Talk: A Way to Catch the Dust, Grenada Jan 5, 2001@ Fedon Books
Thanks to all for hosting this event.
Thanks for the wonderful welcome.
I began writing from very early and am surprised to find the stories and poems that I had written from the time
I was fourteen had already begun to deal with quite serious issues like the violence by men against women, the nature of fatherhood, what manhood means in the Caribbean context, the legacies of
our own particular brand of history, the nature of our society and its proclivities for a certain kind of violence and the ways in which this violence expresses itself, modifies us and nudges us
into violent dispositions also. It is a concern that hasn't left me; in fact I found it all coming together in the novel that I completed a couple of years ago and which should be out in 2001.
In a recent interview with the Jordan Times, I was asked about the themes I focus on in Song for Simone especially as they impact on children, I stated that I learnt quite quickly that the
association of childhood with a state of innocence as you often find in European literature and in popular notions of European childhood is not at all applicable to Caribbean childhood. Children,
especially those from humble backgrounds, assume major - one may even say adult - responsibilities early in life. Hence in one story for example I placed a young girl in one of the most dramatic
moments of the expression of female solidarity and womanhood in our societies: childbirth at home. I don't know if it still is the case, but that used to be very common amongst poor people in
this country and it is truly amazing to see how women are prepared to leave their quarrels aside and come together to in order to help another woman through the risky business of child birth.
I was also interested in exploring children's capacity to experience emotions traditionally ascribed to adults: their capacity to love and to hate. It is one of the themes that critics take up
over and over again these days when they examine the book especially in the context of what has been happening in Sierra Leone and some of the recent experiences of child violence in the UK.
There is always a concern to challenge our attitude to language - the way we as Caribbean people speak and how we reflect that in the writing. More and more I seek to reflect that language
which we have inherited and shaped into one of the most elegant and expressive tools in the world! This book which we are launching today - A Way to Catch the Dust - uses the sea as metaphor.
The sea as giver, as taker, as killer and saviour, provider and depriver. The sea as a symbol for life.
I remember calling it my Atlantic project, and even if it is based on Grenada it draws
on my experience as a sort of traveller - someone living away from home and travelling (being a kind of nomad) for more than thirteen years. It is also more immediate more concerned with
present-day realities. As a brief background to the stories I'm going to be reading from, perhaps I should start with Rum n' Coke. I was here in 1973 for three months and saw that hard drugs had begun to infiltrate the country.I saw a young man
one of my past students who had become a sort of shell to the extent that I hardly recognised him. I was so strongly moved by the experience that I felt that I had to explore it, to do a
something about it. I wanted it to be very strong and shocking and so I created a situation where this woman has this one son, very bright, very promising, and very beautiful whose whole
personality has been modified by his dependency on this drug that they refer to as 'de niceness' which pushes this boy to do one of the most appalling things that anyone can commit in our
culture: to beat up on his mother. Here, she arrives at a point where she
decides that she is going to deal with it is not going to continue. In another piece I look at what we do to our children as a result of what we do and do not say to them about
themselves. What becomes of us in life is often quite tightly linked up to the way that we have been taught to perceive ourselves. A Different Ocean
is the story I get the most amount of letters from readers about, especially from Caribbean people living abroad. It is about a young girl who is constantly told that she is black, broad-nosed and ugly so that when some strangers arrive in a yacht and begins to tell her how wonderful she is, what a gifted diver she is, she's prepared to do almost anything for them including diving to retrieve a box that they want to get up from the ocean floor. She learns in the process that they are not too bothered if she dies as a result of the pressure from diving so deep down below. It is this realisation that brings her to an awareness of her real relationship with her own country and herself.
We find a similar concern in The Laughin Tree, which people find very funny but which sits on some very important concerns, like the way we do not value our property especially by the
sea, the readiness with which we sell up the most beautiful and salubrious parts of this island and get upset when we get barred from using it. The way in which our own places don't belong to us.
And this piece is where this man comes and decides to buy up all the land in this village by the sea and have the people who have been living there for generations, move to live by the swamp. But
there is this old woman who would not sell and the story is about the fight she put up against forces bigger than herself. I must also say something about the title story….I suppose that it is
safe to say that we are one of very few peoples in the world who experience a great reluctance to stare our history in the face. We enter into a sort of denial when it comes to excavating and
learning the lessons from our past.
The title story is about that. A girl emerges from a sea-storm in a coastal village and we see how the people, confronted by this stranger who speaks a
language not known to them - they deal with that. How they deal with difference. Walking for my Mother
is my take on a good old theme in Caribbean Literature: education and its centrality in our development as a people. And of course there are other themes which deal with identity and belonging and relationship and power in both a personal and public sense.
And yes, I'll repeat the answer to a question I was asked earlier; I think that growth and self-realisation are essential quests in all of my characters. I actively seek that even when I am
writing funny pieces like the Ku-Kus stories.
Human relations - what happens to and between people in moments of adversity, crisis, passion - and the strategies that we use, the way we locate
the resources within ourselves to rise above our own constraints are what move me to write. I am also concerned to write about and around women and their experiences in a society that is so
essentially male-focused, so predatory towards them. I often see the discomfort when I say this but literature in my view is about uncovering truths, and truth rarely offers comfort.
Thanks again for having me.
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