I am sure if asked you who’d be the best person to state ...
The writer Vis-à-Vis Self and Society
UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES OPEN CAMPUS ST VINCENT
(16 AUGUST 2001)
I am sure if I asked you who’d be the best person to state what carpentry is, you’d say to me, “Why, of course, a carpenter.” And I would agree with you. I’m here today to talk to you about “ The Writer in Vincentian Society” and you are probably wondering how could I speak on such a subject inasmuch as I have left St. Vincent almost thirty-three years ago. And to be frank with you, I wonder if I am qualified to discourse on such a topic. Moreover, I suspect that you expect me to say something about what writing is or what it accomplishes. But unlike carpenters, writers rarely agree on what the function of writing is. Some writers will even argue that it has no function. So any information I give you about writing will not represent the views of all writers.
Before I get into my topic I need to clarify that from this point onward when I use the word writer, I mean the writer who explores reality via the imagination as opposed to the writer of scholarly papers and books. Incidentally I do both.
The best creative writing is that which emerges from the deepest part of the psyche. Psychologists generally agree that the characteristics of the psyche that they seek to measure and quantify in the laboratory have already been depicted in the works of the world’s greatest writers. Indeed long before the term neurosis was coined, Shakespeare presented one of the best examples of it in Lady Macbeth’s compulsive handwashing. But insofar as it is true that profound writing originates in the psyche, one cannot be absolutely certain why he or she writes. One feels a compulsion to write. Moreover, the moments of one’s profoundest writing come unexpectedly—are unplanned. It is for this reason that writers almost always carry around stationery.
If we examine closely the works that we’ve studied as literature—I trust that all of you present here—did study literature since in recent years the ministry of education has deemed it superfluous in all but its two elite secondary schools—you will find that they were some way preoccupied with the handicaps of humanity. In some cases those works suggest how we might transcend or how we might learn to live with such handicaps. One entire category of writing, satire, focuses uniquely on our handicaps, exaggerates them, turns them into humour. Satirists of the eighteenth century who considered themselves to be humanists—that is to say that they were preoccupied with improving society’s morality—claimed that the purpose of their satire was to correct vice. Then no one took the claim seriously, and today we deem the claim ridiculous.
One might say that writers are keenly aware of humanity’s disease with the human condition. Our–meaning here everyone—mythic symbol or myth for such dissatisfaction is the fall. We are all imbued with a longing for some state of happiness. Religions tacitly agree that the earthly happiness we long for is unattainable and have cleverly fashioned doctrines of post-life bliss, presumably to lessen our frustration resulting from the futile terrestrial struggle. A lot of great literature is the result of the individual writer’s response to this struggle to attain happiness. How writers portray it is clearly a reflection of their temperament, their love of literary play, and most important of all their talent. William Faulkner puts all of what I’ve been saying quite succinctly in his statement that great literature springs from the human heart in conflict with itself. In his poem titled “Meru”, William Butler Yeats dismisses the orderliness civilization tries to impose as mere illusion: he says :
Man,s life is thought
And he despite his terror cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality.
I suppose that if Earl Lovelace, whom others and myself consider to be the pre-eminent contemporary English Caribbean novelist, could be persuaded to pronounce on the subject, he’d probably agree with Faulkner and maybe even yeats. Here are samples of what other writers have said:
Shelley, in his ode “To a Skylark” states that well known passage
We look before and after
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Less known but just as poignant is W. H. Auden’s rendition of what the writer might do. You’ll notice that Auden is far more certain of the writer’s task than I am. You will see too that he evokes the metaphor of the fall and suggests that poetry might help to make tolerable our postlapsarian lot:
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress
In the desert of the heart
Let the healing fountain start
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
And the best folk literature embodies this complex response to the human condition. Take the Blues,for example--African America’s folk songs cum poetry. The late African American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison made the following statement:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal existence alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain
and transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.
Ellison’s brutal experiences refer to lynching, one’s house being spitefully burned down, being refused employment, or when able to procure employment being paid less than a livable wage, one’s sister or daughter raped, or brother killed without possibility of redress—all because of one’s race. This essay was written in 1945. Today we forget that The Iliad and The Odyssey were once oral literature, that most of the stories that comprise the Old Testament scriptures were once oral literature. Nearer home, Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain borrows much from folk literature.
Writers who take their vocation seriously shun all neat moral and religious formulae, especially of the fundamentalist sort. They instinctively know—Arthur Miller’s The Crucible being the best example I can think of—that those who adhere to these formulae publicly must violate them privately; either that or they lead psychologically diseased lives. It is to this sort of truth that Auden is alluding to in the first stanza above. “Follow poet follows right to the bottom of the night.” Night is an important metaphor here, to the extent that it is in the darkness of the human condition that we conduct our mostly unsuccessful explorations. But following right means telling the truth even if it lands us in jail, the Gulag or in earlier times on the wood pyre. Writers therefore are suspicious of packaged truths. It is as if we know that every truth contains its contradiction, every reality, as Jung affirms, contains its shadow, and the packaging is designed to conceal the contradiction.
Here, for example, is what Yeats does with the Christian doctrine of chastity:
The poem’s title is: “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.” It is Crazy Jane who is addressing the reader:
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
“Those breasts are flat and fallen now;
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.”
(Here’s Jane’s answer)
“Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,” I cried.
“My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.
“A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement,
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.”
Thus in a few short lines Yeats tosses Paul’s doctrines about the body being the temple of the living God and the doctrines of sexual continence onto the flames of empirical reality. A few hundred years earlier, of course, he might have been whipped or worse yet burned at the stake for this.
These contradictions between the real and the ideal, between public conformity and private liberty, reveal irony to be one of the writer’s indispensable tools. Who has read William Blake’s poetry and not been thrilled as conformity, dogma, and lies shatter on the anvil of his irony! I can tell you that I personally, exhausted by puritan notions of evil, found the maxims of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell a restitutive tonic.
On this subject of irony let me return to Earl Lovelace. In his novel The Wine of Astonishment, Lovelace initially reveals Bolo to be the community’s defender, its source of pride, and its best instructor of what’s essential for its dignity—and all this in the context of the Spiritual Baptist Tradition. At the end of the novel, however, Bolo is the community’s scourge or if you prefer nemesis. A parallel situation obtains in The Dragon Can’t Dance with the characters Alrick and Fisheye. This time with carnival as the central identity metaphor. Both novels may be read as depictions of the failure of Trinidad’s independence, and by extension the independence of English Caribbean countries. At the core of these novels are two institutions which Lovelace carefully Africanizes—carnival and the Spiritual Baptist religion. In the novels they are embodiments of the Caribbean soul; thus how the characters defend, assail or cheapen them is made a measure of the self-respect such characters accord themselves. Those of you familiar with these novels know that both institutions are cheapened with dire consequences for the community’s stalwarts who turn against the society with a persecuting zeal.
But even here, I am simplifying, perhaps distorting the complexity of Lovelace’s novels. ( In parentheses let me say that therein lies the uneasiness between literary criticism, which relies on logic, and the work of art whose power often lies in depicting dilemmas)
You have probably noticed that I have turned both of these novels into allegories, and you’re probably saying: reality is not necessarily configured as you claim Lovelace depicts it. And my answer to you is that the job of the literary artist is to distil reality and sometimes reinvent it. Thirty years may be reduced to ten pages or for that matter a single page. Or familiar places become unrecognizable, especially if the writer wants you to see such places afresh. For example in my forthcoming novel, Behind the Face of Winter, Sion Hill is transported to Cane Garden, and is renamed Mount Olivet, and Mount Olivet is not to be found in St. Vincent but rather on a fictional island, the fictional Island, where all my Caribbean work is set, and which I call Isabella Island. In the forthcoming novel I cannot remember if St. Vincent is one of its neighbours, but I know it is in the novel I’m now writing. I’ll expand on this later on.
If the writer is to be, as Henry David Thoreau puts it, Chanticleer who wakes the sleeping society up, or if the poet is as Shelley says, the unacknowledged legislator of mankind, then society has to be able to read what the writer has written. I once heard a famous Vincentian (whose name I shall not mention) brag about the fact that he does not read fiction and poetry. Upon further conversation I discovered that for all his education he was not literary literate. He did not know how to read imaginative texts. I can tell you that in all so-called developed countries literature is part of the curriculum. I can also tell you that many countries like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Holland provide their writers with income so that they can devote at least part of their time to writing. More than that they ensure that their populations are literate and that the works of their writers are available at reasonable cost. It does not surprise me that these are among the most intellectually sophisticated populations on the planet, the societies most tolerant of human differences, and among the planet’s most generous. They are also the populations least likely to attend Church, because, I would like to think, the humanistic portraiture that literature produces has helped to imbue them with the understanding that they must work out their own salvation.
Regardless of where one lives, if one has the requisite literary skills, s/he will encounter in literature some of the most moving human experiences ever. These literary encounters too will be some of our most humanizing experiences. I mean humanizing in an almost religious sense: in our understanding of the need for forgiveness, of the limits of vengeance, of the pitfalls inherent in the lust for power, of the enormous moral degradation we engage in when we abuse others. When it comes to portraying the deadly sins, preachers cannot outdo writers. But unlike preachers, writers know that the hell endured is in this life, and sometimes it is more or less hellish than religious dogma admits. You want to understand the limits of pride? Read George Elliot’s The Mill and the Floss. The limits of wealth? Read The Great Gatsby. The tragedy of wilfulness and self-indulgence? Read King Lear. The tragedy of ambition? Read Macbeth. The illusion of human ambition? Read also Macbeth. You get my point. But perhaps one of the qualities of great literature is the sympathy and understanding it engenders in us for those whose foibles or fatal flaws handicap or destroy them. Great writing is about understanding, not persecuting.
So far I have been dealing with great literature. There is a lesser literature as well. Alas this includes many of those propaganda pieces designed to make assembly-line patriots of us all or to salve the consciences of pillaging imperialists. “Land of Our Birth We Pledge to Thee,” Kipling’s “If” (Mckay so rightly called him “the bugle of empire.”) Long Fellow’s, “ Psalm of Life.” John McCrae’s “In Flanders Field” I shall comment only on “Psalm of Life” and “In Flanders Fields.”
“Lives of great men all remind us/ We must make our lives sublime.” (I am sure the older members of this audience remember this) Who are these great men? Pissaro? Cortez? Cromwell? Cecil Rhodes? King Leopold? I beg to differ, and thank heavens, so do many of us—feminist scholars, deconstructionists, postcolonialists—who’ve made it our mission to challenge the master narratives and interrogate the very meaning of meaning.
I won’t define what a great person is; good creative writing doesn’t define; there is death in definitions. But if a person is great, I suspect she/he will not be a writer of fiction, nor an inventor of weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps s/he will be a Desmond Tutu, a Mahatma Ghandi, a Mother Teresa, or your exceptional uncle and aunt who has a word of honest encouragement when it’s needed, a patient ear, and who shares his or her crumb with anyone. “What’s a sublime life?” and “what are those footprints that we should leave on the sands of time?” First Nations of what’s called the New World certainly would have preferred that Columbus’s footprints stay in Europe. Longfellow’s poem, therefore, while it struggles to express the desire in many of us to be remembered beyond death, succeeds in being just slightly better than sententious nonsense. It’s a pity the educators of my day weren’t more sophisticated in the poetry they forced us to memorize. And when they did, as in the case of Wordworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” they were unable to help us uncover the sustenance in it. They made us recite it, made us veritable parrots, but never helped us made sense of the poem’s content.
Turning to “Flanders Fields,” here’s a poem often recited on Remembrance Day, a poem, I would argue, that urges us to perpetual war.
“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Certainly every warmongering leader must love this, but no bona fide humanist can support the message here. Why then do we recite it? If you were my students, I would have been interested in your answers. But I wouldn’t have provided any.
When I was a high school teacher I challenged the messages these poems convey. I have paired them with other works. Gray’s Elegy against “The Psalm of Life”. Wilfred Owens’ “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Arms and the Boy” as well Siegfried Sassoon’s “Repression of War Experience” against “In Flanders Fields.” For literature is one of the few academic disciplines where we can truly engage in critical thinking, where we can examine and pull apart the narcotic propaganda governments and society’s institutions daily drug us with. (Incidentally, history, depending on how it’s taught might be another). It is one reason why born-again Christians all over the world are busy trying to keep great literature out of schools. It is one reason too why some religious groups now urge the assassination of writers whose writings they do not like.
Almost invariably writers are outsiders in their societies. I suspect the reason is that conformity clouds the clear vision necessary to write penetratingly about the human soul and about society. The honest writer of necessity offends, rarely wilfully, but s/he names things as s/he sees them, brings into the foreground aspects of the society that politicians and religions mask or bury. It is for this reason that in theocracies and dictatorships so many of them are in prison.
To close this section and before moving on to the more autobiographical section of this lecture, I’d like to sum up what I think the serious writer partially knows. And I stress the word partially.
That our acts are rarely ever altruistic; that we employ the mantle of altruism to veil our baser motives, oftentimes from ourselves.
That we can never know the full truth about anything that we do since our reasons are often unconscious and reason itself allows us to know only what we are capable of dealing with.
That our best knowledge of ourselves comes to us when we are asleep—when our reason is least able to protects us from what we do not want to know.
That the self we reveal to the public is a carefully tailored one, whether or not we we’re conscious of this.
That the self we project is one out of which we’ve edited those traits we do not like; we put, so to speak, the better foot forward and hide or try to hide the lame one behind it, even when the disinterested observer can see that both feet are lame;
That most human beings are moral cowards but are incapable of admitting it.
That our greatest faculty is rationalization, in other words, we excel in using reason to deceive others and ourselves.
That truth too is fiction, insofar as it is something stitched together by the human intellect; one reason that the writer sometimes prefer to explore reality through fiction rather than accept the fiction offered as reality.
That all human beings are frightened by the uncertainty of existence and have concocted mythological systems to minimize that fright, and a consequence is that we live in constant self-ignorance.
That we all feel the need for salvation, but since we do not know what it is, and since we are too lazy to find out we delegate the responsibility for this to others, who then unduly control our lives.
That most human beings are morally lazy; and instead of acting independently and assuming responsibility for acts, we lazily obey others.
That power rather than love is our major drive, and when we do not have it we ally ourselves with those who do.
That the clever among us constantly juggle our need to dominate or to escape domination, even as we make every effort to remain bonded to and enjoy the fellowship and high esteem of others.
That when lies are comforting and demand no sacrifice of us we prefer them to the truth.
That most people uphold principles only when those principles uphold them
I could extend the list but I think the above is sufficient for our purposes.
Of course, one does not have to be a writer to know all of the above. One must merely possess the faculty of thought and the will to shatter the thought boundaries society’s institutions draw around us.
There is a list too of what writers do not know: it includes the entire list of what I’ve already told you writers know. I’m not being frivolous. In truth we do not know what humanity is, and much of the interesting fiction that we write are speculative explorations of this fact.
Here for example is my own take on the subject: (pp.22 & 30)
While indeed there may be those writers—usually of popular, formulaic texts—who may derive pleasure from writing, most writers whose texts matter have written out of the anguish of being human.
And finally, writers from as far back as classical Greece and Rome, whence literature derived the name humanities, believed that literature could make us better human beings.. The notion that literature is capable of “humanizing” us (it’s absence meant bestialization and believe me it was not without racist implications) has been around all this time. But in the aftermath of World War I and World War II more and more critics have begun to question this notion.
I promised Dr. Fraser that this lecture would deal with some aspect of my writing as it relates to SVG.I ‘ll do that now, hesitantly, because, like D. H. Lawrence, I prefer to trust the tale, not its creator. I was born in Dickson’s Village, not the likeliest place to develop an artistic sensibility. I could also say the opposite. An elementary school classmate reminded me that I drew all the time. I had forgotten, but it’s true. Today I cannot draw. I remember writing a poem when I was eleven but that’s the only creative writing I did in elementary school. However, I realize now that I have always had the character of a writer. I was definitely a loner and an outsider. I was always one who challenged limits and always knew in the deepest part of my being that our child-raising techniques are wrong. They stifled intellectual growth and punished curiosity. And in my years as an elementary school teacher, I refused to flog my students, and in the later years I endeavoured to remove the hierarchical barriers that separated teachers and their pupils. I have felt in opposition to my society—to the raw abuse of power everywhere around me.
I loved language. Everyone who taught me remembers one thing: my love of language.
From early adolescent I seem to be on a quest for spiritual knowledge. At sixteen, in response to such numinal urges, I joined a Fundamentalist Church but I remember that on the day I was being baptized I was far more fascinated by the rite itself than by its sanctity. I soon came into conflict with the leader of that church, for I quickly saw the impossibility of its dogma. I knew that the catharsis which intense worship produces was one thing, but that the grim reality of life and our biological needs were quite another. I left that church certain of one thing, that if God exists no one knows who or what God is, and that all that is written about God is pure speculation. Nevertheless, I did return to the Methodist Church. One reason I’m mentioning the religious here is that religion seems to play an important role in all my major work, published and unpublished.
During these years in SVG, I wasn’t sure where my powerful sexual desire for members of my own sex was going to lead me. Rather than fall into the pariah status society had created for homosexual I decided to don the mask of heterosexuality. Needless to say the attempts to conceal my same-sex desire and my unorthodox notions of religion forced me to restrict my interactions with others. Even so, I know that many people cared deeply for me and esteemed me highly., especially in the Evesham/Riley area where I lived for most of the period 1966-1968. This was especially evident in the several children I was asked to be Godparent to, in both the Anglican and Methodist Churches. This, believe it or not created a dilemma for me, for I knew that all those people were homophobes—Vincentian laws and mores encouraged and still encourage everyone to be a homophobe. I saw the pariah treatment they meted out to the one known homosexual in the community, and I knew I would be accorded similar treatment, were my full reality known. The love and respect I received was accorded to the mask , not to me.
It was while I lived in Riley and worshipped at the Evesham Methodist Church that I did begin to write—primarily sketches to be performed to raise money for Youth Fellowship activities. None of those sketches survive. I wish I had saved them.
I left for Canada in 1968. My experience upon arriving in Montreal was a disorienting one. I left St Vincent full of goodwill for all human beings. Within weeks in Canada I was an embittered human being. In less than two months my entire colonial education went out the window. In 1968 despite the civil rights battles raging in the US. Residents of the Caribbean were protected from subhuman designations white societies had created for Blacks. I was shocked by how Whites perceived me—I who had taught the children of planters—found myself being told that thanks to colonialism my ancestors had been cured of cannibalism; I couldn’t understand why women flirted with me and then became hostile when I didn’t respond, or why conversely they became nervous when I was around them, until I became aware of the myths white North Americans had trapped Black people in. Incidentally I’m still discovering some of them in Quebec City. When I got introduced to gay culture a year later, those myths became surreal. In short Blacks had come to embody whatever white people found monstrous in themselves. We became, in that surreal way that numinal phenomena work, the garbage dump, the cesspool for whatever poisons and depravities white people wanted distilled from their psyche. In fall1969, when I began university I was shocked when a biology professor flashed to his class of 110 students from an overhead projector, a chart of the state of human evolution—he said, and I quote, “At the bottom of the scale, the Negro’s primitive nose and mouth and dark colour show him to have preserved the largest number of traits from our ape ancestors. Nordics on the other seemed to have been most successful in discarding the apelike features.” This statement made, in October 1969, was a mere eight months after the Sir George Williams computer riot. Incidentally, I was the only Black student in the class, and fortunately the exam was multiple choice and scored by a computer. Recently students of mine have since told me that as late as the early 1980s those charts were found in their social science textbooks.
But let’s return to my first couple of months when I did not yet know about the “scientific” underpinnings of the subhuman identity that Whites had accorded me. What I knew then was that I must hold on to my dignity and not let White people define me. I read and read and read, all the books I would not have been able to lay my hands on in St. Vincent. I can truly say that Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask in large measure stabilized me. And my instinctive nature to resist served me in good stead. I remember Easter Sunday 1969, the last Sunday I attended church. I had with me Frantz Fanon’s Towards the African Revolution, and what the minister was talking about in his sermon struck me as so irrelevant to my own ontology as a Black man that I began leafing through Fanon’s book. Eventually I got up and left. From that day I began calling myself an agnostic and began to see how we have been duped by religion. It’s no accident that in my novel Spirits in the Dark, it’s the Spiritual Baptist religion that offers some sort of enlightenment, and that its African elements are emphasized and the Christian ones downplayed.
All this time my quest continued: it had moved from a what quest to a why quest. On my own I began to read existentialist philosophy. I never felt any compulsion to join the Vincentian Association or any association for that matter; in fact, it was to be some fifteen years before I would in anyway become involved with it. It was simply that I was on a quest for truth, and I felt that the pettiness of small island gossip and mores would have hindered, not helped, my quest. I don’t think I did much more in the first year than learn to speak French and read. There was so much to read, so much that Vincentian education, designed to make me an obedient and obsequious subject, had left out. There was so much to learn about the human and therefore my own condition, not to mention about my African ancestors and the sojourn of my African American brothers and sisters. In fact, the revolutionary in me made me see Caribbean society as retrograde, and I identified fully with the African American struggle. Of course all this reading did not answer my most profound questions; in fact it brought new questions that heightened the consciousness with which I lived.
In 1970 I combined part-time university study with a two-year course at Douglas Hospital at the end of which I became a licensed psychiatric nursing assistant. In my psychiatric nursing texts, I discovered quite a bibliography of useful books, beyond the scope of my training, that plunged me into my own study of the human psyche. In 1972 I went to university full-time and remained there full-time for the next four years completing in the process a BA, MA and a Diploma in secondary education—the first phase of my university education.
It was during my last year of that first phase, the 1975-76 school year—I was 28—that I began to write in earnest, but not for publication. I simply began to be overwhelmed by the need to put on paper the emotions that filled me. In doing so, I discovered that the writing came out in poetic form that there was a lot in me that sought expression in poetry. For the next eight years poetry possessed me. I wrote pretty much every day. Much of it was about humanity’s existential dilemma but a lot of it was about injustice. I remember especially one poem I wrote about the injustice the French, the English as well as Africans and Indians and Portuguese had collectively done to the Caribs. In those years, through writing poetry, I came to get a better hold of myself. But apart from a couple of pieces that a McGill professor wheedled out of me, I never attempted to publish any of it until 1983, when I submitted a poem to POETRY TODAY and it was accepted. That poem is now included in my collection MOVING THROUGH DARKNESS which a Montreal publisher eventually persuaded me to put out.
To show you the extent to which my Caribbean roots inform some of my poems, as well as the fiction that came later, I’ll read to you two of my poems. (“Return” & “My People I”) So you see from these poems how my birthplace and my personal history provide keys and metaphors for my understanding of my ontology .
My collection of short stories, How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow? is comprised entirely of stories whose settings some of you will be able to to identify. These stories and others published in literary journals or still sitting in folders were written during the years 1985-1993. The earliest draft of my novel Spirits in the Dark came in 1983. In fact, the first draft, of which all but fifty pages ended up in a waste paper basket, stopped me cold in the middle of preparing for my PhD comprehensive exams, and only when I got it down on paper could I resume work on my comprehensives.
Perhaps this is the place for me to talk about why my Caribbean setting is called Isabella Island. My reason is three-pronged: 1: I want my work to be about the English-speaking Caribbean and not just a single island; 2: I want the freedom to use my settings artistically and creatively; I certainly don’t want to be confronted with literal-minded people telling me, there is no house at the corner of this or that street and there is no hill there or what have you. 3:The third reason is even stronger than the other two: I believe that when reality is transposed to fiction it ceases to be reality; it becomes metaphor.
Even so the issues I explore in Spirits in the Dark, How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow? and to a lesser extent, Moving through Darkness are informed by my Vincentian childhood, although there’s little autobiography in what I write. What living abroad did is that it gave me perspective. It helped me get beyond the sort of insular reality small communities seem to need, and it certainly broadened and deepened my understanding of human nature. With this enlarged vision I have been able to turn a fictional eye on the Caribbean. Spirits in the Dark, which I consider to be my most profound work to date (it’s a university text in quite a few places), began as my need to understand what constitutes a West Indian identity. Let me say that it was a fictional journey I went on to excavate the Africa inside us, the Africa we do not always acknowledge and often demonize, but Spirits in the Dark was also an opportunity for me to explore what happens to the individual who feels constrained by society to repress his sexuality.
By now you must be wondering if I intend to speak all evening. I assure you I don’t so at this point I wish to thank you for listening so patiently, and special thanks to those of you who’ve felt like leaving, but in the end stayed. Again thanks to everyone for coming.
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