novelists-from-jamaica

"Jamaicans don't like to admit to all of the things that are wrong with their society. Children are unprotected. They are fair game, basically. Violence against women and children is endemic and accepted. Academics write about it as if it is a subversive act. Women are simply expendable, and when they write about it, it is always a woman's fault somehow. A woman is mad because she is drinking or something. There's never any rational reason why somebody reaches this point."

"In Unbelonging the past is a handicap, just as it is for so many people here. It's something that stops them from going forward because they've never actually come to terms with exile. It is as much exile if you emigrate as if you came because you had to, particularly for young people who came in their preteens. They had no choice. They are as much exiled as a political refugee. Memory is a funny thing. It keeps you sane because there is another, better dreamland that you can escape to. It commonly has that function here. But what happens when memory comes up against reality? That's what has caused so much pain for people here. When they were able somehow to find the money - half of them actually went to the moneylenders to get it - and went back to paradise, paradise was an illusion. What happens with memory is that it's very faulty. It edits out pain."

"the church has done more to destroy people in the Caribbean than any other institution."

"She saw them before they saw her, the two men leaning against a dusty red Cortina and looking out of place in the regimented grey street. Her heart lurched and her stomach sickened. There was a stitch in her left side and she leaned heavily into it, pressing her palm hard against the spot, her breathing ragged as she came to a dead stop."

"[about writing a character who works as a cleaner] you've got to look beyond the mop because there's a human being there; and until you can accept the fact that people are people and stop seeing people through the eyes of occupation segregation then you are always going to be prepared to step on people."

"We have a word - I don't know if you have anything like it in America - we say that something "clide" you. It gets so strong that you get sick of it. That's how I used to feel about black American literature, especially that of the men, because it was very defeatist. It's a certain something very much like fundamentalist Christianity. It never actually looked at internal blame, which is as important as external blame, because if you can't take responsibility you're not human and you're not adult and you're not able then to ask for a share in things."

"(Q: Your first three novels are powerful indictments of racism, Joan. Yet you've gotten some negative responses from the British for them.) Riley: I think because I'm writing about their backyard. It's okay for people from elsewhere to write even similar things, but it's not right to write about British systems in the same way."

"[about the character Hyacinth in The Unbelonging] the reason she's an outsider here [in England] is because she never ever made a life here. She lived there in the past, but time continued."

"I think I'm an odd kind of Caribbean writer in the sense that I don't come out of the rich, middle-class elite who are the traditional writers. It's almost like cloning themselves, you know. So what they write is very much their image of the world. There's never been a voice that's been a poor voice, and I've never, ever seen myself reflected in Jamaican fiction. To some extent in Olanda Paterson, but very little. All of them, including Olive Senior, can't get into the psyche [of poor people] because they don't know it and it's an alien place, something they are afraid of. And so what happens is that they create a distorted image of people like me and my family."

"I've always been very unhappy about leaders. I see my brother with his cap in his hand, with his head bowed just like my uncles-probably like my grandfathers and my great-grandfathers-and he's saying, "Mr. Manley, liberate us, man." Then I think, But, you're not liberated. And that's because we look always to somebody else. I never write about the leader. It's always the antihero because the antihero is the salt of the earth. And if this earth is to have any chance, it is the antihero we are going to have to look to."

"It struck me that memory is actually quite negative in lots of ways because it stops you from creating new, sustaining memories as a kind of other to survive with...It's...as though if you don't resolve all that luggage you carry around with you, it somehow is going to come back and haunt you."

"because I have written a book which actually goes to the heart of how poor people are kept in control - which is by the church actually doing the job for the government - people are resentful."

"I've been told my poetry is anti-male and anti-white. I think that's very unfair because it raises issues like, Have I not got a right to protest against your exploiting me because you are being exploited, too? I mean, isn't that how we get into hierarchy? And isn't that how we get into trouble? Well, people don't like those questions."

"I started to write because I was getting so angry that I thought that I was going to explode, because the images on the television I was seeing about Jamaica were deliberately misleading images. It was at the time that Jamaica was going through a very bad patch, you know. It was fermenting; there was lots of destabilization. I saw it from the other side...from the mean streets of Kingston. On television they would only spin the shacks and they would say, "This is Jamaica." And of course the way it was being portrayed didn't happen."

"Joan Riley has an extraordinary ability to portray pain and loneliness...her novels become powerful parables of the creation and destruction of illusions... It is this quality which steels Joan Riley's work and the lives of her characters."

"racism is not a white problem; it's a problem of the world."

"…you can’t assimilate until you are something. Then you have something to give other people. My position is this: the universe, the universal, is beautiful, but if you imagine the world as a set of plates piled on each other, there’s this one that’s a little skewed because of a particular history in the New World: our history, that of the descendants of the slaves, is skewed, and it is at the bottom. And if you don’t settle that one, all the others will fall and crash. So that one has to be settled, has to know itself, so that it can take its place sitting firmly with all the other plates…It will continue to run away from us. People don’t know what it’s like, being snubbed for how you look, always being seen as the sniper or whatever. How can they know, unless we stick up for ourselves and say this is who we are."

"People read about these things in something called “history” at school, but it’s not made to relate to your real life. You hear about the slaves, and who wants to be related to the slaves? They’re not people, they’re some creature that you read about. So why would you believe it happened to your people, or anywhere near you? So even if we’re doing all these things, you are not quite sure how much of it is sticking—but it’s worth a try."

"Reading Dr. Erna Brodber’s novel Myal (1988) is a transformative experience that unchains both truths and memories and moves you to explore what she calls the “half that’s not been told”...A paragon of cultural memory, Brodber lives truly, completely and freely as a cultural historian, sociologist, novelist, teacher, community organizer, social activist, caregiver, mother, entrepreneur, healer and chronicler."

"The business of being translated—it’s an honor if people from somewhere else, another language group, another culture, want to hear what you have to say."

"…all sorts of things that don’t even look political got mixed up with the 1970s and the new politics. So, that was how, when I came here, how I viewed Mr. Manley and Woodside. Anything that was out of the current order then was now possible. As if Mr. Manley had shattered some sort of glass globe and people could go inside and take what ideas they felt like having. It was really quite revolutionary, if unstructured. (2015)"

"My work belongs to the people who are reading it. That’s how I hold with the work going away: people have the right to put their interpretation and their meaning into it—it is in the public arena."

"…it’s not just a culture, it’s a history that needs to be preserved. There have been so many omissions in our history…that’s one of the things I set out to do: to preserve…[it] might have come from my knowledge of how people’s history gets distorted and stolen."

"I think that what Erna Brodber is doing is wonderful because she's coming from that extremely spiritual dimension which is so powerful."

"not only do I want people to know the history of the underclass, but I want them to go investigate. So, engaging with my work should send you into further investigations into knowledge. So, it’s a stimulus to knowledge search. (2015)"

"Louisiana was part of my larger interest in Africa and diaspora, and the need for blacks of the diaspora, and to a certain extent of Africa, to know each other and to understand that you have to get through it together, for political purposes if nothing else…[it] was an attempt to say, “Look, we’re the same thing.” So it’s not just the preservation, it’s also the preaching"

"I don’t know that the writers are aware enough of the rural. I mean, there’s nature, they will talk about the blue skies and they’ll talk about the roses, but—my models, which are deeply embedded in the soil, I’m not sure I see anybody else doing that. Because I’m a rural child, I understand these things, I want to understand them. So my metaphors will tend to be coming out of agriculture. (2015)"

"Had I lived in Jamaica, I could not have been a writer…I wouldn't be courageous to challenge the issues that I challenge in my work, you know, especially homophobia, sexualization of our young girls, race, class, socioeconomic disparities. Being here in America gave me that opportunity…"

"I could not write properly until I owned every aspect of my identity - my identity as a lesbian woman, my identity as a black woman, my identity as a Jamaican woman, an immigrant, then also a working-class Jamaican woman..."

"I feel like we’re constantly evolving as human beings, and there are usually epiphanies that happen. It doesn’t have to be the deepest darkest secrets but something that we didn’t know before, that we just discovered, and we’re like, “Oh. Wow,” and the world suddenly looks different…"

"I think what’s going on with this country is that Americans are now experiencing what it’s like to be an immigrant because it’s not the easiest decision to move away from your home land. And so when that decision is made it’s definitely because you’re fleeing something and hoping for the better, but still not wanting to cut ties with your country…"

"Being a big black man in America, I literally do not know how to conduct myself in a physical space. I don’t know how to meet people without it seeming intimidating. I don’t know if I should wear glasses, if I should try to look extra gay, if I should stand up, sit down, wave my ID, not reach for an ID. I don’t know. I am literally immobilized in the presence of a lot of police power. That is a reality that could cross any form of social class, because it’s racist. And it’s very Caribbean of me to think my class can exclude me from racism. It’s very Caribbean of me to think that if I just dress nicer, if I just wear a suit… It has nothing to do with that, it’s racism…"

"I was trying on being a writer for size…I was trying on writing about things that are close to me for size. Like sexuality. At the time, I wasn’t in any form of gay relationship. It’s funny that I’ve gone from hating pop psychology to being way too Freudian. I can see all my fears and desires in it. Ones I could never give in to because I was deep in the church and I was a super-suppressed gay dude."

"Make no mistake, there’s formula detective fiction, there’s formula science fiction…but there’s formula literary fiction too. It’s genre snobbery that we’re only ready to acclaim stuff that’s of the genre but different in some way. It’s sci-fi but, it’s fantasy but… I didn’t want to write a but."

"A lot of it came out of all the research and reading I was doing. African folklore is just so lush. There’s something so relentless and sensual about African mythology. Those stranger elements aren’t about me trying to score edgy post-millennial points. They are old elements. A lot of this book was about taking quite freely from African folklore, specifically from the area below the Sahara Desert. And that’s important to me. Mostly when people think of sophisticated Africa, they think of Egypt. And even that they attribute to aliens."

"Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth."

"The affliction of today is one concerned with who we are—and the need for a we. The question is, “What will be the cure?” That is where the Third Event becomes important you see, because it is a recognition that we are a species, but not in the manner we have been accustomed to, that we can narrate this problem in a different way."

"in this country we must begin to think about education as an initiation into a world full of symbols and descriptions about who we are. Thinking of it as initiation helps us to understand the importance of introducing something else into the lives and worlds of children. Initiation also gives an understanding of the symbolic significance of education, and how language and art structure the whole of our existence. We need to re-initiate ourselves, a symbolic life through death, and create ourselves anew!"

"Where Africa as our ‘origin’ becomes important is in recognizing that if we are going to tell a different story of ourselves, we must grapple with the beginnings, in which Africa is not only important for Blacks but the key. They want us to think about Africa as a way to think about affliction but it is Africa that gives us so much of our language world, and gave us much of what has been transformed over time, and continues of course into the present. And so you see, we cannot have the Third Event without Africa right at the middle—because how do you tell the story differently if the beginning hasn’t been grappled with?"

"As he returned to the congregation he sought for words to share with them the long journey that he had taken. He sought for words to tell them of the world that he had entered where there were no far places and no strangers: only men, like themselves, who would one day inhabit together the same new continents of the spirit, the same planets of the imagination. (21: The Journey)"

"...as he sat waiting, he took up a fragment of wood and carved idly, thinking of making a toy for the child. Then as he shaped the rough outlines of a doll, he began to concentrate. For the first time in his life he created consciously, trying to embody in his carving his new awareness of himself and of Hebron. When he had finished he put the doll in his pocket, and left Hebron as twilight settled into the hollow spaces between the hills. He took the short cut down the hill-side that by-passed the church. From time to time he touched the doll as if it were a fetish. For, in carving the doll, [he] had stumbled upon God. (20: The Return)"

"The cheap and easy radicalism does not address the underlying requirement for a total transformation—who are we as Black people, as Africans? The Marxists, and actually no party could give us that. Only we could do it! That is the easy way. The hard way is to reclaim our past, present and future selves, totally!"

"this is where the potential of Black studies was! Language is the way that we will carry ourselves out of these problems we have—that is what is important now to remember about Black studies during those early years, that it was one part of a bigger project of developing a transformation of knowledge and therefore the transformation of the whole of society, by using a different language to address these intellectual concerns."

"Ann sat in the back of the cart, and, as they drove off, she waved to Aunt Kate. The old woman did not wave back. The past had taken over in her mind once more. (7: The Money-Box)"

"The sun reared up over Hebron like a wild horse. It streamed across the sky, tangled with the naked branches of trees, brightened the hills, illuminated winding paths, glittered like incandescent dust on the heads and shoulders, the marching feet of the congregation; rimmed their flags and banners with light, and settled in the gleaming river of morning that flooded the land. (7: The Money-Box)"

"In the square not even the ghost of a wind stirred the naked trees. Aware of the creeping death around them, the children no longer played by the spring. They remained at home, lingering by their mothers or sitting on the doorstep beside their fathers. And they wondered at the silences which had sprung up between their parents, between neighbour and neighbour. (6: The Star-Apple Tree )"

"It was early morning. There were mists over the hills and valleys of Hebron. Down in the square, Aunt Kate sat on the cold earth beside the spring. She rocked to and fro and cradled her arms as she hummed a lullaby. The clear water murmured an accompaniment. She had dressed hurriedly, and her cotton frock was unfastened at the back, her headkerchief askew, like a crumpled hibiscus. A light wind lifted the loose strands of her grey hair. Her face was oval. Pouches of reddish-brown skin framed a beaked nose and black eyes as swift as bees. The sound of feet squelching on wet grass, of people greeting each other, carried towards her. She remained still and listened. Then she smiled and nodded. Her lips formed words that were propitiatory echoes. The part of her mind which was secret and cunning accepted that she would have to pretend to practise rites which the others used to assure a reality from which she had escaped. For the others were not without power. If they demanded her involvement in their conspiracy, she needed them in hers. (beginning of 1: The Vow)"

"Public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely use the acronym ‘N.H.I.’ to refer to any case that involved a breach of the rights of young Black males who belonged to the jobless category of the inner city ghettos. N.H.I. means ‘no humans involved.’"

"In the silence that followed, the bubble of the morning's celebrations was shattered and the fragments went spinning away like the mist in the morning light. (from 1: The Vow)"

"[He] heard her singing and knew that she had forgotten him already, that in the morning, if she remembered him, it would be with the vagueness of an indistinct dream. And knew that, walking away from her, he was walking away from the land and the people whose reflected image of him had shaped his dreams, fashioned the self that he would now go in search of, to be swept away into the wide indifference of the sea. (19: The Rape)"