Interviewing the Caribbean (IC)—has been founded by Jamaican poet and educator Opal Palmer Adisa. IC seeks poems, stories, creative non-fiction, and visual art in all media that celebrate Caribbean life. Caribbean artists at home and in the Diaspora are invited to participate. Submit by September 5, 2015u, to be included in the inaugural issue along with Junot Diaz, Leroy Clarke, Tamara Natalie Madden, and others. The topic for the inaugural issue is “Intellectual Property” (IP).
Description: “All too often, when it comes to intellectual property, black artists are the ones who lose the rights to their work (The Root, LaToya Peterson, May 15, 2011). Who owns your work? Does it matter? Many are the black creators who have not reaped the monetary benefits of their success. How do you, as a creative voice, ensure that ownership of your work—and the royalties that go with it—accrues to you? In recent years, prominent black artists—and their estates—have challenged intellectual property misappropriation in the courts.
Some well-known cases: The artist formerly known as Prince did battle with Warner Bros. Records for years before winning back ownership of the master tapes for his hit albums. Just this year, Marvin Gaye’s estate challenged Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke on the similarity of their song “Blurred Lines” and Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up”—and won.
Some possibilities to consider: How is the concept of IP experienced by Caribbean artists—writers, visual artists, musicians, and others? How are ideas about IP evolving in Caribbean society at large? What is the future for intellectual property rights for artists in the Caribbean context? (Works that cover other, but related, themes will be considered.)
Please send submissions of writing as Word documents. Visual artists, please send photographs as jpegs at 300 dpi resolution.
Submit via email to interviewingthecaribbean@gmail.com.
WomanSpeak, A Journal of Writing and Art by Caribbean Women, Vol.7, 2014, edited by Lynn Sweeting, brings together 30 contemporary women writers and painters of the Caribbean in a new collection especially themed, “Voices of Dissent: Writing and Art to Transform the Culture.” Includes works by Opal Palmer Adisa, Lelawattee Manoo Rahming, Vahni Capildeo, Althea Romeo-Mark, Marion Bethel, Danielle Boodoo-Fortune, Sonia Farmer, Angelique V. Nixon and more.
Giving thanks to Small Axe for publishing poems from my latest collection, LETTER FROM MARCUS GARVEY. I am also happy to share the creative writing space with my talented sisters, Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Aza Weir-Soley
I am also giving thanks for the many women who have helped, guided, and inspired me through the years: Merty Philp (nee Lumley), Nadezka Philp (nee Ferro), my two daughters, aunts, sisters, my mother and sisters-in-law, Andrea Shaw, Andrene Bonner, Sokari Ekine, Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah, Yvonne McCalla-Sobers, Ida Does, Vanessa Woodward Byers, Michelle McGrane, Marva McClean, Ludy Rodriguez, Josett Peat, Donna Aza Weir-Soley, Patti Harris, Gina Cortes-Suarez, Lou Skellings, Malou Harrison, Hannah Bannister, Dawn Marache-Allen, Heather Russell, Hazel Campbell, Diane Browne, Cynthia James, Jean Lowrie-Chin, Karean Hailey Williams, and Audrey Hadley.
I am blessed to have known the pleasure of your company.
If you enjoyed this post, check out my page on Amazon. I’d also be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook.
By Opal Palmer Adisa “Chess is an intellectual discipline masking as a game,” says Maurice Ashley, who is touted as the first African-American International Chess Grandmaster in the history of the game. But Ashley is actually Jamaican, born in Kingston, where he attended Seaward Elementary School. His formative years were spent in Tower Hill, where his grandmother raised him and where he came to know himself. At the impressionable age of nine, his older brother taught him how to play chess, but Ashley remarks, “Back then, it was just a game. I liked it, but I didn’t know at that time that the game was going to be my destiny.” He later attended Wolmer’s High School for Boys before immigrating to the USA, at the age of twelve, to join his mother. Excitement about living with his mother for the first time with his two siblings was partially tempered by his new environment that belied the American dream. “Coming out of poverty in Jamaica, the mere fact that you are standing on American soil, is an advantage, but the reality was a lot of day-to-day violence --the level was worse in Brownsville, Brooklyn. There were drug-dealers and prostitutes,” Ashley recalls. However, he learned to navigate and steer clear of the numerous traps that were everywhere in his new community. School gave Ashley direction, and because of the friendships he formed, his keen interest in chess grew. “I started to take it seriously in high school in Brooklyn. I thought I was smart, until I lost to a friend. Then I saw a book in the library and I started reading. I didn’t know there was a strategy to chess. My friend had also read all of these books. He had been reading and playing, and that’s when I knew knowledge is power.” So Ashley became an avid student of chess and was determined to be at the top of his game. He studied and taught himself. Still, Maurice Ashley did not recognize his talent until he was a student at City College, New York. His passion and love for the game spews from his mouth as he recounts his journey. “I was so in love with chess, I was doing it all the time. It was like a force. I would beat people and I loved the feeling of beating people, and I just wanted to keep doing it. I never thought of chess as a profession.” Chess became not only a profession for Ashley, but also the very foundation of his life. In 1993 when he was only 20 years-old, Maurice Ashley, as a result of coaching the National Champions from Harlem to victory, became the first ever African American Master in US History. In 1999 Ashley was honored as the first Black person in history to become an International Grandmaster. Maurice Ashley’s love for chess and his international recognition, has led him to his mission: to share chess with young people around the world. The release of his book, Chess for Success: Using an Old Game to Build New Strengths in Children and Teens, serves as a cornerstone of his advocacy.
Ashley’s success begs the questions: How does a Jamaican boy from an impoverished neighborhood, without a father present, become a chess master? Is it simply destiny or are there other forces at work? Ashley contributes his success to his mother, who left him as an infant, and labored hard in the USA for ten long years so that he and his two siblings could eventually join her and be united as a family.
And despite the vices in their immediate surroundings that could have mitigated their success, Ashley states categorically: “My mother made sure that I understood coming from Jamaica that you hold on to your opportunities. She kept us focused. You had to go to college; all of us were going to college.” And indeed Maurice Ashley and his two siblings all went to college and are at the top of their respective fields. Perhaps an additional secret to his success is connected to dogged determination. In chess, Ashley found his passion, and a drive to beat his opponents, which led him to study and practice continuously. His assiduousness paid off when in 2002, he became the first African-American in history to qualify for the US Chess Championship. The crowning event came in 2003, when United States Chess Federation awarded him the title of Grandmaster of the Year. But Ashley still identifies as a Jamaican, and his bond to this island and its culture is deeply embedded in the food, especiallyackee and salt-fish with roast breadfruit, and of course jerk chicken that he loves. However, his Jamaican-ness goes deeper, and he stays committed to his culture and the development of the island. In an interview on October 13, 2011, I asked the following questions: OPA: What do you love about Jamaica or being Jamaican? MA: The fact that we are some of the hardest working people on the planet. Give us an opportunity and we will run with it. Just try to catch us and you won’t. OPA: What are you hopes for Jamaica? MA: That our people become well-educated and using initiatives like chess to bolster that effort, we can show the world the advanced skills of which we are capable. I think a polished and comprehensive educational system has to be developed in Jamaica, where we can use our talents as a means of helping bigger countries to carry out some service that they may needed. That means we have to create an extremely comprehensive educational base, so those countries do not automatically link Jamaica with tourism --that Jamaica becomes known for technology as well. I hope that Jamaica goes the way of some of those countries in Asia --finding our niche in technology. I don’t think more advanced techniques are available to the general population, like what I do with chess: deep thinking. When you start with a platform with young people, it will magnify in a few years.
OPA: Why should children learn to play chess? MA: All the skills we want our children to have, problem solving, analytical reasoning, focus and concentration, are embedded in the game itself, in the playing of the game itself, so kids have fun and learn at the same time and they don’t even know it. Chess strategy doesn’t begin until you realize that there is another mind playing against you. Most people are about themselves, but the competition is about someone trying to beat you, so you have to take that into consideration. The great thing about chess is that you are punished for bad thinking; you are punished for impatience. You have to stop and plan ahead before you move, or else you are going to lose the game. Kids don’t want to lose, so if they have a good coach they begin to play and play well, and those are skills they can use in life to be successful. OPA: What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome to succeed?
MA: I believe that life is a series of challenges that we are consistently overcoming. I am challenged even now in my life. I embrace challenges--that is the way you become successful by embracing the challenges of life.
With every challenge one gains experience that has to be harnessed in order to move to the next level. Ashley uses these stepping-stones, and that has helped him to navigate his life. These are the lessons that he has honed as a man, and that he wants to impart to young people. The proud father of two children, a seventeen-year-old daughter who is an "A" student and a nine-year-old son, Ashley models his practice on his children. “I started teaching my children chess when they were three years-old. I made sure they both had a foundation for chess. My daughter didn’t pursue it, but she is good. Now my son and I do chess puzzles every day.” Until very recently, Ashley had stopped playing chess to be a full time, stay-at-home father, so that his wife, who had put her career on hold to allow him to travel, had the opportunity to pursue some of her dreams, including being principal of a school. But Ashley is excited to be playing chess again. Back on the chess trail, Ashley is embarking on a six-island tour to promote chess in the Caribbean for young people, and visited Jamaica from November 10-12, 2011. Ashley says, “I am bringing chess technology, much of which is donated, to assist the chess efforts in these countries, to lend the voice to the idea that chess is great for kids and it should be supported.” In addition to being a Grandmaster, an author, and an inventor, Maurice Ashley is also the designer of a smart phone application: “Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess,” which was launched in 2010 and has sold in more than 25 countries. Still he remains close to his cause, which is to promote chess as a viable mode of education for young people. To this end, he has traveled widely to speak to, and encourage youth in indigent neighborhoods throughout the USA, South Africa, and Central America.
Ironically, Maurice Ashley says he isn’t sure in what concrete ways he contributes to Jamaican society, but acknowledges that when people know that he is Jamaican it engenders a sense of pride. Reflecting more he adds, “I support chess initiatives in Jamaica, and what they are trying to do to build up chess on the island. I do what I can to support the Jamaica Chess Federation.” Whenever someone does something, great or small, it reflects on his family, as well as his country. Maurice Ashley’s achievements are but more evidence of the global contributions of Jamaicans. Perhaps it is the yams as sports fanatics have been attributing to Usain Bolt’s phenomenal achievements; maybe it’s in our water, in the very air, or maybe it is in the foundation and dreams that have been instilled in us by parents and others who made endless sacrificed to keep us focused, and made us dream beyond what could even be imagined. Regardless of the source of our greatness, Jamaicans such as Maurice Ashley are helping to create a more diversified and accomplished profile of who Jamaicans are and the new frontiers we are traversing. As Maurice Ashley says, “Knowing that chess is a blessing for kids helps me to keep spreading that message.” So I invite you to introduce a child in your life to chess as well as other endeavors that could guide them towards success. Learn more about Maurice Ashley and all that he is doing to promote chess and keep the Jamaican flag waving high by visiting his website: www.mauriceashley.com Please contact Opal Palmer Adisa at 50jamaicans@gmail.com if you have a story to share. She plans to do a profile of 50 Jamaican women and men, living in the greater Jamaica Diaspora who have had exceptional accomplishments. Also, Adisa’s novel, Painting Away Regrets, is set to release this November 2011.
A buffet never before experienced in the South Florida community! Come dine with us. The editors and contributing writers of Caribbean Erotic anthology will be reading and signing books at the Irie Isle Sunday Morning Brunch on Sunday, November 20, 11-1 p.m.
Come join us for great poetry, delicious Jamaican cuisine, and stimulating conversation!
Featured Writers: Opal Palmer Adisa and Aza Weir-Soley (co-editors), Jacqueline Bishop, B. Alison Richards, Heather Russell, Malachi Smith, and more...
The Caribbean Writer is going places, and Volume 25, which is now available, will take readers to Haiti, originally known as Ayiti, land of high mountains.
Opal Palmer Adisa, the editor, decided to focus this special, silver anniversary issue on Haiti for two reasons: first, to pay homage to those Haitians who survived the 2010 earthquake that devastated the country and killed more than 100,000, and second, to commemorate their ancestors who, as freedom fighters, were the first to wage war and win their freedom in 1803.
In addition to providing readers with glimpses of both of these historical events, Volume 25 features prose and poetry by some of Haiti’s local as well as internationally celebrated writers. Included are Edwidge Danticat, winner of the 2009 Fellow "Genius Award," Évelyne Trouillot, novelist and professor at Haiti’s State University, and Marilèene Phipps-Kettlewell, winner of the Iowa Award for short fiction. It also showcases the works of emerging Haitian-American voices such as Michelle Y. Remy and Wilna Julmiste.
Volume 25 of The Caribbean Writer, an international literary journal published annually by the University of the Virgin Islands, also marks a new epoch in the journal’s trajectory as a seminal publication in the Caribbean region. With this first bi-lingual – English and French – issue, The Caribbean Writer is forging ahead to reach a wider readership in the Caribbean, as well as positioning itself for a more diverse international market.
The volume opens with congratulatory remarks by Virgin Islands Governor John P. de Jongh, Jr., UVI President Dr. David Hall, UVI Provost Dr. Karl Wright, UVI Vice Provost for Research and Public Service Dr. Henry H. Smith, and founding editor Erika J. Waters. An introductory overview is offered by editor Opal Palmer Adisa, who references her January 2011 trip to Haiti to bear witness.
Local writers whose work is included are Arnold R. Highfield, writer, historian and UVI professor emeritus, Daisy Holder Lafond and Winifred “Oyoko” Loving. Also featured are book reviews by current UVI professors Simon Jones-Hendrickson, Gillian Royes, Lomarsh Roopnarine, Valerie Combie and Lucia R. DiMeo. To maintain its credentials as a refereed journal in the academy, works were selected blind by the editorial board comprised of Edgar O. Lake, president of the Society of Virgin Islands Historians, Alscess Lewis-Brown, director of the Human Resources Bureau of the VI Police Department, Kenny Hendrickson and Dolace Mclean, professors from both UVI campuses.
The Silver Anniversary/Volume 25 of The Caribbean Writer is currently available at local bookstores on St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John, as well as at the UVI Bookstores on St. Thomas and St. Croix. Copies are $25 and can also be ordered directly from The Caribbean Writer’s office by calling (340) 692-4152, emailing orders@thecaribbeanwriter.org(orders@thecaribbeanwriter.org) or visiting www.TheCaribbeanWriter.org (http://www.thecaribbeanwriter.org/).
When the 2010 earthquake ravaged Haiti, I wondered what good would come out of it? What lessons were to be learned? What greater truth was to be revealed? For I refused to accept that this was a freak of nature, a random and senseless killing of over 100,000 people. As a metaphysicist, I am always seeking to unearth the higher good, and I suppose I went seeking evidence of my belief on January 14, 2011, a few days after the devastation.
What I realized, through observation, is that the people’s will to live is stronger that any earthquake, stronger than the poverty they fight against daily, stronger than, what to my limited eyes, appears to be overwhelming chaos and social need, to which there seems to be no end in sight. What's also clear is that, as with any disaster, there is an abundant outpouring of help from all over the world. Yet, there is also greed aided by bureaucratic structures that serve to impede progress rather than provide the assistance that is desperately needed. This is happening all over Haiti.
There are numerous NGO vehicles driving all over the city (less present in the rural areas), but one is hard pressed to find concrete evidence of what has been done to help the vast majority of Haitians. Allegations abound that some NGOs are getting as much as a $10,000 monthly salary, plus vehicle and house allowance and staff. Also, many USA based companies have descended like vultures, forming non-profit companies, and using Haitians as a front to bid for $25 million clean-up contracts. However, I saw no evidence of any wide-scale clean up. Even the Palace in Port au Prince is still toppled, leaning precariously like an old arthritic man attempting to kneel.
But Haitians do not appear to be neither hopeless, nor frantic, nor on the verge of wide scale protest or surrender to their lot. Haitians, it seems, are about living each day with a righteous zeal, with an acceptance of where they are in the moment, without resigning themselves to the belief that this is how things will always be. What I saw in the people was an unyielding determination not just to stay alive, but also to find and celebrate the gift of joy that is to be found every day--regardless of the circumstances.
In general, this attitude is evident in how the people have responded despite the tragedies that surround them: hair combed, clothes laundered, and a confident stride to match their pride. As my guide drove me through the tangled, rugged, congested heart of Port au Prince, heading out of the city, the air getting thinner and sweeter, the mountain range more expansive, and as the jeep climbed the twisted hills leading to the quaint town of Jacmel, which was also affected by the earthquake, I asked myself, how is this gallant determination possible? What feeds and sustains it?
The answer came in the music. Rara, to be specific.
Rara is a band of revelers and musicians that parades throughout the streets of the villages or towns. Usually, they begin after Christmas and continue until Easter week, culminating in Carnival. Rara groups are often affiliated with a vodun house and are organized by a priest/houngan or priestess/manbo. Typically, they appear in the mid afternoon or early evening, like the two groups I encountered in Jacmel. Their members were comprised of all males, ranging from six years to their mid-thirties. However, the primary age groups consisted of teens and young adults. Accompanying the rara group was a band of musicians who beat drums carried across their shoulders and played trumpets, metal pipes, maracas, and metal bells, all of which seem to have been made from recycled metal.
The first group, lathered in mud from head to toe, (few who seemed like leaders were donned in blue paint), ran enthusiastically into the crowd, and splattered mud on the observers--especially teen girls, who were rewarded by being gleefully chased and smeared in mud. I had to take refuge several times in the vehicle to avoid being daubed with mud. This process of chasing and branding observers seemed routine-- all in the spirit of the processions. Those who did not want to be smeared, watched from the relative safety of nearby verandas. The air was charged with anticipation, punctuated by shrill and joyful voices, accented by laughter and loud chatter competing with the music.
The second rara band, larger than the first, was lathered in what appeared to be car grease, and its members were more aggressively determined to soil bystanders-- although it seemed more like baptism, a sort of initiation, and the youth seemed particularly targeted by this group. Their dance was more frantic than the previous group, and was dominated by clang-clanging of the bells and the thunderous bom-boming of the drums.
Rara is a tradition that engages the entire community as both observers and participants co-mingle, and the mud or grease serves as a sort of ritual baptizing, a branding and induction into a specific group, another existence that recognizes the precarious nature of life. The rara bands are followed by the community and as the procession winds throughout the town, it grows and swells in numbers, so by the end, observers become participants and all ages and genders submit to be branded--all united as one with either mud or grease. Or both.
Leaving Jacmel behind, the music of the rara band reverberating in my head, I marveled at the simple pleasure, the playful engagement I had just witnessed, that was as far removed, yet so aptly integrated, into the poverty and struggle and the hopefulness and joy of Haitian life. Here were people who refused to tell or portray a sad story. Theirs is a continuous testimony of endurance and triumph. Once we entered Port au Prince, the news spread faster than wild fire that “Baby Doc” – Jean Claude Duvalier- had returned and was at the airport. The question floated through the air: Why now?
The more sedate rara group, I encountered in Port au Prince, its members dressed in purple shirts, seemingly more organized (no one breaking free from the group and running among the spectators) and employing more standard instruments, including trumpets and saxophones, helped to answer that dominant question.
The rara groups dramatize the relationships between politics and culture. They demonstrate how cultural rituals help to sustain a community and are worthy of further investigation Regardless of the syncretization, rara is an important phenomenon in Haiti; it is a cultural legacy that refuses death, and I suspect, brings both cohesion and hope to the community.
About Opal Palmer Adisa
Opal Palmer Adisa, Editor of the Caribbean Writer, hails from the Caribbean, born in Jamaica, but whose spirit hovers over the entire region. Her latest anthology, Caribbean Erotic (co-edited with Donna Aza Weir-Soley), and her forthcoming novel, Painting Away Regrets, will be released in August by Peepal Tree Press. Visit her sites: www.opalpalmeradisa.com/ and www.thecaribbeanwriter.org
CLS: On your blog, you dedicate a significant number of articles on Caribbean writers. What are your thoughts on the present volume and quality of prose and poetry produced in the Caribbean?
Geoffrey Philp: I am amazed that we have so many active published writers in the Caribbean and its diaspora. The quality of the prose and poetry that has been produced in the past few years has been extraordinary. I’m thinking about, for example, the work of Jennifer Rahim, Frances Coke, Opal Palmer Adisa, Kwame Dawes, and Kei Miller to name a few.
I’m also gratified by the work of critics such as Heather Russell and Donna Aza Weir Soley, whose work has opened up a new critical appreciation of our writers.
The Caribbean Writer is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Opal Palmer Adisa as its new editor. Her appointment will begin in January 2010.
Jamaican born, Dr. Adisa is a poet and prose writer who brings extensive editorial experience to the anthology. She has published 14 books, and her writings have appeared in over 200 journals and anthologies. She is also a much sought-after speaker and has traveled throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean.
She has been recognized for her work in the form of many awards and honors, among them the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for her poetry collection Tamarind and Mango Women and the Master Folk Artist Award for Storytelling from the California Arts Council. She has also received awards for both poetry and fiction from The Caribbean Writer and has served as an Advisory Board member of The Caribbean Writer since 1998. Her interview with renowned poet Kamau Brathwaite appears in Volume 23 (2009). Dr. Erika J. Waters, founding editor of The Caribbean Writer said she was “delighted the magazine was in such capable hands.”
Dr. Adisa’s editorship will begin with the 24th edition of The Caribbean Writer, submissions to which are currently being accepted. As usual, the Caribbean should be central to the work, or the work should reflect a Caribbean heritage, experience, or perspective. Besides poetry, fiction, essays and one-act plays, special sections are planned on Trevor Rhone and Wayne Brown. Deadline for submission has been extended to December 31, 2009. Visit www.thecaribbeanwriter.org for more information.
What I recognize is that the art is a calling, is a commitment; and you’ve got a sense that you have something to say, and you’ve got to fight to find the time and space to say it. The world is always trying to distract you from that, and the world is willing to try to buy you out from that particular commitment and engagemant; but when you decide that you, despite all that, are going to concentrate on your own work—on what calls you, as some would say—it means you are sacrificing a lot of material benefits and a lot of material gloss; and you are willing to invest at whatever personal or social, economic or political cost, your own time & attention to the art.
Western European mythology and history tend to view spirituality and sexuality as opposite extremes. But sex can be more than a function of the body and religion more than a function of the mind, as exemplified in the works and characters of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Edwidge Danticat.
Donna Weir-Soley's Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writingsbuilds on the work of previous scholars who have identified the ways that black women's narratives often contain a form of spirituality rooted in African cosmology, which consistently grounds their characters' self-empowerment and quest for autonomy. What she adds to the discussion is an emphasis on the importance of sexuality in the development of black female subjectivity, beginning with Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and continuing into contemporary black women's writings.
Writing in a clear, lucid, and straightforward style, Weir-Soley supports her thesis with close readings of various texts, including Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Morrison's Beloved. She reveals how these writers highlight the interplay between the spiritual and the sexual through religious symbols found in Voudoun, Santeria, Condomble, Kumina, and Hoodoo. Her arguments are particularly persuasive in proposing an alternative model for black female subjectivity.
Praise for Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings
Weir-Soley speaks with an authority that comes from real knowledge of, investment in, and attention to the details of the African cosmologies and textual complexities she unearths.
~Carine Mardorossian, SUNY-Buffalo
The most original and significant contributions are the often brilliant readings of Morrison, Adisa, and Danticat. The work is riveting, both methodologically and critically.
~Leslie Sanders, York University
In Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings, Dr. Weir-Soley successfully undertakes an analysis of how black women writers, beginning with Zora Neale Hurston in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God, have used overlapping narrative depictions of sexuality and spirituality to recast the denigrated black female body and rewrite an empowered and fully actualized black female subject.
~Candice M. Jenkins, Associate Professor of English, Hunter College, City University of New York
Adisa’s initial interest in writing can probably be traced back to the stories she was told by her Aunt Zilla, who Adisa would visit during the summer. Since she was frequently around storytelling, Adisa reflects on “always writing, or at least making up stories and poems in [her] head" (Agard 43). When she left for Hunter College, she was not aspiring to major in English or Creative Writing, but Mathematics. Adisa made the shift to writing after attending a poetry reading by Sonia Sanchez, and reading the novel Cane by Jean Toomer (Leach). Other influences on her writing include Kamau Brathwaite and Mervyn Morris, both of whom she met and came to know personally when she returned to Jamaica in the mid-seventies. In her interview with Kwame Dawes, she says she had "been influenced a lot more so by fiction or prose than by poetry" (188).
Read Me and Be Roused: You Are the Audience for My Work
I am the first audience for my work. I am always writing out of knowing, fettering out some deeper meaning, seeking to understand whatever has piqued my interest, that has arrested my attention, and that has captured my imaginings. I really wanted to understand what was it about a mother’s hatred of the man who impregnated her that she would take out her sorrow and unforgivingness on the child she carried in her womb for nine months. What did his father do that burned her so deeply that she could not let go of the pain and be free to love and live again?
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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