That was the major question that nudged me while writing Until Judgment Comes: Stories About Jamaican Men (Peepal Tree Press). I was faced with characters, mostly women, who were cruel to their children as a result of some lost love. These women carried with them a weight of defeat and hurt – being stuck—that determined their entire life even though the men to whom these emotions were attached had long gone and they were not even thinking about the women they had left behind. What wasted energy! What non-living! What a woeful baton to pass on! But unfortunately, it gets passed on far too often, by far too many of them, of us.
My need to understand made me the ideal audience for that collection. Only after I completed writing it, did it become clear that the audience was primarily women, mothers specifically. I was talking to them, to say, “Hey, I understand you have been hurt, but look at the lives you are destroying. Look at how you have shattered your own life. Enough already! Give it up and move into love. Bequeath love.” Moreover, I was also talking to those boys and men and children in general who have been the victims of their mothers’ unrequited or misguided love, saying to them, forgive your mothers, have compassion for them, don’t continue the cycle of bitterness, resentment, treadmilling the past.
Now, as I write this, I am at Soul Mountain Retreat revising a poetry collection entitled, 4-Headed Woman, which I anticipate being out next year. Only now, two years working on this manuscript, with more than half of the poems dating between ten and five years earlier and the other written in the last two years, have I pondered for whom is this collection? Who am I writing to and for? Only yesterday, I dedicated it to my two daughters and grandniece, yet they, these young adults, are not necessarily the audience.Audience is such a worrisome affair, and I believe preoccupation with audience at the beginning stages of a manuscript can get in the way of one’s creativity, and even alter the tenor and tempo of the work if the gaze at a nebulous audience is too keen. I am always writing for an audience.
The goal of writing is to share, to communicate, to impact, is always conscious during the process, but who that specific audience is, never really gets defined until the final editing of the manuscript and even then I can’t imagine who might find the work and be moved by it.If anyone had told me that my first collection, Bake-Face and Other Guava Stories (1985), recently reissued under Mango Press classical series, 2007, would resonate with a Swedish woman, who wrote to me, saying how affected she was by the stories and how much she identified with Bake-Face, especially, I would have said no way. However, it has and people from disparate places still email about how much they enjoy those stories and how they cry when Perry died, and grieved with June-Plum. These are stories about rural, semi-educated Jamaican women, ordinary, yet extraordinary women. Primarily, the collection is about dogged determination, unconditional love, and letting go of fear and as a result, that collection has been around the world, taught in South Africa, Germany, throughout the USA and elsewhere. But, in truth, when I wrote it, the audience I had in mind was insular: Jamaica, and maybe the wider Caribbean. So thank goodness the work is bigger than me, and has a life of its own, and thankfully has found its way in places I could not have imagined.
If you write the truth, even if you started out telling a lie; if the work is suffused with love and integrity, it will find an audience. Who is the audience for 4-Headed Woman? Well, I have in mind debonair, urbane women like my college educated daughter. But it might, no, I am certain will, appeal to a wider, more diverse audience than I can fathom. Since my goal is to share my ideas and sell 10,000 books monthly, I dare not limit or say who I think my audience ought to be.My latest collection of poems and stories, I Name Me Name, (Peepal Tree Press), 2008 is for all people who are toying with identity, considering lineage, and exploring legacy and familial connections. I guess that is everyone, people of African descent, Europeans and Caucasians, Asians, Latinos and every other nationality, gender, sexual orientation and unnamed population. Who in the world today isn’t faced with the question of identity, self-affirmation, alignment, and situating the self within the context of family, and the self within the context of i-ness in the world?
As a writer, my job is to write something, anything that arouses and causes another to reflect and identify and if I do that half-way well, then I have accomplished my task and I don’t have to worry about an audience. The audience will find the work and tell me more about it than I initially envisioned. According to the United States Census Bureau, there are 6.77 billion people in the world. I just want 1% of the world to buy and read my books. Once they do, I know they will keeping coming back because I am talking to each and everyone of them. My stories are the flies buzzing by their ears, my poems are the memories shadowing their steps, and my tales are the rhythms tuning their hearts.My words connect us as family, the entire global community where language intersects all of life’s intricacies and complexities, making us “Out of Many, One People.” i-and-i-i-ness, i-and-i-audience.
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