At Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn, Prof Elizabeth Nunez is huge. Students attending a literary event there last November cheered their newly appointed provost like a superstar. The Trinidad-born writer and scholar is a distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY), of which Medgar Evers is a part. She's also a celebrated author and last month's publication of her seventh novel Anna In-Between will only add to her cachet. In the book, Nunez's main character is a West Indian woman living in the US who returns home for a month-long visit with her parents only to discover that her mother has advanced cancer.
The character, Anna Sinclair, is a brown skinned intellectual who questions her identity. As the book says: "She is all of these: African, Amerindian, Asian, European. She is Caribbean and not Caribbean, for she has lived many years in America. She is American and not American, for she has lived many years on her island." In an e-mailed response to interview questions from WomanWise, Nunez said last week, "What occasioned this novel was a deep sense of loss and sadness. I had done what immigrants do: I had worked hard and achieved a measure of success for myself and my family. But now that was done, what next? Where did I belong? Where were my roots? I had spent most of my life outside of my homeland where my navel string was buried. Would I always be a foreigner both in my adopted country and in my homeland?"
Though resident in New York, the author has a terrific connection with Trinidad, and said she made many trips back here in the past few years. "Trinidad is in my blood, my heart and my mind. Whenever I return, I replenish myself with the sounds, smells, sights and feel of Trinidad. I think to a great degree, landscape shapes us, and I am shaped by the smallness of the island where I was raised, and by the sea, the mountains, the two-season weather of lush greenery and suffocating heat. "I have a theory about this, about how the island shapes us, or, let me say, shaped me. I think my ambition came from always looking outward, as one does when one is surrounded by water. I think my lack of confidence, which I struggled against for years, came from being taught that the world was there, outside, not here, on the island."
Is Anna In-Between her story?
"All fiction, I believe, is to some degree autobiographical, at least in its emotional intensity," Nunez said. "I have played with facts in this novel, but readers who know me and who know the island may recognise people and places.�"Of course, this novel is very much inspired by the story of my parents' marriage, their love for each other and the values that were important to them. I am happy that I had the chance to tell my mother that I was writing a novel somewhat based on her. By a sort of serendipity, the mother in the novel hopes to live to 90; my mother died one month after her 90th birthday, in 2008." In the book, the mother absolutely refuses to go to the US for treatment, and Nunez uses the book to tear into the island's health care system. She said in the e-mail, "In the US, we are now having a spirited debate on health care and I always felt proud of the fact that we had a system in Trinidad that provided health care for everyone.
Unfortunately, experience has shown me that in Trinidad there are two types of health care: health care for the poor and health care for middle class people who can afford to pay for a private nursing home and would not be caught dead using the public health care system." Nunez grew up in an upper-middle class home like the one in the book. (Her sister, Karen Tesheira, is a successful lawyer and the current Minister of Finance.) Anna In-Between casts a critical eye on class, on the whole. "One of my sisters complains that I write too much about race and class," Nunez noted in the interview, "but I think discrimination based on race and class remains very much the central problem in the world, in Trinidad and in the US. All the problems in the world flow from that: poverty, mortality rates, crime, oppression, lack of education.
We ignore this scourge at our peril. Trinidad often fools itself into believing it is exempted.�What a lie!" Anna In-Between was an Editor's Choice in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and a CUNY writer called it "a compelling and lifelike novel". Nunez's prose in the book is spare and poignant. She writes about domestic life with cunning attention to detail, calling to mind the artful, insightful writing of Modernist giant Virginia Woolf. Nunez modestly said, "It's difficult to say any book is one's best book. My novels are all very different, in content and style. This novel was particularly challenging. I wanted to nail each image and scene in as few words as possible.�I wanted to drill down to the diamond. Cadence was important to me; words had to flow musically into each other, sentence into sentence. I spent many months revising and revising to achieve a meaningful correlation between the 'what' of the novel–the subject matter–and the 'how'–the language I used."
More info
Prof Elizabeth Nunez will be the feature speaker at the St Joseph's Convent, Port-of-Spain, Hall of Excellence Induction Ceremony on Tuesday.
She will launch Anna In-Between on Wednesday at The Reader's Bookshop, corner Middle and Patna Streets, St James at 7 pm. On October 22, she will read from the book at Paper Based, The Normandie, St Ann's at 6.30 pm.
