IRA MATHUR
Trinidadian Golda Lee Bruce, a former news anchor and journalist, is this Sunday’s featured writer on Bookshelf with her first book, Born on an Island: Stories from a Trinidadian Girlhood.
Launched in Trinidad earlier this year, Lee said her impetus to write this book came from her love of writing, which she has always used as a form of therapy (as a child, she kept a journal and wrote songs).
Born on an Island: Stories from a Trinidadian Girlhood when writing helped her to deal with the anxiety of flying. Lee says, “I would write to distract myself on the aeroplanes.”
After enormous encouragement on social media, where people responded positively to her personal stories, Lee decided to “re-write some old journal entries and some other stories from my life. Publishing was a natural next step.”
Lee, who was committed to telling “Caribbean stories” when she was a practising journalist in Trinidad–said she wants to “leave the world better than she found it” and “believes in the power of stories to motivate people and transform lives.”
The following is an excerpt from Golda Lee Bruce’s book Born on an Island: Stories from a Trinidadian Girlhood from the chapter “Teaching and Learning”. Reproduced exclusively for The Sunday Guardian with full permission from the author.
Excerpt
“Then one day, I became a target. My teacher saw me wipe my nose on my shirt. And in front of the whole class, she said, “Oh my God, Kezia! Don’t wipe your nose into your shirt, that’s disgusting!” I had told Ann to let them call me Kezia at this school. And so, from then on, I was known as the girl who wiped her nose on her shirt. I was ridiculed, I was laughed at, I was excluded from the games and all the fun. Apparently, if you came close to me, I would wipe my nose on you too. Stupid teacher.
Coping with the culture shock took a further toll on my academic progress. I hated school. I hated my teachers. Fortunately for me, the following academic year, the backwardness of the public-school system at the time allowed my teacher to segregate the class based on academic performance. This meant that I sat together with other academic and social misfits. Although they rarely spoke to me, I was grateful to not have been in the struggle alone.
The teacher who segregated us did not like children. There could be no other explanation of her behaviour. She was disgusted by us; she was revolted by us. I found myself as an untouchable in her caste system, but she was equally angry at every child in her classroom. Her choice of discipline was a metre long, two-inch-wide stick. She would make offenders face the far end of the chalkboard and flog them in front of the class. The physical pain wasn’t enough, so she piled shame on top of it.
Once, a boy who was known to come from extreme poverty showed up to school with his hair uncombed. It was also speckled with little balls of foam. We all knew that he slept on an uncovered mattress. It was not actually a mattress, but rather a piece of foam with the dimensions of the mattress. There were a couple of them at my home too. After asking him if he had slept under the bed, she instructed that boy to find a scrubbing brush. When he returned to the class, she made him brush his hair with it. Thankfully, in this school too, no one laughed at the boy’s shame. I knew first-hand that children could be cruel, but they could also be extremely compassionate. We all knew he didn’t deserve that punishment for being poor. No one deserves to be punished for circumstances beyond their control.”
Golda Lee Bruce, who earned an undergraduate in media and communications from the University of The West Indies and a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York, received an Ambassadorial Scholarship from the Rotary Foundation. Married with two children, Lee is a senior communications officer in Washington, DC.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023. (www.irasroom.org)
