I am from Grenada - an island in the Eastern Caribbean around which you can drive in an hour. This does not make it a small place and for me sometimes it assumes the dimension
of whole continents. What has given it dimension is history first and then geography since it has more mountains than flatlands, more forest than gardens - places that require a great deal of
effort to arrive at - and therefore lends itself quite easily to the imagination.
Perhaps the most seminal influence in my writing life was my father. He fathered us, twins when he was in his
mid seventies He was a Barbadian who had seen a lot of the world. Said that he had worked in the coal mines here in England, had travelled on the railroads before moving back to Guyana to
prospect for gold and later to the oil refineries of Aruba. He was an educated man with a beautiful singing voice. A thunderous voice, a voice made for stories. He lived on his own and I was sent
to live with him when I was nine. Because he was gradually growing blind from a wound he had suffered in his eye as a young man. I watched him go blind, and during that process found myself
becoming his eyes because I remember leading him out of his house on mornings and looking down on the Calivini valley with his hand on my shoulder, since he would not let me lead him by the hand.
He would ask me what the day looked like, the morning, or the afternoon, or sometimes the dusk.
I remember being filled with an overwhelming desire to convey the exact colours, the hue and
tones and shape of things, where the light and shadows fell, I remember asking my mother the exact name of colours and fabrics. I knew then that the women in our household were more sussed about
colours and textures and fabrics than the men did, and it was to them I turned.
People who read my writing tend to comment on the way I describe things, the way I convey atmosphere and place.
I got that from being my father's eyes.
Women have always been more important in my life than men. I have had many mothers, not least a few teachers who told me that I could be anything I
chose to be; and what mattered then was not that what they said was true but that I believed it.
I grew up in a time in Grenada when to be young, articulate, and intelligent was a very
dangerous thing indeed. Those were years of dictatorship, resistance, partisanship and force-ripened political consciousness that we eventually and rather poetically called 'the long dark night'.
It was a time of disappearances of friends, atrocious killings, and enforced silences. You were simply not allowed to be young. Innocence was a luxury and a handicap.
My first book of short
stories, Song for Simone, was largely about those times. It is a book about children growing up and surviving in those times. Children thrust into the world of adults and having to find their
feet. Children emerging, without realising it from history; children being the inheritors of a past of serfdom and enslavement that their parents had always been fighting to break out of.
These are things that I felt I had to write about because our past is one that has been so cruel, so dehumanising we would rather forget about it. As a people we have had a lot of help learning
amnesia. Our particular brands of education and religion have also seen to that. My conviction has always been that we can have no meaningful future if we do not confront our past in a
meaningful way.
It is in one sense what sits at the heart of the title story of the present collection 'A Way to Catch the Dust'. And if this book is about anything at all it is about our
resilience and our humanity, and it is also in a very fundamental way about our beauty. And I mean beauty in a very essential way. In fact I believe that this idea of beauty sits, crucially for
us, at that place where we can barely understand contemporary black fiction without an examination of the issues that this notion flags up. I am talking about beauty in terms of the valuing and
the acceptance of the self, beauty as in being whole, as feeling worthy and comfortable within one's skin, as in needing no approval from anyone else outside oneself.
I hope you enjoy reading
the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Thank you.
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