In My Own Words...Marie Nadine Pierre

My name is Marie Nadine Pierre and I participated in the Caribbean Writers Seminar in the summer of 1994 and 1995. I took the theory course with Professor Michael Dash and the literature course with Dr. Sandra Paquet. I also participated in the translation institute. I loved the CWSI and I found the program exciting and thrilling. I met some very interesting people and really well known established writers and scholars in the field of Caribbean Studies. I had obtained a Bachelor of Arts in African and African Diaspora literature from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. The CWSI provided me with a great opportunity to network with folks whom I had read about and to do more in depth study of issues that I contemplated in College.

I was born in East New York, Brooklyn on June 15, 1969. My parents were first generation Haitian-Americans. They had met and married in New York City. Unfortunately, due to their separation and subsequent divorce, my father decided that it was best to send and my sister to live with his father in Leoganne/Leyogann/Yogann, Ayiti/Haiti. I was about 1 when I arrived there and 11 when we returned to live in New York. 

The issue of transnational identity and "citizenship" is very important to me. I feel like I am always on the borders of many national and ethnic identities simultaneously. For instance, as a Nyabinghi RastafarI, I feel that my lifestyle and belief is most important in my daily life. Still, I must grapple with the reality of being a transnational 2nd generation Haitian-American often. These aspects of my ethno-sociological biography are not being analyzed in the Social Sciences. And perhaps that is why I find it so hard to be me. 

I hope that the CWSI re-starts with a strong commitment to courses and discussions that will consider the issues of trans-nationalism, ethnicity, migration and lifestyle (RastafarI) as they are re-presented in fiction by writers in the Caribbean and its diaspora as well as in theoretical texts. I am very happy that the CWSI will begin anew for others to participate.

My Work

My graduate work in the doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania focused a great deal on material culture, specifically belief, foodways, migration, fashion, and dress. I was also very concerned about identifying, collecting, and analyzing body-lore. I worked with Haitian immigrants of various generations. I decided to do my dissertation research in Miami in the 1995 because I felt that the Haitian community was diverse and accessible and there were plenty of material to work with. Later, I matriculated in the Ph.D. program in Comparative (Anthropology)/Sociology department at Florida International University. My work focused on Haitian immigrants with a specific concentration on gender issues. I hoped to complete a dissertation about the Haitian female experience with body and dress or fashion. The sociological variables of color (shade of black), region of origin in Ayiti/Haiti, age, generation, class and race were important. 

Currently, I am hoping to work with Haitian folklore and folk life in the diaspora. I am hoping to find ways that these narratives of various genres can help to shed light on the Haitian migration experience.

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Media: The Present Future of Caribbean Literary & Cultural Studies

Podcasts and photos for the Present Future of Caribbean Literary & Cultural Studies are now available on the Center for Humanities web site: http://humanities.miami.edu/symposia/paquet.

Participants:

Michael A. Bucknor is Lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) on a Commonwealth Scholarship. At Western, he won the 1997 McIntosh Award for the best Ph.D dissertation lecture and, subsequently, the 1999 USIS Postdoctoral Fellowship on “Contemporary American Literature and Culture” (University of Louisville) and the 2002 Du bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan.. He has been the Chair of the Adjudication Panel for the Canada and Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, an editor of Journal of West Indian Literature and Postcolonial Text and is currently Chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS). Dr. Bucknor’s research interests include Caribbean/Canadian writing, Austin Clarke, masculinities, postcolonial literatures and theory and cultural studies. He has co-edited with Prof. Alison Donnell The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature forthcoming March 2011 and is completing a manuscript entitled, “Performing Masculinities in Jamaican Popular Culture.”

Lara Cahill is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Miami. Her research includes the intersections between literature and geography, environmental criticism, processes of transculturation, and Cuban zarzuela. B.A. in English and Spanish, Virginia Tech, 2000; M.A. English in English, University of Miami, 2005.

Donette Francis is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Binghamton University, where she has served as Director of Graduate Studies and the Senior Honors Program.   Her research and teaching interests include Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies, African Diaspora Literary Studies, Globalization and Transnational Feminist Studies, and Theories of Sexuality and Citizenship.  A graduate of New York University’s American Studies Program, she has recently published Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature.  Her published articles appear in numerous journals including: Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism, Research in African Literatures and Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir.

Rhonda D. Frederick (MA/PhD, University of Pennsylvania) teaches Caribbean, African American, and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, where she also directs the African and African Diaspora Studies Program (AADS). Her research interests include contemporary popular fiction (speculative, horror, detective, and mystery fictions), literatures of the African Diaspora, Post-colonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and narratives of migration.  She is the author of “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration (Lexington Books, 2005) and articles published in several peer-reviewed journals and anthologies.

Glyne Griffith has a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He served as Chair of the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies from 2006 to 2010. He is the author of Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel, and co-editor, with Linden Lewis, of Color, Hair and Bone:Race in the 21st Century. He is completing a book on the BBC “Caribbean Voices” literary radio program and the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature.

George Lamming of Barbados is a world renowned intellectual, writer, critic and educator. Lamming, chosen as the 2004 Distinguished Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, is currently Visiting Professor in the Africana Department at Brown University. He has held many prestigious academic positions including 1998-2000 scholar-in-residence at City College of the University of New York where he delivered the Langston Hughes Lecture at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Other recipients of the distinguished Langston Hughes Festival Award include James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou. Lamming exploded onto the literary scene in 1953 with his first novel In the Castle of My Skin which won the Somerset Maugham Award for literature, and was championed by leading writers and intellectuals such as Jean Paul Satre and Richard Wright. In the Castle of My Skin, a novel about a Caribbean childhood and the realities of colonialism remains the most widely read of West Indian novels. Lamming, author of six novels, describes himself as a "political novelist" and has been closely involved in the political and cultural events of the Caribbean and Commonwealth over the last 50 years, remaining an astute critic and commentator on political, historical and cultural events.

Paula Morgan is Senior Lecturer, Head of the Department of Liberal Arts, and Coordinator of the Cultural Studies graduate program at the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine, Trinidad.  Her primary areas of research, teaching, and publication are gender and ethnic relations in the Caribbean and the African Diaspora. Dr. Morgan has produced and/or co-authored four books, the latest being Writing Rage: Unmaskin Violence in Caribbean Discourse with Valerie Youssef.

Supriya Nair is an Associate Professor at the Department of English at Tulane University.  She is the author of Caliban’s Curse:  George Lamming and the Revisioning of History (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and co-editor of Postcolonialisms:  An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (Rutgers UP, 2005).  She is editor of the MLA Options in Teaching Series:  Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature (forthcoming) and has completed a manuscript on Anglophone Caribbean literature.  She has written and taught on topics related to postcolonial and feminist theory, African and Caribbean literature.

Kezia Page is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Caribbean Studies at Colgate University. Her work is a socio-cultural analysis of Caribbean migrant and diaspora literature in North America and Britain. It responds to critical movements in Caribbean theory that configure the region as borderless, as a space outside of place. Ph.D. in English, University of Miami (fall 2002), M.A. in English, University of Miami (1998), B.A. in English, University of the West Indies, Mona (1996).

Sandra Pouchet Paquet (Ph.D., Connecticut, 1977) is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Miami and the major faculty advisor in Caribbean Literary Studies. She teaches in the fields of Caribbean Literature, African-American Literature, and Women's Studies. She is the author of The Novels of George Lamming (1982), Caribbean Autobiography (2002), and co-editor of Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2007). She has published numerous book and journal articles in Caribbean and African-American Literature, was guest editor of special issues of Callaloo ( "Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean" 1997), andJournal of West Indian Literature (Volume 8, Number 1: October 1998 and Volume 8, Number 2: April 1999). She was Director of the pioneering Caribbean Writers' Summer Institute at the University of Miami (1992-1996).

Patricia Saunders is an assistant professor of English at the University of Miami. Her research and scholarship focus largely on the relationship between sexual identity and national identity in Caribbean literature and popular culture. Her work has appeared in The Bucknell Review,Calabash, Plantation Society in the Americas and Small Axe. She is currently completing a manuscript titled Re-Patri-nation: Caribbean Literature and the Task of Translating Identity. Her manuscript traces the emergence of literary nationalism in the Anglophone Caribbean and maps its transformations through discourses of exile, national and sexual identity, and Diaspora race politics in three cultural and political contexts: pre-independence Trinidad, post-independence Britain and the Civil rights era in the United States. Other works in progress include an edited collection of essays on Jamaican popular culture.

Stephen Stuempfle is Executive Director of the Society for Ethnomusicology and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Steve received a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania and has conducted field research in Trinidad, Texas and Florida. Over the past two decades, he has assisted a variety of arts and historical organizations and has taught courses on folk and popular culture at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Miami. From 2000-2008 he was Chief Curator of the Historical Museum of South Florida in Miami with responsibilities in the direction of research projects; archival and object collections; and exhibition programs related to the history and cultural traditions of South Florida and the Caribbean He is the author of The Steelband Movement: The Forging of a National Art in Trinidad and Tobago (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), and has written about Caribbean music for several journals and encyclopedias. He is also co-editor, with Sandra Pouchet Paquet and Patricia J. Saunders, of Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Ian Randle Publishers, 2007).

***

Image source: http://humanities.miami.edu/symposia/paquet-media

In My Own Words...Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming

WRITING CONNECTIONS: CARIBBEAN-STYLE

In 1994, Dr. Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Director of the Caribbean Writers’ Summer Institute (CWSI), offered, and I accepted an Institute scholarship to attend the CWSI Fiction Workshop, directed by noted Caribbean poet and writer, Olive Senior, at the University of Miami. Then in 1995, Dr. Pouchet Paquet offered, and I accepted an Institute scholarship to attend the CWSI Poetry Workshop, directed by another noted Caribbean poet and writer, Lorna Goodison. Both of these workshops were the very first writing workshops I had ever attended and the experience was overwhelming.

 I learned much from Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison, as well as the other workshop participants. Seminars for scholars of Caribbean literature were held simultaneously with the writing workshops. The scholars and writers were all able to participate in discussions and readings that enhanced the workshop experience and exposed the writers to literary criticism. The writers and scholars also benefited from the discussions, seminars and readings presented by the specially invited guest Caribbean writers such as George Lamming, David Dabydeen and Maryse Conde, to name just a few. Each workshop lasted five weeks, but at the end, we had made new friends, and many of us are still friends today.

The CWSI Fiction and Poetry workshops proved to be the foundation for my writing career. I was able to polish my first poetry manuscript, which included poems written in the CWSI Poetry Workshop, based on feedback from Lorna Goodison. That manuscript was to become my first poetry collection and first book, Curry Flavour, which was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2000. I was introduced to Jeremy Poynting and Hannah Bannister of Peepal Tree Press by Deborah Nester, a PhD student at the University of Miami, who attended the CWSI as a Literature scholar and who was also on the staff of the Institute.  Curry Flavour was reviewed by the Caribbean writer and blogger, Geoffrey Philp, who was himself a participant in the CWSI workshops.   

As for my fiction, after participating in the CWSI Fiction Workshop with Olive Senior, I was able to get my short stories published in journals and magazine, in particular The Caribbean Writer, published by the University of the Virgin Islands, St Croix, USVI. Subsequently, in the summer of 2000, I was awarded a scholarship to attend the inaugural Cropper Foundation Fiction Workshop, which was led by Merle Hodge and Funso Aiyejina (himself a participant in the CWSI workshops). The next year, 2001, I entered the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Short Story Competition with the story ‘Saving Rupa’, which won the Overall or Grand Prize. I continued submitting my short stories for publication, one of which won the Canute Brodhurst Prize from The Caribbean Writer in 2009.

Some other publications in which my poetry and stories have appeared since attending the workshops include:  Poui: The Cave Hill Literary Annual - University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; Woman Speak - Bahamian literary journal featuring women’s voices; Anthurium - A Caribbean Studies electronic journal, Editor Dr. Sandra Pouchet Paquet, published by the University of Miami; Voice, Memory, Ashes: Lest We Forget - An anthology published by Mango Publishing, UK; In Our Own Words – A Generation Defining Itself – literary journal edited by Marlow Peerse Weaver, published by MW Enterprises, NC, USA; Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review Special Caribbean Issue (2004) - University of Virginia; Yinna - Journal of the Bahamas Association of Cultural Studies (BACUS); Journal of Caribbean Literatures - University of Central Arkansas literary journal; Thamyris – literary journal published by Najade Press, Amsterdam, and Caribbean Erotic, edited by Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Weir-Soley (two participants of the CWSI) and published by Peepal Tree Press in 2010.

As a result of my writing, I was a featured writer at the Miami Book Fair International (1996 and 2000) which was organized by Mervyn Solomon, who was on the staff of the CWSI. I was also a featured writer at the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, Duke University, 2002, organised by my friend and noted Caribbean poet and scholar, Dr. Christian Campbell. Along with Olive Senior, I was one of the featured writers at the University of The Virgin Islands, St Croix Campus Humanities Week, 2004 which was organized by a graduate of the University of Miami, and former student of Dr. Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Dr. Kim Dismont Robinson. In 2007, spearheaded by Dr. Sandra Pouchet Paquet, the University of Miami hosted a Caribbean Literary Studies Conference under the theme “The Asian Experience in The Caribbean and The Guyanas: Labour and Migration, Literature and Culture”, for which I was one of the guest poets. I was also the keynote speaker at the Caribbean without Borders Conference 2008, at the University of Puerto Rico, organized by Caribbean scholar, Dr. Dorsia Smith.

In 2009, I submitted my second poetry manuscript, ‘Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems’ to the Inaugural International Proverse Prize for unpublished writing. Based on incisive critiques by Lorna Goodison, I edited the manuscript, and Dr. Sandra Pouchet Paquet wrote the preface to ‘Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems’. The manuscript was shortlisted for the prize and was subsequently published by Proverse Hong Kong in 2011.

Lamenting the lack of writing workshops available to Caribbean writers, two Bahamian writers, Helen Klonaris and Marion Bethel, both of whom participated in the CWSI workshops, created the Bahamian Writers’ Summer Institute in 2009 offering fiction, poetry, memoir, playwriting and screenwriting workshops. I had the great opportunity to teach the BWSI Fiction Workshop in 2010, where Olive Senior was the guest writer. I am slated to teach the Bahamas Writers’ Summer Institute Fiction Workshop again in 2011. The CWSI spawned many new Caribbean writers and now they are continuing its legacy in many diverse and interconnected ways.

About Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming:

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming resides in Nassau, The Bahamas where she is a practicing Mechanical/Building Services Engineer. Her academic qualifications include a B.Sc. Degree in Mechanical Engineering (Hons.) from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad; and a M.Sc. Degree in Building Services Engineering from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland. She is a Chartered Engineer registered with the Engineering Council in the UK and a Professional Engineer registered with The Professional Engineers Board of The Bahamas.

Lelawattee is also a poet, fiction writer and essayist, whose poetry, stories and artwork have appeared in numerous publications in The Bahamas, the Caribbean, Nicaragua, USA and Europe. She has won poetry, essay and art awards in The Bahamas. Internationally, she has won the David Hough Literary Prize from The Caribbean Writer (2001); the Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for Short Fiction from The Caribbean Writer (2009); and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association (CBA) 2001 Short Story Competition. She was short-listed for the inaugural Proverse Literary Prize (2009). Her first book of poetry, Curry Flavour, was published in 2000 by Peepal Tree Press, Leeds, England. Proverse Hong Kong published her second book of poetry, Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems, which includes some of her artwork, in 2011.

***

Related articles

• By Love Possessed: Lorna Goodison has a new book of short stories (repeatingislands.com)
• Lorna Goodison: One of the Best Writers You've Never Read (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• International Women's Day :Caribbean Women Writers (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• A Night of Celebration (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• The Bocas Lit Fest: The Trinidad and Tobago Literary Festival (repeatingislands.com)
• Lorna Goodison : Passion for Keats weaves through writer's work (thestar.com)
• Lorna Goodison comes through (arts.nationalpost.com)
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New Book: Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems by Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming

Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems 

By Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming 

Published by Proverse Hong Kong 

Distributed by The Chinese University Press 

2011    210 × 148 mm    176 pages 

ISBN 978-988-19321-3-6    Paperback    US$20 

Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems is Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming's second collection of poetry. It was shortlisted for the inaugural international Proverse Prize.

Inspired by the Hindu philosophy of reincarnation, many of the poems in this new collection are written in memory of loved ones. But, in the same way that the orange and red flowers of the Immortelle tree flame the forests and plains of Trinidad, these poems are brightened with imagery of hope and rebirth.

Manoo-Rahming's Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems is filled with scenes from the poet's physical landscape which spans the Caribbean: from The Bahamas, her present home, to Trinidad, the land of her birth. The language of these sensual poems is a syncretism of her East Indian-derived Bhojpuri Hindi and her Trinbagonian creole, peppered with nuances of the Bahamian vernacular. This syncretism is reflected in the themes of the poems. Although many of the poems deal with Indo-Caribbean anthropology, the collection embraces other cultures and religions which are present in the Caribbean, and speaks to the fluidity in philosophy that can exist and flourish in such plural societies.

Please follow this link to order Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems : The Chinese University Press.

About Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming:

Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming was born in Trinidad. She is married to Bahamian, Hammond Rahming, and makes her home in Nassau, The Bahamas. She is a practicing Mechanical/Building Services Engineer, a poet, fiction and creative non-fiction writer and essayist. She also expresses her creativity and seeks enlightenment through sculpture, drawing and painting.

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A Night of Celebration

On Thursday night’s gathering of authors at Books & Books (3/3/2011), there was much to celebrate in Caribbean letters. For not only were we celebrating the lifetime of service of Dr. Sandra Pouchet Paquet, whose scholarship on the work of George Lamming (who was also in the audience) has been invaluable to scholars and writers, but we were also had the pleasure of meeting the following authors, who launched their books:

Michael A. Bucknor is a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. He is an editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature and has published book chapters and journal articles on Caribbean and Canadian Literature, diasporic writing, body theory, masculinities, cultural and performance studies.

Alison Donnell is author of Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature (Routledge, 2006); editor of Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (1996).

Anthony Bogues is Harmon Family Professor, Professor of Africana Studies, Political Science, Modern Culture and Media and Humanities Faculty Fellow at Brown University. He is also Honorary Professor of the Humanities at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, an associate editor of the journal Small Axe and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Boundary 2. His latest book is Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire and Freedom (2010).

Garfield Ellis grew up in Jamaica, the eldest of nine children. He studied marine engineering, management and public relations in Jamaica and he completed his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Miami, as a James Michener Fellow. He is the author of four other books: Flaming Hearts, Wake Rasta, Such As I Have, and For Nothing at All. His work has appeared in several international journals, including: Callaloo, Calabash, The Caribbean Writer, Obsidian III, Small Axe and Anthurium. He is a two-time winner of the Una Marson Prize for adult literature; has twice won the Canute A. Brodhurst prize for fiction and the 1990 Heinemann Lifestyle short story competition.

Kezia Page received her PhD from the University of Miami (2002) and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Colgate University where she teaches Caribbean literature and Ethnic American literature. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Small Axe, Anthurium, The Journal of West Indian Literature and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Dr. Michelle Rowley is an Assistant Professor to the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Maryland. Her publications include “When the Post-Colonial State Bureaucratizes Gender: Charting Trinidadian Women’s Centrality Within The Margins,” “Where the Streets have no name: Getting Development out of the (RED).” “Rethinking Interdisciplinarity: Meditations on the Sacred Possibilities of an Erotic Feminist Pedagogy,” and “Whose Time Is It?: Gender and Humanism in Contemporary Caribbean Feminist Advocacy.” She serves on the editorial board for Feminist Studies.

Dr. Patricia Saunders, who introduced the authors, also had some exciting news: the rebirth of the Caribbean Summer Writers’ Institute and the consolidation of the CSWI database.

It was great to see George Lamming, who taught the CSWI seminar in fiction (1991) and fellow UM alums, Andrea Shaw and Garfield Ellis.

Here are some more photos from the event:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/geoffreyphilp/5505698259/in/set-72157626092472459/

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Related articles

• An Evening with the Authors (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Upcoming Posts (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)

Upcoming Posts

I still haven't recovered from the Caribbean Literary Studies conference in honor of Dr. Sandra Pouchet Paquet at the University of Miami on March 4, 20011. George Lamming, the keynote speaker, gave a remarkable lecture in which he outlined some of the major themes in Caribbean literature and expanded our understanding about the work of authors such as Nicolas Guillen, Édouard Glissant , Alejo Carpentier, and Derek Walcott. In the next few days, I will be giving a brief summary of his lecture and provide links.

I’ll also post of recap of “An Evening with the Authors” at Books and Books on March 3, 2011 and a follow-up to the review of Kamau Brathwaite’s Elegguas. To my surprise and delight, Kamau responded to the review and he has agreed to the publication of our online conversation as an “xtension of the dialogue.”

Finally, Dr. Pat Saunders and Dr. Andrea Shaw have initiated an effort to organize a virtual meet-up of the participants of the Caribbean Summer Writers’ Institute, which was hosted by the University of Miami English Department. The Institute was held for five weeks during the summer in Miami, Florida from 1991 through 1996. Each year the program arranged public readings and interviews at a variety of locations in Miami and was a fertile meeting space for many Caribbean authors listed here:

Alvarez, Celia

Anthony, Michael, 1930-

Antoni, Brian, 1959-

Antoni, Robert, 1958-

Baugh, Edward

Bethel-Bennett, Ian

Brathwaite, Kamau, 1930-

Castro, Adrian, 1967-

D'Aguiar, Fred, 1960-

Dabydeen, Cyril, 1945-

Dabydeen, David

Danticat, Edwidge, 1969-

Dash, J. Michael

Edgell, Zee

Frederick, Rawle

Freeman, Sharon

Goulbourne, Jean

Harmon, Juanita

Harrison, Faye

Hillhouse, Joanne C.

Hippolyte, Kendel

Horne, Naana Banyiwa

Hyppolite, Joanne, 1969-

Jack, Deborah

James, Cynthia

Johnson, Jacqueline, 1957-

Johnson, Nicola

Kristensen, Randi Gray

Lamming, George, 1927-

Manoo-Rahming, Lelawattee

Morisseau-Leroy, Felix, 1912-

Morris, Mervyn

Page, Kezia Ann

Persaud, Sasenarine

Philp, Geoffrey

Pollard, Velma

Quashie, Cin D

Senior, Olive

Smith, Malachi D. Sankey

Strachan, Ian G. (Ian Gregory), 1969-

Taitt, Marina

Weir-Soley, Donna

Stay tuned!

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Defining Moments...Joanne C. Hillhouse

I’ve published two books, and I still feel like a fraud.

It was said there, in the safety of the circle, not simply to echo the insecurities of another, nor disingenuously, out of some sense of --you are not alone – false comfort. It was as honest as we had ever been with each other. It was an unremarkable day, really, notwithstanding the record low temperatures of the pending Christmas season; unremarkable, except for this, this moment of copping to our insecurities as though finally confessing some shameful secret.

And yes, there was a part of us, of me, fearful of being dismissed or ridiculed for it – more self-doubt. There was a part of me that contemplated, much of the rest of that Sunday and night, the riskiness of trust. After all, isn’t that one reason why writing, and fiction writing especially, had been my longest and most honest relationship; it gave me a safe place more sacred than the confessional, a space where it was okay to be honest and yet okay – in fact, essential – to twist the truth.

But in that moment of quiet admission, it felt safe here, too, in a community of writers not concerned with putting a good face on things, writers who’d spent the better part of this writing session talking candidly about the things that matter to them and the things that drive them to write – about family, and ideology, and country, and childhood, and passions, and flirtations, and the books of other great writers, and dreams, and, yes, insecurities.

I feel like a fraud.

And it hit me, about five minutes before I finally gave into the compulsion to write this, just now, that this is why I’ve struggled with my host blogger’s invitation – to me and other writers – to write of that moment when we knew we were writers.

I thought of things my father and mother – holders of my first memories – have told me about my early relationship with language: the way I’d sit so silently in pre-school my teacher thought it was too soon yet radio everything that had happened on returning home, the way I read the pictures and told the stories before I could decode the words.

I thought of how I’ve daydreamed my way through life, always with parallel scenarios running on delay in my head.

I thought of how writing saved my life all the times I felt certain I would finally jump from the ledge.

I thought of Tanty’s black and white notebook, inherited after she died; her elegant script alongside my own scrappy scrawl. I thought of how her ghost shows up, inserting itself:

At night, after she’d bathed and put on the pretty pink duster one of her ‘children’ had sent her, when he’d climb into her lap, it would be to the scent of baby powder, Florida water and soursop bush (the last tucked under her head tie) – from The Boy from Willow Bend

I thought of seeing the cover of that book for the first time and not knowing how to feel, and of that feeling of jumping out of my skin – like I was on a caffeine high – when, recently, my agent called with the news that she had an offer, after more rejections than I care to think of, for my new book – Spring 2012!

And while these are all true moments, it would’ve been disingenuous to milk them and say, I knew then.

I know I am a writer. Through each struggle for the right word, through every rejection, wondering if writers are just masochistic after all because this amount of stinginess in a normal relationship would’ve had friends scheduling an intervention. Through every effort to greet the day and the fragments of things that sit like puzzle pieces on the page with hopefulness, and let my spirit not be squashed.

I know I am a writer, and, yet, insecurity dogs me; insecurity, and curiousity, and questions, and this tendency to pick at things, and pain so big it feels like it might swallow me sometimes.

I know I am a writer, because, through it all, I write.

I know I am a writer, because as I drove to that writers’ group meeting, musing on things, my fingers itched to pick at the scabs with paper and pen.

Because as I left that meeting, the need to sum up how that looping, rambling conversation had filled me up was like an ache, but a good ache.

I know I’m a writer. And sometimes I even impress and surprise myself, feel proud of myself, that, yes, I wrote this: something that makes someone laugh or cry or wonder why, or so they tell me. I wrote this, After Glow, Friday Night Fish Fry…both stories I’m proud of. I wrote this forthcoming book, my most challenging effort to date.

I know that I’m a writer because things never feel quite so hopeless, the world never feels so dull and absent of meaning as when I can’t write. Not even after the umpteenth rejection saying in not so many words, you’re not good enough. It’s not about finally finding the courage to cop to being a writer, to write it in my passport, to greet the world with it – even as they whisper with something like pity, she bright, you know, she coulda been a lawyer.

It’s about moments like this when I can admit to the insecurities that I haven’t been able to shake despite the Boy, in spite of Dancing Nude in the Moonlight; and still write and feel grateful that like air and music, the ability to express that insecurity (and every drop of joy and fear and hope and sensation of being suspended miles above earth fearful of the drop but hanging there nonetheless) lives in me. I know I’m a writer because I write. This. And my underarms are sweaty with the fear of putting it down and setting it free. But I do anyway.

About Joanne C. Hillhouse

Antiguan Joanne C. Hillhouse (who also writes as jhohadli) is the author of two books of fiction: The Boy from Willow Bend and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight. A former Breadloaf fellow, her fiction and poetry have, also, appeared in Tongues of the Ocean, Mythium, Ma Comère, The Caribbean Writer, Calabash, Sea Breeze, Women Writers: A Zine, St. Somewhere, and more. She was awarded a 2004 UNESCO Honour Award for her contribution to literacy and the literary arts in Antigua and Barbuda. Among her projects are the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize – http://wadadlipen.wordpress.com She’s a freelance writer, journalist, editorial consultant, and producer (having worked in print, film, and TV). For more, visit www.jhohadli.com  

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Photo Credit:  Andy E. Williams.

In My Own Words: Garfield Ellis

I Shall Write

In January 1984 I wrote my future with the following entry in my diary:

I think I have come to an important decision in my life--I am going to write. I always thought of my engineering career as a stepping-stone and a foundation to fall back on – writing is now the horizon to which I march.

Looking at this now, after nearly twenty years, I am amazed that I could have been so bold.

It is a very difficult thing to want to be a writer in Jamaica; especially if you want to be great. It seems pretentious and ridiculously vain, a head-in the-air, pie-in-the-sky type of folly. Writing is not for poor people. It is for those of a lighter cast, white people, rich people, foreign people, but not people like me--ordinary people--for whom just growing up is a struggle. Besides, it is not something that you share with your friends. I knew no writers. There was no one to discuss it with. There was no precedent in my community, not for writing, not for any kind of success. Those who succeed, leave.

And yet it confirms to me that as melodramatic as it may sound, we write our own destiny. The moment I wrote that down and convinced myself of what I wanted to be and how I was going to do it, events were set in motion that would get me to where I wanted to go irrespective of the poverty in which I lived.

So I have taken it upon myself to be a writer, not a popular love or sex-on-the-beach writer, but a serious writer. Not obtrusively academic, but popularizing the archives of the Caribbean people with quality work. I longed to read stories about me and my people. No one was writing them, so I would. That was that. These stories must be told and Jamaicans will read them if they can identify with them. And whether or not they read them, still, the stories must be told and that is my calling.

And every story I write--no matter how short or how long it is--every story I write, I stop halfway through and question my sanity and whether anyone will want to read it. Or I ask myself why should anyone want to read it, or who do I think I am to assume this mighty role. Whatever…it consumes me and I cannot but do it.

Apart from my sense of mission, it is the writing that I love--the putting down of the words on the page--the shaping of thoughts to make them sing. I remember once writing a good line and leaving it to run around my housing scheme, jumping up and down as if I had won the lottery. And secondly I love to read it. Sometimes I write conscious of the rhythms of delivery--of the words resonating and dancing through my head. But still there is nothing to me like putting my heart on the page. It is this love, this passion that drives me.

Sometimes making a living gets so intense I have to leave the writing for a while. To get back to routine takes days of solitude. I used to feel guilty about these binges of empty days when I would go home from Thursday and not surface till Monday--sending my son to his mother and not taking any phone calls or talking to a soul.

But as I have grown, I have learned that these days of doing nothing are the most critical stage to my writing. They are the days when my mind is being prepared. When it is being emptied, like a field being cleared. By day two there is nothing on it and the soil is being tilled. By day three I am entering a stage, almost trance-like, when everything I see seems to be related to the story I am working on: a line from a movie; a headline in the daily papers or something flashing through my mind while walking or driving. (Long walks and movies are also acceptable during this time--but alone--no dates, no friends, just me.) By the night of day three or mid-day four, I am there and things start to emerge and flower and I am at the place and the story is before me refreshed. The ideas are clear and there is new life.

I start Thursday and I usually begin writing around Saturday night. By Sunday I am in full flow and in the place where I can begin the daily routine again. Now when people call me, I am not afraid to say I am writing, even though technically, I am doing nothing. But doing nothing is sometimes the most critical element of my process of getting back to the place where the words flow.

It is hard to keep going when every stage of the writing has its challenges. Before I was published, rejection slips and the feeling of worthlessness--no money—were my main demotivators. Now that I’m published, it is lack of marketing by the publisher, the booksellers not keeping my books on the shelves or not displaying them well. The fact that I have another profession helps because at the very least, it acts as a source of other rewards.

Sometimes when my writing gets me in the dumps, there have been moments when an incident at work picked me up. But I have to admit, I hate the fact that I have to work because I know if I could write full-time, I would be much more productive and would be much further along in my work.

Every now and then writing smiles on me by sending an award my way. Every now and then a book or story is published and I may get a great write-up.

Fame and riches may come. I don’t know and I don’t dwell on it.

Most of all what keeps me going is the fact that other writers go through the same thing. I have a little book that helps, For Writers Only by Sophy Burnham. It is like a little book of meditation. It has all these gems and anecdotes about some of our greatest writers. And I realize that my sufferings are not as great as some whose names we now mention with reverence. And what I am going through others have gone through, are going through, and will continue to go through as long as there are those who continue to take on this order of the word.

One of my favorite quotes by some great writer from somewhere that I cannot remember is:

I could not have written if I had not lived

And I could not live if I had not written.

As for me, I write because there is nothing else.

About the author:

Garfield Ellis grew up in Jamaica, the eldest of nine children. He studied marine engineering, management and public relations in Jamaica and completed his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Miami, on full scholarship as a James Michener Fellow.

He is a two-time winner of the Una Marson prize for adult literature; in the first instance for his first collection of short stories, Flaming Hearts (pub. 1997), and later for the still unpublished novel, Till I’m Laid To Rest. He has twice won the Canute A. Brodhurst prize for fiction (The Caribbean Writer, University of Virgin Islands) 2000 & 2005 and the 1990 Heinemann/Lifestyle short story competition.

Garfield is the author of four published books: Flaming Hearts , Wake Rasta, Such As I Have, and For Nothing at All. His work has appeared in several international journals, including; Callaloo, Calabash, The Caribbean Writer, and Obsidian III. A fifth book, Till I’m Laid To Rest is due in Spring 2010.

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Garfield Ellis's Amazon Page

In My Own Words: Andrea Elizabeth Shaw

My book The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies is a project that grew out of my long term interest in the cultural perception of large, black women’s bodies. Growing up as a fat black girl in Jamaica, I loved books and reading, and I always wondered why there were so few characters that looked like me amidst all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys novels that I voraciously consumed. When characters that even vaguely reminded me of myself, and I do mean vaguely such as Nancy’s black male butler (or was it her chauffeur?), turned up on the page, I read oh so closely to see what the world’s literary imagine was of me, or at least some aspect of my identity. By the time I began my recent book project, it was clear to me what question I wanted to answer: How is the large black woman represented in both literary and popular venues? How is she perceived? How do her race, size and gender intersect in her representation?

What made writing my book interesting for me, and hopefully my readers, is my interrogation of these representations within multiple arenas. For example, within the realm of popular culture I discuss blues singers such as Ma Rainey; actresses such as Mo’Nique of The Parkers; Miss Piggy from Sesame Street; Oprah; Missy Elliott; Miss Lou, Jamaican poet and actress among other things; and Carlene the ex-dancehall queen just to name a few. I also discuss historical figures such as the Venus Hottentot and eighteenth century Barbadian entrepreneur Rachel Pringle. The literary characters I discuss come from a range of texts, including Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s, Nervous Conditions, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Grace Nichol’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, and Derek Walcott’s epic poem, Omeros.

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Publications: 

The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies. Lexington Press (2006).

Book Chapters and Articles

 “Big Fat Fish: The Hypersexualization of the Fat Female Body in Calypso and

 Dancehall.” Music, Memory and Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination. Eds. Patricia J. Saunders, Sandra Pouchet Paquet, and Stephen Stuempfle. Ian Randle Publishers (2007).

About Andrea Elizabeth Shaw:

Andrea Elizabeth Shaw is Assistant Director of the Division of Humanities and Assistant Professor of English at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

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