Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture hosted by me, alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, where one of our essential missions is really understanding the complex layers of our collective identity and resilience. Today we are turning our focus, in the ways of you know who we are, into one of the most vital aspects of our cultural heritage, and that is in Caribbean literature.

Speaker 1: 0:45

Literary history is central to understanding the Caribbean's past and present in many ways, and even future. The written word has long been a tool of resistance, cultural preservation, expression. I could go on and on, but you know, I think when we really understand some of the writings that came out of the 20th century in particular, that's where we really begin to underscore Caribbean writers. And you know how they began their craft to tell stories of who they are, their experiences, and you know, particularly in the face of colonialism and post-colonial challenges, colonial challenges.

Speaker 1: 1:26

And so, with us to extend that conversation out a little bit further before I get a little bit ahead of myself, we are joined by Head of Humanities and Professor of Modern Literatures in English at the University of Bristol, alison Donnell, whose new book Lost and Found in A to Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean offers an exciting new lens through which to view Caribbean literary history. By bringing attention to writers who have often been overshadowed or excluded from the traditional canon, this book really opens up new avenues for understanding Caribbean creatives and literary activists whose works shaped and you know, and sometimes should have shaped more increasingly the cultural landscape in ways that have not always been fully recognized. So, alison, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we get into the book, why don't you share a little bit with our listeners? You know your love for Caribbean literature and you know your connection to the region.

Speaker 2: 2:23

Yeah, absolutely so. My connection to Caribbean literature began really in the 1980s, a long time ago, when I was studying for a degree in English literature and I was very much committed to feminist and anti-racist movements at the time and engaged in those, and I had a commitment to educate myself if I wanted, you know, to see this transformation in terms of what we understand, where we understand from and how to combat the structures that were really still pervasive, very deeply pervasive, in the academy then. And so I was so fortunate that I took a course in Caribbean literature, taught by an amazing Guyanese academic called Michael Jokes, and really that was it. From that moment I just became kind of ignited, everything emotionally, intellectually, by this amazing body of work that was so exciting, both in its political ambitions and in its creative energies. Both in its political ambitions and in its creative energies and I guess I was, you know it really struck me that the world had met in the Caribbean in the most violent way, cultures had encountered each other in the most violent way, and yet the writers were really there to at this time of, I guess, like people making projects, imagining in the aftermath of that. How do we all learn to occupy this space together? How do we relate to each other? How do we relate to the world around us? And the social complexity, I guess, of those stories and yet the clarity with which they articulated kind of subjecthood was really dazzling to me. And that was it. So I was hooked.

Speaker 2: 4:09

I took a PhD, and I think it was really when I took my PhD, and my PhD was in women's writing, because I hadn't really been taught much women's writing and I've been told as an undergraduate that the women weren't really writing till later and everything in me was like nah, nah, it's just not true, I agree.

Speaker 2: 4:30

So I just. Also it was slightly bewildering that you know, you suddenly have given money to just do what you want in your own time, and that freaked me out a bit. So I spent my time in the library and I was really fortunate that there was a big center for Caribbean studies at the University of Warwick so amazing primary resources and I just literally nobody was up there. So I had a little piece of paper that was my bookshelf bookmark and I would just take off like 10 volumes and read them and go back the next day, take off another 10. Make up another 10. And I think I've just began to realize that there was this huge body of writing that I hadn't encountered, not only in the work that I'd studied as an undergraduate but in the critical writings that I'd studied. So I felt like the scale of the field and the texture of the field had just not been represented, and that was where I felt most excited to try and contribute to that work.

Speaker 1: 5:28

And I think that's something you know, having read Lost and Bound, that I tremendously see in this text as well, and so I gave a little bit of a preview. But do you want to share a little bit more about your vision behind you know, this composition, this edited collection, what inspired you to create the collection and perhaps what drew you to this particular project, having, you know, gone from an undergrad and grad student who opened yourself up into understanding Caribbean literature to you know there are layers to the to, I'm sure, your journey in academia. So you know what, what sort of, drew you to this project at this time.

Speaker 2: 6:07

So I think I've been doing this really slow research for a long time and I've been very aware that it wasn't really an area. So I was never able to publish my PhD, which was on Jamaican women writers before 1950. There wasn't really an interest in that. There was a kind of perception, I guess, that it was entangled in the colonial past and it wasn't really where attention was at the time. And I mean I can understand that there were so many brilliant contemporary women writers publishing and I was writing on them as well. But I always had this idea that the long history was worth telling, the deep history was worth telling and I just acquired as many sources as I could over time. So I would photocopy things I would you know. Whenever I could, I would buy it, and I mean booksellers, secondhand booksellers have a lot of credit in this book. You know who? People who say to me I had found this volume, do you want it? So it took a long time, I guess, to build up a library. So the Pioneer Press in Jamaica was a really important press publishing in the 1950s from the Gleaner newspaper. But we don't even have a definitive list of the titles published by that press. So every one I bought, I would go to the back and see what other titles it listed did. And so I have all of these kind of boring, nerdy spreadsheets about trying to work out, like how many books were published in this list, what did this publisher do, what did this writer do? And I could have probably gone on like that forever. But I got some really major funding from the Leverhulme Trust to have a project on Caribbean literary heritage, and the website is literally wwwcaribbeanliteraryheritagecom, and we made all kinds of resources the project team who were key to this including a wonderful resource to find the archives of Caribbean writers developed by Marta Fernandez-Kemper and we were doing this research during 2019.

Speaker 2: 8:03

And then something happened in 2019. I had the global pandemic and our access to archives that we planned. I had a kind of open suitcase for months, just looked at it. I was bound to Jamaica and never made that trip, and so I suddenly thought, well, what I do have for all of these books? And, like most bibliophiles, I collected more books than I'd ever read.

Speaker 2: 8:27

So I started just giving myself the discipline of taking down one of the writers, reading one of the books and writing a Facebook post about it, and so the whole A to Z started that way and I was really amazed by how historians and other contemporary writers had never heard of these writers and were interested and excited by them. So I realized really that my sense that there was this very narrow canon was not wrong. It wasn't just in the academy that these writers had been lost. They've been lost more generally to readers and interested publics. And then the wonderful Polly Petillo from Papiuk Press approached me and said, how about publishing that A to Z? And I think she probably thought it would be quite a short book because the entries were quite short on Facebook.

Speaker 2: 9:17

But that's when the professor in me kicked in, I think, and I realized that one of the things that had really struck me when I'd been looking for these writers was very often like a writer, like Vera Bell. Her poem Ancestor on the auction block is anthologized in very many places, but if you go to the author bibliographies either she's missing or it just says a writer from Jamaica. And I had this really keen sense that I couldn't represent these writers without knowing who they were. So the biographical research became a really important part of this project and some of the most challenging aspect of it as well and some of the writers who were in there.

Speaker 2: 9:58

There's still not that much of their life I've been able to tell. But I'm hoping that publishing this will act as a catalyst and everyone will say, hey, she didn't know that about Claude Thompson from Jamaica, and then they'll come forward. So the same with the bibliography. So it became a much more scholarly book because I felt like I'm at the stage now of my career where I cannot write about all of these writers in this book, but they all need to be written about, and far more still. So if I could go through the newspaper libraries, if I could go through all the bibliographers and do my very best to give scholars who are very, very time poor today and whom the career demands of being in the academy are very pressured, if I could give them a kind of foothold to do this sort of archival research, my hope was that these writers will be more fully recovered.

Speaker 1: 10:51

Thank you for that introduction. First of all, I think that underscores, you know, just what, to me, was just such a very impressive collection. Because I think sometimes when we think of particular texts, right, we think of the moment that they were published. We think of particular texts, right, we think of the moment that they were published and of course we don't always think of the lives in which the authors led or you know, their, their experiences, that even manifested in these texts a lot of times. Um, and you also brought up the canon of Caribbean literature, which brings me to sort of to my next question, in that from reading it I was glad that I wasn't sort of alone as somebody who loves Caribbean literature but is not, you know, in the sort of English discipline formally.

Speaker 1: 11:47

Figures of Caribbean literature who sort of kicked off or were the catalyst of Caribbean literature, particularly in the 20th century, come from this sort of 1950s moment, you know, of migrations, of windrush, etc.

Speaker 1: 11:56

Right Moving particularly to Europe, to the UK, and then really, you know, helping to concentrate in what becomes known as this Caribbean literature canon, and in a lot of ways this text debunks that right. It helps to really underscore that. You know, our canon is not necessarily traditionally only male, that it also wasn't just or didn't really start in the 1950s. There are just a lot of things that I think this text complicates. And so, whether that's time period, as I said, gender, ethnicity, as well as something that I was blown to here, just because you know it takes us on multiple routes, whether that's, you know, the impact of Indo-Caribbean writers, of multiracial Caribbean writers, etc. And so in what ways do you think the traditional canon has limited our understanding of our Caribbean literary history? And, you know, certainly, in what ways have some of the writers that you brought to light through this text helped to reshape that?

Speaker 2: 13:00

Yeah, thanks, that's a great question. I mean I think in very many ways. Yeah, thanks, that's a great question. I mean I think in very many ways. But perhaps to summarize, I think genre, absolutely. So I you know the shaping of genre and our idea of the novel being this, the form of giving consciousness to West Indian literature, I think is shaped by external forces. So genre, because really the short story in very, very many ways was a form that was dominant and prevalent at this time.

Speaker 2: 13:53

Definitely, gender, you know, as I said, you know I could find no women really of this period when I was studying and subsequently I found like four or five anthologies of Caribbean literature were published in the 1960s, edited by Andrew Sulkey. You know really great people. Not a single one of them has a Caribbean-born woman writer in them. So gender was really significant.

Speaker 2: 14:20

And location, I think so, as you said, it might have been Ken Ramchand who said that London was the literary capital of the Caribbean at this time, but that notion really that the making of the professional writer and migration went together, that you couldn't really be a writer in the Caribbean. So I think we miss the writers in the Caribbean because of that idea. And then I guess finally audience because of that idea and then I guess finally audience. So this notion that you're really a writer if you write to the major publishing houses to be reviewed by all the literary press in London and you're writing for kind of a literary readership, because very many of the writers that I have found they they were storytelling and a lot of those stories were for children and they wanted those stories to be imprint because they wanted Caribbean classrooms to have material of a Caribbean nature and I guess, in terms of what I found was absolutely a lot of the women were writing for very particular sort of communities.

Speaker 2: 15:29

So you know someone like Eula Redhead who had nine of her stories broadcast on what was seen as the sort of literary platform of the mid-century, the Caribbean Voices Radio Programme. She's really writing very specifically about Grenadian folklore and you know she's writing for a program that was broadcast back in the Caribbean. It had to go via London but that's where it was. And so I think you know someone like Edwina Melville who's writing very, very specifically to bring the Rupanuni in Guyana to life and the lives of the people there. So I think that that idea that writing was part of this huge project of building Caribbean cultural literacy, you know, and very many of these people were committed teachers in their professional lives as well. So this kind of mission of creating a body of work through which an education system could be transformed, through which people's reading materials and reading of themselves could be transformed, I guess that shaping of the nation at home, I think we really missed.

Speaker 1: 16:32

That is a tremendous point, I think. In many ways, right, I'm captivated, as you've pointed us, to the writers taking it upon themselves to really shape what is Caribbean history, Caribbean nationalism, etc. The work that they do and the difficulties with being just a writer, right, it's something that, as you pointed to, was potentially much more feasible once you know you migrated. But many of these writers who were Caribbean-born in this text had several other jobs, right, which I found amazing, when I don't want to give too many people away from the text, but just the wealth of work that they were doing in addition to writing some of these texts. And so could you maybe share a little bit more about how, upon doing this research, you navigated, understanding, you know, the multiple roles and jobs that these people took up in addition to their careers as writers, as authors, as poets, etc in addition to their careers as writers, as authors, as poets, etc.

Speaker 2: 17:44

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 17:44

So I think that, again, this kind of sense of who we held on to as a writer, I think was to do with this making of professional authorship, who kind of promoted themselves as a writer as well as who actually was writing.

Speaker 2: 17:53

And there was a sense, I think, amongst the writers who were based in the Caribbean, that it was their writings that mattered rather than their identity as a writer. So they were journalists as well, they were teachers very often, but they were also like in the commercial world. They were sometimes homemakers. Really, what mattered was their writing. So that's what they were committed to seeing their writings into the world. So I guess what I mean by that was somebody who wants to be a professional writer, wanted commercial return, they wanted to be able, their writings needed to be commercially viable, and so the ones who were actually writing at home in a way were able to write that was free from that expectation, free from the marketplace. So I had the sense really that their sense of who they were writing for was much stronger, because they weren't interested in metropolitan approval in the same way.

Speaker 1: 19:04

Yeah, I ask that because you know, reading purely, you know, one of the people off the top of my head was reading about Vera Bell and learning that, you know, she was the first female chief clerk of the National Water Commission in Jamaica, right. And so that is a story within itself that I hope somebody underscores, right, and so that is a story within itself that I hope somebody underscores Right. But to think that, you know, on top of that feat, she did so many other things within her career as a writer, as you point to, and so these are just you know, several reasons why maybe my nerdy historian self was gushing over this text. Yeah, you sort of mentioned, or alluded to a little bit earlier the difficulties with sort of, you know, having to navigate, finding these biographies of these writers, and so what was that experience like? What were some of the challenges that you faced while researching these lesser-known Caribbean writers and their works, and sort of how did you go about recovering and documenting their literary contributions?

Speaker 2: 19:59

Thinking about traditional research first. So even some of those sources are very scarce. You know a lot of newspapers, for example, haven't been digitized or incomplete in their runs and a lot of them have suffered from the impact of climate. You know, they literally are perishing as you see them. And then a lot of the writers who publish books would have had very limited print runs. So it's quite possible that some of the volumes, like Barbara Jones's Among the Potatoes possibly there were only ever 50 copies printed and she gave them away to people who were important to her. So to find one of those is really rare now, and obviously because Caribbean lives are very diasporic lives, papers travel and things become kind of detached from each other or scattered. And then I guess most excitingly but also difficult to access, is the fact that I always thought they're not lost, they're just unfound, like if I can find them, and so many of the papers are still in family hands. So so many important manuscripts are still being held by families and that's great, but it also means that they're not open for researchers really. So we need to be thinking. You know, collectively, what to do about that. But in terms of the sleuthing aspect of it, because I found these papers in Canada, in the US, in Spain, in the UK. So I joke that I have a literary detective agency and that everybody I know is part of it, but it's not really a joke. So you know, as I said, I've kind of kept these names and added whenever I could. But I also put out adverts in newspapers. You know, I put out an advert in the newspaper in Barbados for Monica Skeet, the writer, and that was really productive. I put out a TV advert in Grenada for Eula Redhead, and so I was was aware that, you know, I needed to reach people who may actually be very elderly themselves now, who would know these writers. And I guess also, just, I've been so fortunate to work with a community of other interested scholars. So at the very end, when I was trying to finish the book, I couldn't find an obituary for WG Ogilvie and it was just about possible that he might still be alive, but I thought it probably wasn't. And it was really through people like Velma Pollard and Olive Senior and Mervyn Morris helping me, like negotiating with the Gleaner, and then the Gleaner team, brilliant research team, came up with that obituary. So I think you know, I guess in some ways the shape of the book.

Speaker 2: 22:44

I could have chosen 25, 26 writers I wanted to write about, but I didn't want to do that. Other contributors, you know Chris Campbell, Ronald Cummings, Marta Fernandez-Camper, Joanne Hillhouse, Evan O'Callaghan, Jeremy Pointing, and, you know, Winston Minot, Nalini Mojabir and Aaron McHattie. In a way I wanted to kind of signal deliberately like nobody does this work on their own. We're all part of a scholarly community and you know, there's so many people whose work, whose knowledge making, is in this book. I mean, I was just a lucky person to put it all together, but so many people, and I think that's why it takes a long while. But you know, I'm hoping now that the network will expand still, that people will hear oh, there's something about that person. And then you, you know, because for many of the writers we don't know who their literary estate is. So we'd love to bring the work back into print, but without that it's much harder.

Speaker 2: 23:45

So so it's been quite unconventional because I've tried to travel to the places where the writers lived, or I've traveled to relations. Um, you know, I've been swimming in, uh, you know, ponds up in the Rupanuni I've been swimming in. You know, ponds up in the Rupanuni, I've been doing, you know, going through the archive of Queen's College, which is another history all of its own, and somebody should tell that one. You know coming across all of these, I guess, relics of the colonial girls' school. You know thinking about Olive Senior's poem and you know how the archive interplays with that. So it's been an amazing, uh, you know, adventure, um, and, and really it's taken more than a village to bring this book to reality I've shared um some of my favorite parts of this book.

Speaker 1: 24:34

I think you know it's also an experience, or it was at least an experience for me, because Una Morrison is from my family's parish, so I knew about her, but I read about one of my professor's fathers in this text as well. So there's, you know, I think, the interesting thing about this text in a lot of ways. But for me was, you know, the ways that we can sort of build these connections out forward, sort of you know, similarly to what you were talking about in sort of your archival research, right. But who, for you, were some of the most fascinating or surprising people that you came across in doing this research? Were there any that stood out for either their unique stories or literary contributions, or maybe whose works challenged or deeply impacted you know your own understanding of early Caribbean literature.

Speaker 2: 25:27

So I think, in a way because one of the initial impetus to do this work was that idea that there were no women at that time. I think it really is the kind of women who stand out First of all, just as the most remarkable, astonishing kind of human beings. When we read the literary histories, if they are commented on, it's always like, oh, their work's a little hors d'oeuvre, it's this kind of diminutive work, it's a short story rather than a novel, or it's in the vernacular, you know. And so I just wanted to be able to show quite the opposite of that. These are enormous personalities, I mean, they're really astonishing achievers. So, as you said, vera Bell, this single mother of three children, like going around Jamaica taking all the names for the first electoral roll you know, being involved in the sort of you know Caribbean children who've migrated, I mean she's really really remarkable achievements, as well as this huge body of unpublished writing which is exciting to know about. And the same with someone like Monica Skeet.

Speaker 2: 26:51

So she was having this very respectable career as a history teacher at Queen's College in Barbados, which was really for most of her time largely a very kind of white colonial institution, and I think this parallel life she had like she went to work. It doesn't seem that they ever acknowledged her as a writer, even though she published a collection of short stories with Nelson in 1978, when she'd been working there for like 20 years already or something and her writings were infused by this other life. She'd grown up in a house with her father, james Martino, who was part of the founding of the Barbados Workers' Union and labor movement. So I just think she had this kind of life that it must have been fascinating for her to juggle that sensibility. She had this writing which was all about empowering women and children to read their own strengths, and then she was living this kind of other life, although her pupils say she always like she taught them about Cuba when Cuba was a dirty word in Barbados and so there was a radical in her. There's nothing in the institutional record. So I really would love to take her stories back to Barbados and see the children reading them there. But so I mean again, she was another kind of firebrand in many ways.

Speaker 2: 28:14

And then Edwina Melville, who was the first woman to have a tractor license in Guyana, and you know who lived under the most kind of tremendous challenges really, in the Rupanuni writing, you know when a letter would take two weeks to get back to the capital, and she really dedicated herself to representing Amerindian life. And you know she learned Wapichand. All of her stories are about trying to give voice to others. And you know she also published and wrote a newspaper called the Rupanini Review and she would write all of it but she always put people's names when it was their story. And she would write all of it but she always put people's names when it was their story.

Speaker 2: 29:00

So this idea of, like you know, being able to represent others, and finally they became an MP, a member of parliament in Guyana, again representing the same region, so this kind of, I guess, kind of ethics of the work of these women as well, like very much dedicated to representing women and children's lives. So you know, they were just remarkable. I mean Ada Quayle, who was really that was her fabulous pen name but Kathleen Robinson, you know, came to Britain during the Battle of the Atlantic, I mean, you know she had tornadoes and U-boats and everything to face and published a novel published by the same publisher as Salvoin in 1958, reviewed by Salvoin, disappeared from view, you know. So I think, I guess I feel a strong sense of justice for these women. I want their names to be known. I want their work to be read. I want people never to say again you know, there were no women publishing then.

Speaker 1: 29:57

This is maybe my own sort of personal interest in this, my next question. But you know, from doing research myself and I think, going through the experience and the challenges and the you know uphill battle oftentimes or sometimes it feels like a lonely road and the process and you know your relationship to Caribbean literature and how it's evolved, certainly your understanding by doing this work.

Speaker 2: 30:28

I learned remarkable patience. I think of myself as a very impatient person, but I think this, I really knew that this was worth waiting for. So I'm glad that I realized I could be patient and I think as well. Really, what I learned in this book more than any other was who I was writing for, who I wanted this work to reach. So you know, I've published a lot of, I guess, what within the academy seems prestigious work with big publishers like Cambridge University Press, but they charge so much that work cannot be read. It's not discoverable really outside of the academy.

Speaker 2: 31:05

And I had not done all of this research to call these writers' names into an institution that had already kind of proven it wasn't interested. You know, this book is for a very, very different audience. I mean, I hope it's readable to anyone who picks it up and is interested's. I hope it's readable to anyone who picks it up and is interested and I hope it's there for the pupils of these writers, for the families and the friends and, um, the people who lived in the same places.

Speaker 2: 31:33

Um, and then I guess, as a researcher, what I really struck me was how fortunate I was to start before the internet because, like, discoverability is a really managed process. You almost can't find what you don't know because it always replicates the same questions for you. It tells you what you want to know, it recommends oh I think you mean this, or, and. And I think that if I hadn't started by just being in those library stacks and thinking, wow, I never knew about that publisher, like I never knew, and actually like none of that still is discoverable electronically, you know, it still takes that patience. So I would really really just recommend people to just go back into libraries, really just recommend people to just go back into libraries, talk to librarians, like really discover. I mean, librarians are such huge knowledge makers. They carry so much of what we don't know as scholars. So I think you know that was a really big lesson for me to realize that how lucky I'd be.

Speaker 1: 32:37

That's you know so beautifully said, and I think, at least what I think is, you know, researchers a lot of hope in having to navigate these challenges right. That certainly you know. I think we share that in terms of you know, impetus for doing research, right, it's you know to share collectively and not just live within the sort of, you know, ivory tower in some ways, and so I found certainly this book to be one that I'd recommend to certainly everybody. I think that brings me to my next question, which you know strictly facts, family will know.

Speaker 1: 33:13

I'm always like what is the song or what is you know something that points us in this direction? And while that could certainly be true I'm looking forward to your answer I might also even really be asking what is, you know, a great text that you came across from this, and this may be difficult, right, because sometimes they are, some of the texts, as you noted, are a little bit inaccessible based off the varying dynamics. But what is you know? A text or a song or even a book, right? A piece of work from one of these authors that you know, you think is really effective in showing us, you know, who we are at this time in history through our popular culture.

Speaker 2: 33:55

So I think, I mean I'm really heartened by the recovery of Una Marson who, as you said, is, you know, on the same place as you, and I think that the recovery of her work shows us what is possible. So there's an addition of her poetry with Peopletree Press, there's an addition of her plays with wonderful Blouse and Skirt Press from Jamaica, and I think in all of that we still see the cultural tensions that she's working through as somebody at the mid-century but also like, as I said, the sort of resistant consciousness of so many of these writers. So, you know, she writes a play like pockomania in 1938 in jamaica, bringing, you know, drumming and singing and spirit possession onto the stage of what was otherwise a very conservative world theater. So you know, I think, like having access to her work now in print is really, really significant and that's been picked up.

Speaker 2: 34:48

So the bbc did a biography, a documentary about her, and there's been biographies and there's wonderful murals on um crystal palace her, you know. Hopefully that's a sense of what can come for others. The danger, of course, is the sense that she becomes the representative and we don't need to do that for anybody else. But I would love to see documentaries made about so many of these other writers. They all have really fascinating, remarkable lives.

Speaker 1: 35:19

Certainly, certainly, I agree. I think, you know, even just in my own research, going through various libraries and actually it's most of the times just like random bookstores and coming across a text that, like you know, on the outset it might just look like an old book, right. But when I've, you know, gone and Googled and, you know, learned a little bit more about the author, you know it becomes a moment, I think, for me, right, and so similar to what you're saying, right, if we sort of pull our energies into doing that sort of similar excavating work and can really help honor the lives of these individuals who helped shape who we became, especially leading into the independence movements of this, you know, 50s, 60s, moving forward. I want to, you know, end a little bit with our conversation today with having you share a little bit about this experience.

Speaker 1: 36:18

How do you hope this book will influence not only Caribbean literature but how it's taught in schools? You've mentioned it a little bit, right, wanting it to see, to see it in the hands of pupils. But I think we're in an age where there is such a wealth also of Caribbean literature, of like contemporary Caribbean literature, right, june has also become Read Caribbean Month, in addition to Caribbean American Heritage Month. So shout out to Book of Sins there who created that? But what can we all really come to understand differently about the Caribbean through these writers, through their worldview? That, you know, wasn't that long ago in a lot of ways but, you know, tells us something very particular. And how do you think their works speak to current social and cultural issues in the Caribbean?

Speaker 2: 37:09

I mean, I think a lot of these works they draw on the same cultural resources. So they're drawing on both kind of, you know, questions of power, of social injustice, working out who's seen, who's not seen, who has a voice, what kind of voice they have, and also the kind of rich traditions of all storytelling folklore. A lot of them are very funny, a lot of them are very moving in terms of the kind of tender interactions that happen, you know. Um, so they're very intimate stories, I think of between parents and children. Um, you know very much about what it is to remain connected when you go through social change. So so you know, that whole question of people being educated away from where, or their feeling of detachment from where they were, I mean, there's some really amazing stories, I think, that read beautifully alongside our contemporary writers in bringing up kind of like you know I mean voices of a Caribbean past. These embed those voices, I think. So in some ways they are the resource upon which some of our contemporary writers have drawn as well, not knowingly, and that's a beautiful thing. So I've noticed how many of the contemporary writers, particularly women writers, who were told they had no literary ancestors, are like wow, here are my literary ancestors. This is the tradition that I was writing in. You know, when I read some of the work by Gloria Scoffrey, you know I see sort of Lorna Goodison in my mind, and you know Vera Bell, you know Olive Senior. I mean it's really really clear to me. So I think there's a real continuity there. I mean, obviously, you know, different questions are at the forefront now. I think that those around sexuality that are really prominent and, you know, a real kind of area of fascination for contemporary writers in trying to kind of carry on a liberation program. I guess in many ways, I guess in many ways many of those are not that present, although actually Oscar OR Daythorne's work in Guyana is really interesting in that regard. His novel the Scholar man has got lots of kind of queer imaginings in. It can be read really brilliantly alongside Sulfur's Escape from Norton Pavement.

Speaker 2: 39:38

You know, going up through that tradition of writers that we now kind of acknowledge within a contemporary period, I guess, in terms of what has remained the same, I think there's still kind of challenges for writers who are writing within the region compared to those in metropolitan centers. So I already gave a shout out to Blouse and Skirt centers. So I already gave a shout out to blouse and skirt and you know I think that that tanya bats and savage has done amazing work as a publisher but generally publishing houses, you know it's quite hard within the caribbean booksellers. You know, again, paper-based books in trinidad fabulous. But you know it's been quite hard to get this book into bookshops in Jamaica, no-transcript. But I think there is still that sort of sense, I guess, of the making of the writer um being sort of pulled towards that metropolitan center. So it would be fabulous to see more kind of resourcing and infrastructure happening for those writers who are writing from Caribbean spaces.

Speaker 1: 41:10

Certainly, certainly. I just want to tremendously thank you, alistair, for joining us. I mean, this was such a fun read for me, in a lot of ways right, and so I cannot recommend it anymore. So for our listeners who are interested in just learning about a broad range of Caribbean writers who lived many lives right, as we've noted in our podcast today, be sure to check out Lost and Found, an A to Z of neglected writers of the Anglophone Caribbean, and we mean Anglophone in a very broad way. Right, Belize is included, all of so you know, it's not just four places or anything like that. Be sure to check it out. I will link it in our show notes.

Speaker 1: 41:51

Special thank you again to you, allison, and to Polly Patello of Papalote Press for sharing a copy with me so we could have this discussion. And you know, as always, we hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. Feel free to let us know if you've grabbed a copy. And, you know, let us know what you enjoyed, what you learned from the text as well. And till next time, little more. Thanks for tuning in to Strictly Facts. Visit strictlyfactspodcastcom for more information from each episode. Visit strictlyfaxpodcastcom for more information from each episode. Follow us at strictlyfaxpod on Instagram and Facebook and at strictlyfaxpd on Twitter.