If musicians make the most intractable interviewees, (because what they have to say is in the music) then writers run a close second, as some of those who attempted to question VS Naipaul at a UWI function honouring him after his Nobel award, discovered to their chagrin. Last Saturday UWI once again played host to two more diasporic writers from the region: Yale Professor of English, Kittitian-British Caryl Phillips and Trinidadian Robert Antoni, in what was billed as A Literary Conversation with a focus on Writing Caribbean Lives into Colonial History.
The soir�e was a joint venture organised by the Ansa Caribbean Awards Foundation, UWI, UTT and the Bocas Literary Festival, although as progenitor of the event and moderator for the evening Dr Raymond Ramcharitar inferred, both writers paid their travel expenses.
Once again the writers proved their unwillingness, or inability to be constrained–either by the questions posed by the moderator, or by the supposed focus–which resulted in frustration for some in the packed Learning Resource Centre auditorium, while for others it provided comic relief.
What might have been more productive would have been to allow a real conversation between the two writers to develop, which was surely the original intention, but the format was derailed into a series of responses from each writer to the moderator's questions.
That said, some of those responses proved invaluable to those seeking insights into the production and functions of literature. The evening got underway with readings from the writers' latest works, both historical novels. Caz Phillips (amongst whose awards was the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize for his novel (A Distant Shore) began with an excerpt from his recently-published novel The Lost Child, which revisits a Caribbean-English intertextuality, established by Jean Rhys' rewriting of the Charlotte Bronte canonical classic Jane Eyre in her 1962 Wide Sargasso Sea.
One of the protagonists in Phillips' novel is Heathcliff, anti-hero of Emily Bronte's equally canonical Wuthering Heights (which has already been reworked, or Creolised in Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Cond�'s Windward Heights).
A major theme which emerged throughout the conversation, was immediately introduced by Phillips in his initial gloss–the personal and opportunistic elements of creative writing. He explained how after migrating to England with his parents in the 1950s he had grown up Leeds, in the north of England, ten miles from the West Riding village of Haworth, where the Bronte sisters lived.
For 15 years a picture of Emily Bronte sat on Phillips' desk but there was no connection for him until years later he began to wonder about the "seven-year-old child who shows up on the docks at Liverpool," one of the British city-ports built on the profits of the slave trade.
It is estimated that in the two decades preceding the abolition of the trade in 1807, three-quarters of all European slaving ships left from Liverpool. Overall, Liverpool ships transported half of the three million Africans carried across the Atlantic by British slavers.
Phillips' introductory reading focused on the seven-year-old Heathcliff to be and his destitute mother, "a former Congo slave from the West Indies," definitely a case of inserting "Caribbean lives into colonial history" and a powerful evocation of the same empathy Phillips would claim later in the proceedings, to be one of literature's fundamental objectives.
The nameless, broken half-crazy woman is viewed against the backdrop of the prosperity derived from her suffering and while she's invisible to those bustling about their business on the dock, she is very much alive to her young concerned son.
The closeness of their bond is more clearly defined by the indifference surrounding them and their humanity remains intact. Despite the trauma of her past and present the former slave, in a moment of lucidity determines "her son will never walk behind a lady," that he will not suffer the same servitude she's endured.
Read in a melancholic monotone, this extract compelled the audience (and will do the same for readers) to reposition their sensibility. Rather than focusing on the slave experience in the Caribbean, it brings the results of that experience back home to the belly of the beast which created it, heightening pathos but simultaneously inducing empathy for the mother and son whose lives have been shattered by the same experience.
Bobby Antoni introduced the reading from his 2014 Bocas winning novel As Flies to Whatless
Boys by emphasising that this historical novel set in Trinidad in 1845, was essentially "the story of my mother's family the Tuckers," after whom the western valley is named.
Although much of the narrative is shaped by the abortive attempt of German inventor/charlatan J Adolphus Etzler and his associate CF Stollmeyer, to found an experimental Utopian community in Trinidad, under the auspices of their Tropical Emigration Society (TES), Antoni decided he wanted "to tell a small intimate family tale" rather than concentrate on the admittedly fascinating character of Etzler.
After reading part of the prologue (extracted from the journal of 15-year-old Willy Tucker, who along with his mother and sisters accompanied his former Chartist father to Trinidad as members of the TES) Antoni was questioned by moderator Ramcharitar about choosing to introduce Enlightenment ideas (experimental Utopian communities utilising machines to transform nature, leaving members free for other pursuits than labour), rather than the obvious tropes of slavery and indentureship.
Replying, Antoni stressed that the TES choice of Trinidad as a location, was firstly based on the fact that slavery had been abolished there.
He noted that both Etzler and Stollmeyer (whose pro-abolition newspaper office in Pennsylvania was burnt down and an attempt made to lynch him) along with the working class Chartist fugitives from London all subscribed to Enlightenment ideals of universal freedom and equality.
But he also noted the synchronicity of the TES arriving in the same year as the Fatal Rozack and the beginning of indentureship.
From this point the focus wobbled. Maybe Caz Phillips didn't respond too well to the moderator's blunt: "What does the Lost Child symbolise?", the same kind of dead end question as asking a composer what a piece of music means. Besides, Phillips is well aware that "publishing is a business" and he's in the business of selling his books and not revealing what can only be arrived at after careful reading. He parried by quoting William Faulkner's Nobel prize speech, that writing is concerned with "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."
The next questions about metropolitan audiences expectations about the Caribbean and "who are you writing for, an audience or yourself" were sidestepped by Phillips who pragmatically noted that "any writer affiliated to the Caribbean is regarded as a exotic adjunct to the English canon."
However, due to globalisation, increased travel and more cosmopolitan audiences former expectations no longer pertained.
"People should be encouraged to read, more than write," Phillips concluded.
Asked to comment about being called The James Joyce of the Caribbean, Antoni explained writing is based on what you read and when he began as graduate student he was reading Joyce, Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.
He posed the challenge to himself: "How do I make a novel as daring in terms of form and language?" With Whatless Boys he was attempting to make "my text as daring and as outrageous as Etzler."
Which he did by "breaking out of the text" with a website of appended films and documents. He went on to confess: "My obsession is with the vernacular.
"I'm looking for hybrid language and form to express that wonderful hybrid Caribbean sensibility."
Phillips then emphasised that for young writers "you will write what you read" and that "too many people don't read or read the wrong stuff.
"Reading is like nourishment. If you eat McDonalds you can't be an athlete."
In the brief Q&A session that followed, responding to a query about how to encourage social media and digitally-obsessed teenagers to read, Phillips reminded us all of literature's universal function–its focus on "the issues of the human heart," its requirement that "we read deeply and develop deep empathy for someone who is not you," a criterion chillingly opposed to the narcissism of social media.
Maybe not an insight on writing Caribbean lives into colonial history, but definitely a disturbing sound byte for our times.
