient aux Éditions Gallimard leurs manuscrits, avec, plus ou moins, l’espoir de tomber dans l’emblématique « Blanche ».

MM : Vous êtes aussi cinéaste et peintre. Quels liens voyez-vous entre vos trois formes de création ?

MV : C’est presque pareil. C’est très physique. Juste un décalage de support. Je vais d’une forme à l’autre, et parfois je les mélange.

MM : Qu’est-ce que vous écrivez en ce moment ? Quels sont vos projets à court et à moyen terme ?

MV : Je finis présentement un roman, et je compte tout de suite après passer à la caméra.

Martin Munro est professeur d’études françaises et francophones à l’Université de l’Etat de Floride. Spécialiste de la littérature antillaise, il est l’auteur de Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas, et travaille actuellement sur la question de l’apocalypse aux Caraïbes.

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.

Bastian Balthazar Becker: As a collection of critical essays, reviews, biographical sketches, and autobiographical reminiscences, Color Me English [2011] seems be a sequel of your last collection of essays, A New World Order [2001]. And once more your scope has broadened. What issues or events have particularly influenced your work within the past decade?

Caryl Phillips: First of all it seems to me to be a kind of logical ten-year successor to the last collection. As soon as one starts to look at it dispassionately, the main thing, or one of the main things, that changed is my feeling, or desire, to want to write about America. Ten years ago I still felt like I was participating in American life and trying to learn at the same time. I didn’t feel that I had a position from which to comment with any authority. But I think September 11 [2001] changed that. I think it made me, like many other people, feel much more outraged about what happened in the wake of September 11, in terms of American domestic and foreign policy.

And I think another element which made me want to write about America is that I got somewhat fed up listening to people in Britain, and perhaps Europe in general, giving America a hard time, using the policies of George Bush, which were admittedly pretty disgusting and disturbing policies, as a stick to beat America as a larger concept, America as an idea. It seemed to me they were missing the point. So I wanted to write not so much in defense of America, but I wanted to write back to that kind of European notion that America had lost its way.

BB: Repeatedly in Color Me English you describe 9/11 as a moment of personal arrival. Can belonging, this precariously fragile and yet strikingly resilient sensation, around which many of your works revolve, accrue from trauma? And if so, can this feeling of belonging transcend the trauma? Or will it always be contingent on a wound?

CP: Good questions. Well, for me, certainly, September 11 represents some kind of a trauma. A kind of personal, almost minute-by-minute trauma throughout that day, which has left a wound. But it certainly made me feel that I had to examine my belonging or detachment to this society. I wouldn’t want to broaden that out into a more general statement. Maybe that’s something to come in the future. But certainly, trauma can produce a certain change in one’s sense of belonging and of one’s sense of participation in society. It definitely happened to me on September 11.

BB: Could one say that this trauma, then, revealed a sense of belonging, which you had already created before 9/11?

CP: I think so. I think that’s not a bad way of putting it. I am very suspicious of affiliations of any kind, particularly national affiliations. The United States of America is a country which, it seems to me, increasingly so, has imposed upon its people over the years this notion of having to advertise one’s sense of allegiance. I am thinking about things like the little lapel badge that the president seems to always wear. I am talking about the pledge of allegiance. I am talking about that rather weird glazed look that American athletes and sportspeople get when the national anthem is played. An almost kind of holier-than-thou display of “We are Americans.” One is very suspicious of such nationalism generally, but I am also very suspicious of it in the American context.

But perhaps the events of September 11 did in fact make me feel that I understood something about America, perhaps on a more visceral level than I had allowed myself to deal with or engage with. I think I had absorbed more of America than I had realized.

BB: Writing in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, you describe “the sounds of a city screaming in pain.”[2] What is the city saying, mumbling, stammering, whispering, coughing, or screaming, in the summer of 2011?

CP: I’ve only ever lived in Manhattan. And if I was to characterize the noise that Manhattan makes now, it’s a kind of ugly, collective, raucous noise that those Wall Street traders, all in their late twenties, waiting for their bonuses, making a lot of money, rather self-satisfied, make. Manhattan has become this ugly gated community, increasingly “us and them,” increasingly satisfied to be less and less cosmopolitan, pushing all the interesting people and all the artists out to Brooklyn, to Queens, and to the Bronx. Obviously it began with [mayor Rudy] Giuliani, but there is a space that has been opened up for those who already have. And the thing about New York is that there was always a space for “those who have” and “those who don’t have” to live side by side.

The noise of current Manhattan is the noise you get when you go to a bar in the financial district at about five o’clock. It’s just full of people with briefcases who are getting drinks before they go back to TriBeCa or before they get on a train to Westchester. That is the noise. And that is not, to me, the noise I signed up for.

BB: Ironically, September 11 seems to mark both a moment of arrival but also a turning point in your ways to think about the United States. While your writings in the aftermath do reflect a sense of membership and belonging, they also express a growing disenchantment with a particular mythology of this country.

Is criticism thus an expression of a sense of belonging? Does it express your heightened concern for the place for which you have developed a sense of home?

CP: I don’t think of it as home in that sense. But certainly the first point you make about the sense of belonging I think is true. You can only really work up passionate juices and flow and bite about expressing how you feel about a certain thing if you care. If I felt detached about the United States of America and if I actually was tiptoeing my way through the society, looking left, looking right, but not really feeling any sense of investment, I don’t think I would have been quite as indignant as I was about some policies, particularly the domestic policies—the Patriot Act, for instance.

The fact that I am so critical seems to me to suggest a belonging. It surprised me that I actually wanted to write in so many different essays about how annoyed I was. One might have imagined it to be possible to work it out in one piece and then move on. I feel similarly indignant about things that are happening in Britain. It has taken me a long time to get to the stage where I read about something that’s happening in the United States and feel that I want to write about it. For many years I was quite happy to sit here in the United States and have my blood boiling about what’s happening in Europe but I think in the last few years I have been sitting here, seeing things that are happening here, and then picking up the pen to write about these issues.

BB: You said that you would not call New York home. Generations of interviewers have asked you about your personal definition of home. Following this tradition, I would like to ask you, Where is home for you in 2011? And how has this notion changed within the past ten years?

CP: Well I think the only change is a growing embracing of the United States as part of that notion of home. If you had asked me that question ten years ago, I would have definitely said Britain and St. Kitts (or a sense of the Caribbean) are places that I recognize, understand, feel confident enough to write about, and care about. But I think you could add now, in 2011, the United States to that list. I would not want to make a choice between any of them. They are not places that are unfamiliar to me and they are not places that I would reside in as a singular place of residence and imagine that I am fully fulfilled. All three places are important to me.

BB: If one regards your work throughout the past thirty years—and Color Me English seems to confirm this impression—one notices that within your geographical focus, the Caribbean, compared to Europe, North America, and Africa, has slowly lost some of its centrality. Do you feel that you speak with a greater authority on both North America and Europe? And is there a more urgent need for people in the global North to hear the stories you like to tell?

CP: Good point. The thing about the Caribbean is that a lot the concerns that are there—social, political concerns, if you like, artistic, aesthetic concerns—seem to be increasingly falling under the shadow of the United States of America. There was a period initially, if you turn the clock back thirty years, when I would look at the Caribbean and definitely see it in a British context, a kind of colonial context, an old-fashioned British colonial context.

This is a very long-winded way of saying that I don’t think I’ve changed so much. I think the Caribbean has changed in the last thirty years, so that now if one looks at the modern Caribbean, you’re not really seeing it in a colonial context of Britain so much as in a kind of neocolonial context of the United States of America. It’s really not a static place. It is changing.

I think my notion of it has changed because I am now seeing it from a different vantage point. I am not seeing it through the old British colonial viewpoint; I am looking at it from an American colonial viewpoint. That means I can’t write about it in the same way. Or I don’t feel the urge to write about it in the same way. I still write about it, but I write about it differently, I think, because of its different geographical relationship to me but also because of its relationship now to what one might call a new colonial master.

BB: The relationship of British colonialism and US neocolonialism is a complex subject. In your essay “A Familial Conversation” [in Color Me English] you outline the continuing conversation about African diasporic identity from the encounter between Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire to the exchanges between James Baldwin and Richard Wright. You suggest that African writers and African American writers have disparate historical experiences because of their different involvement in British colonialism on the one hand and US imperialism on the other.

What does the towering figure of Barack Obama—whose personae merges the African and the African American, and fuses the themes of European colonialism and US imperialism—mean for the ongoing project of negotiating African diasporic identities?

CP: He is fascinating and he goes even beyond that. You look at his mother and her relationship with Indonesia and then his relationship with Hawaii. Everywhere you turn with Obama you are looking at something that is heterogeneous in terms of identity. He falls slightly outside of, and I know he has been criticized for this, he falls outside of that usual notion of African American essentialist identity that comes from slavery. But I think he more accurately, if you like, represents that kind of cultural fluidity and plurality that is part of the global picture now, for any of us living in the West, whether we are living in Europe or whether we live in North America.

Obama is part of that, but he has begun to engage with and embrace old essentialist notions of the African American world. It definitely makes some commentators and some people feel uncomfortable. There are those who still insist that he does not represent in that way, but it seems to me that he represents a very interesting and complex movement, which is hinted at, I suppose, in the essay you are referring to. In our modern world, clinging onto a very essentialist and narrow notion of African American identity is not going to get you very far. It’s an identity which has been a source of resistance against a lot of prejudice, but going forward, even African American identity will have to accept a kind of plurality which seems to be washing over all of us. I think it’s actually astonishing that Obama should have so many connections to, you just outlined them, British colonial past, etc., etc.

One of the things I am working on at the moment is a play for the BBC which is about the relationship between Richard Wright and C. L. R. James during the Second World War. They used to meet in a restaurant in the Village, in Washington Square. I am writing a play about the two of them and the dinners they used to have together. They used to talk, this guy from Mississippi and this guy from Trinidad. And I am still trying to explore this strange relationship between the African American world and the African diaspora and how complicated it is. It is reflected in the figure of the president, exactly.

BB: Black intellectuals from abroad—I am thinking of Bert Williams and Claude McKay, both of whom you have written about—have often had difficulties upon their arrival in the United States, and in New York in particular, as their sense of who they were and how to position themselves in terms of race was often very different from that of both Americans at large and African Americans in particular. As you state, James Baldwin detected “a broad gulf of unease”[3] between African Americans and black people from other countries. Could you describe your transition—the comforts and the trials—into American society?

CP: Very quickly after I came to this country, I remember going to a tennis club in a place near Amherst, Massachusetts, called Sunderland. This white American lady said to me, “It’s really easy to talk to you. You don’t seem to be as angry as other black people in this country.” And I remember thinking, “What exactly does she mean by this?” Because the black people I knew did not seem angry.

And then slowly I began to realize that, of course, that it is not just African Americans, who are making distinctions between themselves and new arrivals, be they from Africa or the Caribbean. That has always been an area of some contention. For instance, West Indians were always known, throughout much of the twentieth century in the United States, as the “black Jews.” And they were called that because apparently racial slights or indignities kind of washed off them because they were just determined to knuckle down and make money and then go back to where they came from. It was a pejorative and not very pleasant way of saying that they are not like us. African Americans would call them that. Within the African American community, I’ve been aware of the fact that there’s been a slight schism. And racial politics in the Caribbean have always been slightly different from up here. Sure, there was slavery, but there was also a kind of creolizing process, which comes about when you are on a small island where people are intermarrying, people are interbreeding, and doing so in a much more open way than they are doing in this country.

So I was aware that there was unease in the black community, but I wasn’t aware of the extent to which those of the white community were also perceiving differences, even though they were articulating them clumsily. The lady didn’t mean it in any nasty way. She was just trying to express her own level of comfort. But what does that leave you feeling? It left me feeling, to what extent am I ever going to fit into American society? Because I certainly do not want to fit in as some honorary, not-angry white guy. And I wasn’t going to pretend to be an African American. How do you pretend? Does this mean that I have to like hip hop, and I have to affect a particular accent? It left me feeling that you just have to be yourself and it’s going to baffle some people, it’s going to confuse some people, it’s going to make some people feel uncomfortable.

So I think that’s one of the reasons why it took me a long time to feel confident to write anything, because I was aware of the fact that there was a huge African American tradition that wasn’t always friendly. It wasn’t always oppositional, but it wasn’t always friendly. I was also aware that on the other hand there were eyes looking at you to try to get you to be something other than an African American. I am very suspicious of that too.

That’s a sort of general overview. How did this play out on a day-to-day level? Moments of confusion, for most people who look at me think that I am an African American, until I start to speak. And then they don’t know what they are dealing with. Accusations, certainly, from some African Americans. Colleagues prefer to work with you because they like the British accent. It has played itself out in all sorts of weird ways, but the overall problem has always been one of weird suspicion. Weird suspicion on both sides.

BB: I am also thinking about issues of readership. I remember an interview with Stephen Clingman in which you related an anecdote of an African American woman who had objected to your inclusion of Joyce, a white woman, in the strings of names of people in the diasporic song at the end of Crossing the River [1993].

CP: She was actually essentially saying it is a betrayal. That’s the kind of clumsy identity politics that come sometimes with an essentially racialized sense of self. It can create a few awkward moments. But you can only be what you are. And to be honest, if you subscribe to that notion of feeding an identity, then you’re not really writing literature. You’re writing politics. You are writing something else. It’s tough.

Way back, Langston Hughes in the twenties, Ellison in the forties and fifties, all of them were writing very good essays about the difficulty as African Americans who are trying to become artists and slip the noose of identity politics. If somebody tries to lean on you and push you back into that once you’ve jumped out of it is frustrating and problematic, and I guess that’s what was happening with that woman, challenging me. She was basically saying, “You’ve jumped out of the box and need to get back in there.”

BB: Would it be fair to say that you’ve channeled some of these experiences in the role of Bert Williams, an Afro-Caribbean man who carefully has to negotiate his identity in face of the demands which both an African American and a white American audience exert upon him, in your novel Dancing in the Dark [2005]? Are there some connections?

CP: Obviously there must have been. When I was writing the novel I was just fascinated with him, fascinated with the process of the performance, both on and off stage. I don’t think I ever suffered. To be perfectly frank with you, I can’t remember a single moment where I have had any sort of anxiety that even approaches anything as intense as he had to deal with. I had a very, very easy ride, compared to, say, the doorman, Mario, the guy that let you in, and the other ones, most of whom are Caribbean. I talk to those guys. Those guys are on the cutting edge because day after day they are having to deal with hard, serious decisions about who they are, who they are mixing with, what church they are going to, where they are going to live, and it’s all coming back to their identities, to what extent they want to drift toward embracing a kind of African American identity or to what extent they want to stay in their own small community and be Dominican, or Puerto Rican.

If you teach in the academic world, if you are writing books, you are kind of living in a Mickey Mouse world, not having to make some of these tough decisions. So I’ve not really had to face those real hard serious decisions about what face to present. I’ve been able to present my own face all the time without too much performative anxiety, if you like. That’s just a by-product of vocational luck. I don’t think that’s the case with other people who are, day in, day out, doing a nine-to-five job and having to interface with people and know these people, and have to make decisions about their future based on how they speak or where they are socializing.

(Read part 2 of the interview here.)

Bastian Balthazar Becker is a PhD student of English literature at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, and teaches at Brooklyn College. He has pursued studies in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Atlanta, Georgia, as well as in Tübingen, Germany, and has lived and taught in Alexandria, Egypt; Lima, Peru; and Toulouse, France. His primary academic focus is on postcolonial narratives, comparative approaches, and collective memories. He is the author of Re-Signifying Lynching’s Memory (2009). His work has appeared in the South Atlantic Review and in Social Text, and he contributes on a regular basis to Kritikon Litterarum.

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.

Joy Gleason Carew: What was the response to your novel Moscow Is Not My Mecca? And, were there any differences between the responses of the white and black communities?

Jan Carew: I was determined not to produce a knee-jerk anticommunist work, but to tell the truth about the rise of racism in the Soviet Union. The regular Communists were against [the novel]. But, the Socialist Workers Party [SWP] in Toronto, Canada, was for it and had done a favorable review of the book in its journal. The SWP was Trotskyist and thus anti-Stalin. Their journal was also one of the few white journals to recognize the impact Malcolm X would have as a black leader and they had, for example, bought the rights to most of his speeches.

George Padmore, whom I knew in London and who had died five years earlier, would have approved of the book as well. Padmore’s theory was that race was more important than class when dealing with people of color. He had shared some of his reminiscences of the 1930s-era USSR during my visits to his flat in London. He told me that he had dared disagree with [Vyacheslav] Molotov. Molotov wanted to him to buy razor blades for him in Berlin. But Padmore refused to do it and told Molotov he wasn’t an office boy. Padmore was always impeccably turned out and the thought that he was being considered an errand boy was particularly insulting. At the time, Padmore was the Comintern’s Commissar for African Affairs and member of the Moscow City council.

JGC: Wasn’t there a pirated edition of the book being circulated around Africa?

JC: It was the Cold War time. You were either for or against; you weren’t dealing with nuances. Years later, my literary agent told me he had discovered the news about this pirated edition. He had been offered royalties to publish an edition of the book by certain people, but he had turned them down. Somehow, though, a blatantly anti-Soviet “English-language reader” version was produced and I came across it by mistake in the airport bookshop in Lusaka. This further fanned the flames. The Russians contacted Janet Jagan to complain about my accusations of racism. Later, when I went to Ghana to work for [Kwame] Nkrumah, I discovered that the Soviet cultural attaché had also denounced me to the Ghanaian cultural attaché.

JGC: But, you visited the USSR twice as a guest of the Soviet Writers’ Union and didn’t you study in Prague before that?

JC: My Prague studies were in the late 1940s, early 1950s. I went to the USSR as a guest of the Writers’ Union in the early 1960s. In the late 1940s, I attended Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where I met Martin Spitzer from Prague. Cleveland had a sizeable population of Czechslovaks and his father was the Czech consul general. At the time, I was willing to go anywhere where I could get a free education. Martin introduced me to the Students’ Union at Charles University in Prague, and we began to negotiate a potential scholarship.

As to my trips to the USSR in the 1960s, Black Midas had come out in 1958 and been translated into Russian. It was very popular and I had collected a large sum of royalties. In fact, the Russian version collected more royalties than the British and American versions together. They had serialized my book in their International Literature magazine before they brought it out as a whole book. It was also published in Georgian. Part of the reason for my visits was to spend those funds, as the Soviets had not signed the Berne copyright agreement which would have allowed me to take my royalties out of the country. I was also curious to see the country myself after reading about it for so many years.

For my second trip, I also had the advantage of having my cousin there who could take me around and translate for me. He was a student at Leningrad University.

JGC: Being a guest of the Writers’ Union probably meant you were given special treatment.

JC: I knew that the V.I.P. treatment I received was not only because of my novel, but because my Soviet hosts were out to win my political support. These Soviet invitations and visits, plus my relations with Soviet writers and artists, were taking place against a backdrop of political relations with my country, British Guiana. That is, relations with our Left-wing government and the Peoples Progressive Party, which by now had openly declared its allegiance to the communist cause. Both sides in the Cold War were aware of the fact that British Guiana, situated as it was on the northern coast of South America, had a symbolical, geo-political, and strategic importance—in spite of its relatively small size and its population of under a million. Also, my country was on the eve of gaining independence from Great Britain and had a popular Marxist Party, which was likely to win a majority, if free and fair elections were held. The Soviets saw this as an opportunity to infiltrate the region, while Great Britain, the US, neocolonialist governments in the English-speaking Caribbean, and Right-wing military dictatorships like that of Brazil saw it as a “communist threat.”

JGC: Back to the question of royalties, did you raise the question of changing this system with the Soviets?

JC: I put it to them that they were wrong to not sign the Berne copyright agreement which made it possible for authors outside their country to collect their royalties. Instead of penalizing Third World writers, they could provide for writers who needed their royalties. I got them to publish Vic Reid’s The Leopard, that poetic evocation of Caribbean writing, which created a sensation in the Soviet Union. They also agreed to publish John Hearne’s Stranger at the Gate. I also had a meeting of Caribbean writers living in England at Andrew Salkey’s apartment to discuss the importance of having these world-wide connections for our works. In this way, we wouldn’t have to remain dependent upon British and, to a lesser extent, American publishers.

JGC: When you got the opportunity to study in Prague, you said you were at a university in Cleveland, didn’t most West Indians attend Howard University, the historically black college, in Washington DC?

JC: I went to Howard first and was there about two years. But, I made my decision to leave Howard because I was spending so much of my time and energy looking for jobs or working them to help cover my costs. Seventy-five percent of my time was spent on this job search, while only twenty-five was left for my studies. My friends were afraid for me, but I was determined to leave racist DC. I had enough money for bus fare and one of my classmates who was from Cleveland told me about Western Reserve, so I decided to go there.

JGC: And, did you go directly from Cleveland to Prague?

JC: No, by this time, I’d been away from British Guiana for almost four years and I wanted to visit my homeland before I went to Europe. So I went home to wait for a response from the Students’ Union. This was also 1949, a time when the anti-colonial ferment had increased and I wanted to be a part of it.

JGC: What was the response to hearing about your impending scholarship?

JC: This was also the time when I first met Cheddi and Janet Jagan. Cheddi was a handsome, fiery Indian. I was so impressed with hearing him speak on a corner that I went to his house that evening to volunteer my services. I met Janet there and, as a result of this meeting, was introduced to many other young radicals. As I got to know them better, I offered my help to this new movement, which was in its formative stage.

When the scholarship notice came through, I still needed a recommendation from a progressive group, and Cheddi wrote a letter of approval for me. But, the contacts with Prague were tenuous, Cheddi had not yet formulated a foreign policy that included communist countries. The intellectuals in British Guiana at the time were all some version of Marxists. But, in 1949, the Left-wing parties weren’t as cognizant of the value of communist party linkages, though many were Stalinists. The communist countries had not yet awakened to the possibility of alliances with British Guiana, either.

As far as my Prague scholarship, another student who was studying in Prague, Samuel Bankole Akpata from Nigeria, had written to Paul Robeson for a recommendation before, and he suggested I get a letter from Robeson as well. Robeson sent the letter, which helped confirm my suitability for the scholarship.

JGC: What was it like to finally arrive in Prague?

JC: I left British Guiana and went to New York first. Then on to London, Paris, and to Prague. When I finally arrived in Prague, it was a dismal afternoon in the winter. The first thing I thought as I stepped off the train was that it was rather bleak and grim-looking. There were few passengers but many guards. I looked around to see if there were any porters and, in fact, there were none. So there I was, a lone Guyanese man in a country that my mother believed was somewhere close to the end of the world.

Two young women came up to me and asked if I was Jan Carew. The smaller of the two picked up my heavy suitcase and with the greatest of ease carried it to the end of the long platform. The one who spoke to me in English was Martin Spitzer’s fiancée and the two were University students. They assumed I was well off because of the way in which I was dressed. Food and clothing were still rationed in Prague in the late 1940s. Little did they know, but I had bought the outfit at a second hand shop in New York. My two hosts installed me in a fancy hotel, but, luckily, my contact, Ivan Svitak, came and rescued me, and I ended up staying at his family’s house.

JGC: What was life like in Prague? It must have been challenging taking classes in a different language.

JC: I had a great deal more freedom than the average student. The Czechs had never heard of British Guiana before and they didn’t know what to make of me. So, they couldn’t tell where I stood in the East/West divide.

They taught courses in a combination of French and German at Charles University—both languages I had studied. I actually had a good French background and had taken two years of German. English was also spoken widely. With the Nazi occupation still vividly in mind, German was not a very popular language in those days.

JGC: How long did you stay?

JC: I spent just under two years in Prague before returning to London, via Paris. My mentor, Ivan, was getting into political difficulties, so I thought it best to leave the country while I could. But, leaving was not so simple, I had to go to great lengths to get the right documents. I had to cross the border to East Germany at Pilsen. When I got to the crossing, there were American guards and German guards standing across the no-man’s land. The Czech guards inspecting my passport said I was missing a certain document and that I would have to return to Prague to get it before being allowed to leave the country. But, that was half a day’s journey to go back. I started arguing with them loud enough for both sets of guards at the border to hear—so there would be eyewitnesses to any incident that arose. So, the Czech guards had a brief discussion between them, and decided to let me go. I was welcomed by the other guards, and after glancing at my British passport (our country was still a colony of Britain), they waved me on.

JGC: Looking back over these experiences, what lessons might be learned from them?

JC: Looking at what’s happened in the last three decades, it seems that the world has changed, but when one thinks seriously about it, one realizes that it is we who have changed. Importantly, we, Caribbean people, have come to appreciate the value of shaping our own destinies, which sometimes means going against tradition, but also can mean taking the opportunity to refashion models to suit our purpose.

Joy Gleason Carew is an associate professor of Pan-African studies and associate director of the International Center at the University of Louisville. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees were in Russian and French studies. She, too, did some of her studies in the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s, spending several months in the USSR as part of a US university study group. Through the decade of the 1970s, she returned several times, initially taking her Russian language students and then taking other student groups and groups of professionals. More recently, she has made a number of visits to post-Soviet Russia to further her research or attend conferences. Her book Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (Rutgers University Press, 2008) focuses on the perspectives of black intellectuals and others as they looked to the Soviet experiment for opportunities that their home countries denied them.

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.

BS: Tell me a bit more about that path, starting with your early life.

AW: I was born in Kingston, at Jubilee Hospital in Kingston. All of us were born there. Many of us from those days have a Jubilee connection. I lived in Kingston and moved to Montego Bay. I went to Excelsior High School and Mt. Alvernia High School then Cornwall College.

My father sold tires for John Cook and Company. He was one of those indispensible characters. Car, radio, bulldozer: if they weren’t working, he could fix them. He was a man who could do it all. Yet it was difficult being around my father because he got drunk and violent. My mother was a breeder—she had eight children. My mom, who was from the Zaidie family, was one of fourteen children.

Jamaican boys [that] I went to school with talk with nostalgia. I don’t look back with nostalgia. Nostalgia, my ass! Nowadays you dare put your hands on someone else’s pickney, you might get shot. I got the crap beaten out of me by cane; and commonly at Cornwall, headmasters and house masters could cane us. Mr. Miller was one of the most sadistic teachers I know.

And when I was fifteen, I was expelled from Cornwall.

BS: How did that happen?

AW: I was a disaffected young man. I would go down to Mountain View Avenue and fool around with the whores. They knew me and we would talk shop on a long concrete wall. I was coming home when an Englishman asked what time it was. Even as a boy of fifteen, I hated the English. They acted like God Almighty and we were peons. I told him, “Yu bomboclaart, go back to your rassclaart England.” That pushed me more and more into the Cornwall College mire.

It sounds like a plot from a movie, but the same guy I cussed out turned out to be my teacher. He turned on the pressure, asked me questions and made fun of me. The headmaster kept getting bad notes about me and I was sent to his office. He reached for his cane and I told him, “Me and you are going to fight like hell on the verandah.” Now he was much bigger than me and probably would have handled me. He told me to leave the premises.

My mom was heartbroken; she saw a lot of potential unfulfilled. My classmates didn’t understand, because I had done well in school. I came first in my class. I was trying to impress my dad, which was the reason why I worked so hard. Staying at home was horrible. The maids take over when the master and kids are away. I didn’t belong there.

BS: How did you deal with it?

AW: I begged my mom to try and find me something. I got a job at Vaughan Travel Agency. I made five shillings a day as a messenger boy. Jamaica is still very small geographically. In those days, if you were expelled from one school, you were expelled from all. You quickly became envious of those in school.

I was sent a letter from the school administration after six months. They said I won a prize and told me to come to the prize giving [event] for coming first the previous two years. None of my family attended; there was nothing to be proud of. I received the book Black Beauty. Never in my life have I been more embarrassed. It was the most humiliating experience of my life. No one knows why they did that.

Painted Canoe was my first novel and it got rave reviews. I went to see Mr. Bay, the headmaster in Montego Bay, to let him know I hadn’t entered the gallows. He was old and didn’t remember me at all, which kind of spoiled my intentions.

BS: Where did you go to college?

AW: I was twenty-one when I went to America. I realized I was going nowhere, had nothing to do and had no special talents. I was a lame duck. Mom was a pushy woman, though, and she decided I needed to get out of Jamaica. She went to her family and collected five pounds, five pounds, five pounds . . .

She paid my way to America. She made contact with a quantity surveyor for an oil refinery. I think [they were fooling around]. He agreed to put me up for a week in California but I walked into an ambush. The man’s wife set on me. She asked who my mother was and her relationship with her husband. It was a rough life. You had a schizophrenic daughter, a madcap mother and a hen-pecked husband. I was kicked out after three weeks.

People felt sorry for me. For six months, I lived at a boarding house paying two pounds, three and six for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I worked as a dishwasher. I look back and wonder how I managed. I wanted to go to school badly. A friend told me about a junior college and Mr. Smythe accepted me with no visa, no means of support, and no relatives to fall back on. He looked at me and the floor and said yes. That was Citrus Community College and I spent two and a half years there. To this day, it is a mystery to me. It was utterly unexpected. There are days in our lives that turn us in a way that changes our life. This put me on the track. I worked like a dog and ended up being the main scholar of my graduating year.

I got a scholarship to UCLA and turned it down because the president said they never give anyone an “A.” He said Einstein would get a “B” like everybody else. I spent four years at California State University where I got a BA and an MA in English. It was tough. Citrus was better than CSU. There was better treatment and they dealt with people better. I remember going to school and working on the side. Nobody could be around me. All I ate was beans.

BS: Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite?

AW: Painted Canoe, my first novel, is the one I love the best.

[When I was growing up,] there was a guy named Baba, and he went to sea every night. He was the ugliest man I’d ever met. I asked him to take me fishing. He said I was too young. The last sound I would hear at night before I fell asleep was the groaning made by the rope oarlocks of Baba’s canoe as he put out to sea right across the street from a small strand of beach known locally as Lady’s Rock. I would be drifting off into the sea of dreams just as he would be setting out into the dark mouth of the night sea. Sometimes he would be coming in just as I was trudging to school, and we would wave to each other.

One morning he didn’t return. His empty, overturned canoe was found floating over the fishing reef, and he was presumed drowned. A few days later a man appeared who identified himself as Baba’s cousin and asked permission to clear out the cave of the fishing equipment that Baba had left behind. My father gave it, and the fisherman stripped the cave clean and left, taking Baba’s canoe and fishing gear with him. I was aghast. I begged my father not to allow the man to leave with all of Baba’s worldly goods, but he told me to mind my own business. What appalled me was how Baba had simply disappeared, wiped off the face of the earth as if he’d never been here. I remember walking down to the beach with the fisherman who was taking Baba’s stuff and asking him questions about who he was and being gruffly told by him to mind my own business and leave him alone.

Baba was a black man with no past. He had nothing ahead of him; he had nothing behind him. I think of Baba, who was here one minute and the next minute was gone, un-mourned and unremembered, the few trinkets he’d left behind after a long lifetime as a fisherman swept up by a supposed cousin, until nothing was left behind to mark his presence, not even a footprint. The speculation was that he’d fallen asleep and overturned the canoe. Some said that his canoe was attacked by a shark or hit by a rogue wave. We don’t know. But what I do know was that he was always kind and patient with the pesky little white boy who was always nagging him about going fishing.

 Baba became Zachariah, my protagonist in The Painted Canoe, my first novel, which I began in 1975 when I had come back home to teach at Moneague Teachers College in Saint Ann’s. I was very proud I had given him a face. I don’t know what it is, but when you’re a kid, you get attached to older role models; [he] mesmerized me.

BS: Talk about Jamaica and what it means to be Jamaican

AW: I am very conscious of the fact that Jamaicans are proud and have every opportunity to be proud. . . . I’ve learned a lot over the years about my Jamaicanness and what it has given me and how it has informed my worldview. Race in Jamaica is not merely a matter of white and black. That is the American view of race. Ours is a more slippery concept. When it comes to race, we Jamaicans are hopelessly composite. Race has unknown effects on us, most of it bad but some of it unexpectedly benign.

The only people who had ever kicked my butt in sports, scholastically, or any other way were brown or black. So when I looked at America and the prospect of competing there, I had this naïve feeling that I was better. The Jamaican was a more formidable adversary than the American. This is, I know, one of those stereotypes that impregnate our being. And you know what? It turned out to be true. The Jamaican was better and is better. That is part of the paradox of what it means to be a Jamaican. We’re strong and capable and good-looking because the stewpot we come from is a blend of black, Indian, Chinese, and white, and seasoned with the pepper of ole negar.

A lot of people have a chance of freedom and dignity. That is very important, especially for Jamaicans. Jamaicans have a resilience and a core of bounce-back-ability not found anywhere. We will make it. God made us, this little island. We grow and we change and hopefully get better.

BS: People make a big deal that you are a white Jamaican. What is your reaction to this?

AW: You see, I am neither a black nor a brown man, but a white one. Yet, in the mornings when I first get up, I don’t go to the mirror, look at my reflection, and scream, “Kiss me neck! Me white!” any more than anyone begins the day by bawling, “Rahtid, me brown!” or “Say what? Me black!” or “Lawd Jesus, me turn Chiny.” The color of your skin is like the color of the car you’re driving. People outside the car can see its color better than you can. I may be driving a white car but most of the time I don’t know it. I’m just driving as best I can.

BS: Do you go home often?

AW: I go to Jamaica four times a year when I can afford it. I get invited to sumptuous dinners and all I have to do is play court jester, which I’m often willing to do.

BS: Would you go back home to teach?

AW: I wouldn’t mind a couple of years teaching at Munro. The mornings are cool and dewy. It’s a beautiful campus. If they ask me, I would go, although my wife said I’d be going by myself. The hardest challenge: sometimes I don’t particularly want to do something—you’re fighting yourself.

BS: Do you have a special/preferred time to write?

AW: Any time will do. If I get harnessed into a project I don’t like, then it’s hard. Have you ever gotten up and said, “Rassclaart, I’m a year older and I haven’t written anything yet”? That’s how it feels sometimes. A writer writes constantly, day and night.

BS: What is your philosophy as a writer? What makes Tony Winkler tick?

AW: Your work will get better if you try harder. If not, by happenstance, it may be good, but with hard work, it will mushroom, grow. I don’t have a particular methodology for writing, but in writing one has to learn to simply “trust the darkness.” My biggest surprise as a writer is learning how to write.

I take things as they come. I have had people tell me I’m a rebel. I have a cousin, a doctor in Toronto, who told me, “Of all the family members, I thought you would be a rebel and come to no good.”

One thing I have learned in life is to respect everybody’s point of view. I try not to be better than you.

Barrington M. Salmon is a British-born Jamaican journalist who has been writing for more than twenty years. He recently completed a master’s degree in creative writing and new media from Demontfort University. He is a traditional African priest in the Akan Akom tradition and has lived, worked, and studied in Washington DC, United States; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Leicester, United Kingdom.

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.

Anita Baksh: When did you start writing?

Lakshmi Persaud: Unlike a number of fellow writers who say that when they were age six or ten they knew they wanted to write, I wanted to teach. . . . It was a challenge for me to try to ensure that [I] pass on to my students the desire to want to know about our world, how we live in it, about what we have and haven’t, and to ask about how to shape our future. . . . I love teaching. It is a means of communicating a perception, an understanding of things; it is communicating with language, communicating with a motivation and an intent to enable the child to see that [education] is worth having; as I intimated I didn’t see myself as a writer, I saw myself as a good teacher, and was happy to be that.

When my last child left home for the London School of Economics, I began to have the nightmares I used to have when I was a little girl. . . . I described some of these in Butterfly in the Wind. One of the worst ones was this: I had eleven books to read for A levels literature. When you did O levels literature in those days it was about two or maybe three books, but when you did A levels it was eleven books; this substantial jump in number was too large for me. What made matters far worse was I had to change schools in order to take my A levels. . . .

Much later, when it was all behind me, whenever I was going through a bad patch I began to have this nightmare: you have a year to read twelve books, so you say to yourself that you will read one a month, and you find that six months have elapsed and you still have not begun to read. You then tell yourself you will read two books per month. Why you are not doing what you should is part of the misery of the nightmare. Then it goes on to three months, and finally you have twelve days and you say you’ll do a book a day. Well, eventually when the day of the exam comes, you find that you have not read a single book. You go to the exam and the question paper is turned down on the desk. When [the instructor] says, “You may begin,” you turn the paper over and realize that you cannot answer a single question. That’s a terrible nightmare for a teenager whose parents are depending on her to do well. I used to get up weeping, and this is how I came to writing. I thought that if I were to write about this, explaining my fears and how I felt at the time, the nightmares would leave me. While doing this, I found that the corporal punishment I had at primary school from our sadistic headmaster was oozing out too. What is fascinating is that it was only when my three children left home for university and I was on my own that these things seeped upward. . . . For the first time in years I had time to myself, to reflect and think seriously of life outside the concerns of the children, the home, their schools and the garden that all manner of fears returned to me. I soon left the incidents that were the source of my nightmares and began writing about people and things; the prevailing order of life I had experienced as a child growing up in an agricultural village. . . .

One day my husband said, “I see you’re writing a great deal. What is it that you are writing?” I replied, “It’s a very private thing, very private”; and believe it or not he said, “What could be so private that I can’t look at it?” Typical male, isn’t it? I emphasized that it was very private and I didn’t want anyone to look at it. . . . But he kept going on and on about it. One day, I got fed up and offered it to him. . . . Not long after my husband attended a conference at Warwick University, and [Jeremy Poynting] of Peepal Tree Press happened to be there. My husband went up to Poynting and said that his wife had written a novel. Would you believe it? A novel! When he came home and told me what he did, I responded, “How could you do a thing like that? I haven’t written a novel!” “The publisher would like to see it,” he replied. At that moment, I realized that I had to give the publisher the impression that my husband knew the difference between a novel and remembrances of time passed. I could see that these vivid childhood recognitions needed a structure. I did what was simplest for me; I put my experiences in chronological order. It wasn’t long before I heard from [Poynting]. When I opened the letter, it read, “Now this is the nicest thing any publisher can tell you. It doesn’t happen often.” . . . “This novel must be published and I would like to publish it.” And that’s how I started writing, to answer your question.

AB: Which writers have influenced you and your work?

LP: The one writer I am aware has influenced me . . . is Vidya Naipaul. His novel A House for Mr. Biswas is autobiographical. Before that was written, there was no substantial work of literary worth narrating the lives of Indo-Caribbean peoples. I could see the reality on the written page; you had before you the end product of someone’s creativity, in this case, an exceptionally fine writer. You see, at the beginning of his writing career . . . Naipaul believed he did not have suitable literary material, perhaps because all the novels he had studied at school and university, and had read for pleasure were from Britain, France, Spain, and the United States. In some ways, someone of his background and upbringing, thinking of writing fiction in the 1940s and1950s was on his own, for he would have had to find a path to traverse that which in some ways was virgin territory. In one of his attempts at writing a novel, he was fortunate to have given his writings to someone who said to him that what he had written was full of pretensions; this observation may have awakened him to what he should write about, which were things he knew intimately. That then would have meant his childhood, the Trinidad environment of his upbringing, his A House for Mr. Biswas. This novel made me realize that I also had material. We all have material for we are individuals with unique experiences. It is interesting to note that A House for Mr. Biswas is acknowledged as his best work of fiction.

AB: Were there English writers or any other Caribbean writers who have influenced you?

LP: I would say writers like George Orwell and George Eliot certainly; Jane Austen too, whom I studied at school. And poets like Rilke, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold. [Laughing] Whenever I want to indulge myself emotionally I read Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum.” I love poetry; the compactness of poems, saying so much succinctly and so tightly reined in, finely controlled. Music also influences me a lot. In one particular instance, in order to describe a dance I played a recording of drums to get me into the mood for writing about this dance. What I find that we cannot do in prose that music does, is the way the first few chords in a piece of music can instantly set you alight, capture its entirety; you’re held within its fold; the chords tell you what is to come. To write like that is every writer’s aim. And yet our finest most moving music holds our soul while poetry struggles to get close to it.

Writers will write about what interests them. Fiction in the multicultural Caribbean is as rich and varied as its history. Writers write about what they know well. This is inevitable. The background and the culture you were born into have a strong influence on your perception of life, at least initially; travel, reading and meeting people from all walks of life and cultures enlarge, enrich one. Of course, the human imagination enables writers to enter other spheres. When someone criticized Toni Morrison, saying that she did not have many white people in her books, Morrison said that she writes her books the way she wants to. I do the same with my books. I also try not to read people who are writing about similar scenes and places as myself because I do not want unconsciously to ever take a character or scene from anyone too close to me in place and culture. I’ll give you an example of what I fear. Janice Shinebourne wrote a scene in her book [The Last English Plantation] about a girl riding to school on her bicycle in Guyana and I had in Butterfly in the Wind a girl cycling to school. I was so glad that I had not read her book before writing mine, because my depiction of a girl riding to school on a bike is very different from hers. In Butterfly in the Wind the whole history of colonialism opens up, the architecture and function of the buildings speak as she cycles; it’s a large canvas that makes it very different from [Shinebourne’s]. If I had read her book, I would have felt inhibited to write about a girl riding to school. This is one of the reasons I try to read writers whose works are far removed from my own in many ways.

AB: Whom do you write for in terms of audience?

LP: I don’t write for anyone. When I begin to write, I don’t say that I am writing for a certain group of people. I write for anyone who wishes to read. I also write because it is therapeutic, while giving me an opportunity to look at relationships that interest me, through study and research. I write also because I feel compelled to write by the things that disturb me.

AB: Can you speak about the variety of creative genres that you use? For example, in Butterfly in the Wind you use realism, in Sastra you experiment with magical realism, For the Love of My Name is told from different narrative perspectives, and Raise the Lanterns High experiments with time and space by having the story move back and forth between contemporary Trinidad and eighteenth-century India.

LP: You are right to say that Butterfly in the Wind is in a realist mode, because it is autobiographical, mirroring much of my childhood. On the other hand, For the Love of My Name is an analogy, in the sense that events [described in the novel] mirror vividly the first three decades of an independent Guyana. . . .

For Raise the Lanterns High, I went to the British Library to do the research on sati. What encouraged me to continue to do the painstaking research and write about this human horror, encouraged and perpetuated by the priestly class, were the moving accounts of the travelers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. . . . You have used terms taken from literary criticism to describe my novels, others have used other terms such as political, political feminist, socialist and so on; you will find in the novels evidence to support however you may decide to describe them.

AB: Why depict For the Love of My Name on an imaginary island using different perspectives rather than use the realist mode?

LP: It is far easier for Guyanese or anyone to read it in this form; this is especially so for the majority in Guyana who were either silenced by fear or were silent in their complicity, not to mention the active perpetrators of this ugly time that lasted far too long for a young country in its formative stage, over three decades. The imaginary mode of fiction provides a compelling way to engage with this past; fiction makes it palatable and opens the possibility for poetry, for lyricism in the telling; the realist mode is apt to be too cold, bare facts can be clinical. And there is this other matter; all an author in the realist mode has to do is make two small errors and people begin to wonder if the whole thing is filled with errors; this feeling would be encouraged by the many who would wish the period forgotten. Fiction provides you with some measure of protection as well as liberation. Nevertheless by using an imaginary place, it is incumbent upon you to have worthy analogies.

In addition, fiction opens the gate to using metaphors, similes, fables, allegories, the imagination, and another perspective than your own. . . . Realism offers me a framework, but no more; I cannot use the realism form all the way; I am not at ease with it for highly charged political issues where the emotions rule. For the Love of My Name is symbolic; [in the novel] the island sinks. It could represent the gods’ response to hubris, or the cleansing that must take place before the new that could come with a rebirth, the upliftment of the island to the surface, to light and oxygen and bird song. Symbolism is conducive to art; the realist form is more appropriate to journalism, though, there too, we too often have the author’s imagination and perceptions energized with wishful thinking.

AB: In Butterfly in the Wind and Sastra, you portray female characters that struggle with their cultural and sexual identities; these characters mainly struggle with Indian Hindu values versus Western Christian values. Can you speak to such characters as Kamla and Sastra?

LP: Yes, that’s true. Well, in the case of Kamla, if I may put it in this abstract way, it’s consciousness expressing itself openly. This is what children do, until their parents, teachers, journalists, and politicians let them know which thoughts are acceptable and which are not allowed. I was told by a reader that one of the attractions of Butterfly in the Wind is the naïveté of the protagonist Kamla. [For example,] when Kamla goes to primary school and reads British history she feels that it is wrong that Queen Elizabeth I should be happy with the slave trade; she stands up in class and says, “That’s not right.” The teacher slams her down and says, “Shut up and sit down,” because the teacher had no answer, though there was an intelligent reply that could have been given: it being the values of the time and the way of the powerful. In those days, my primary school days, if you asked a question and the teacher had no answer, as far as the teacher was concerned, you were a nuisance to the class. We see Kamla opening up herself and trying to understand the world with a child’s limited understanding.[1]

AB: In both Butterfly in the Wind and Sastra, migration to the West is depicted as libratory act. Can you comment on this idea?

LP: [There is] a moment in Butterfly in the Wind at the end of the novel when [Kamla] is waving and waving to her parents and family. . . . The airhostess on the aircraft says to her impatiently, “Come along now,” and soon after we hear Kamla’s thoughts: “I was entering a world where time had a far greater significance than I was used to and where, as I learnt, it was weighed and sold on a finer scale.”[2]

If you notice, in the developed world time appears to move faster than in many developing countries. In the former, one has to move at a different pace. The new technology with its Blackberry and the Internet is increasing the productivity of each individual, for now we can work en route on a train, cab, or airplane. . . . We are becoming different people, different from our agricultural past when nature did set the pattern of work. Any female character of a certain age that emigrates is plunged into this new space of faster moving time. How does she adjust and adapt? For the young it’s alright, but for a mature, even educated, thinking woman, whose childhood and teenage lives have not been in this country but in countries where domestic help is plentiful, how does she adjust? You have this problem of family ties, responsibilities while simultaneously you must cope with the question that now hangs above the liberated women here: What are my rights as a human being, am I to be an exemplary mother, wife and daughter? Dare I wish to join the professions, or the wider civil service? If so, how so? What then of the traditional exemplary roles? What of the accompanying stresses and strains. . . .

AB: Would you describe your work as feminist?

LP: The definition of feminism presents a problem. The definition of feminism has changed over time; initially it was associated with the burning of bras or not wearing bras and that sort of thing. . . . If you define feminism as trying to point out difficulties inherent in being female that can be improved in all cultures, then I am a feminist. I don’t want us to have special privileges. We can fight on the same track that men are fighting on and manage well. We are as capable as the best among them. The enlightened males have long known this.

AB: What do you make of your place in Caribbean writing and in Indian diasporic writing?

LP: I do not follow these things. . . . My work has traveled to places and institutions I had not expected. This is gratifying and encouraging. . . . The fact that Warwick University did establish a fellowship in my name and that other universities are looking at my work are good things. What consumes me is the high regard and respect I have for my readers and for researchers like you; I want to give of my best. I am very much aware that my readers could be reading someone else’s work, but they have chosen mine and I want to make it worth their while. . . . This is what motivates me; nothing else.

Anita Baksh is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her article “Breaking with Tradition: Hybridity, Identity and Resistance” has been recently published in Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women (2011), edited by Rosanne Kanhai. Baksh’s primary research and teaching interests include Indian and Indian diaspora literature, Caribbean literature, postcolonial theory, and feminist theory. Her dissertation focuses on notions of home, identity, and nation in post-indenture Indo-Caribbean literature.