Moko jumped at the recent opportunity to interview Diana McCaulay during her UK promotional tour for her latest novel Gone to Drift (Papillote Press).
Richard Georges: This new novel, Gone to Drift, was originally commissioned as a short story for Akashic’s Kingston Noir?
Diana McCaulay: Right. This image came to me of a boy sitting on a wall at night looking out to sea in the rain waiting for his grandfather. So I wrote the short story. Akashic passed on it and I eventually submitted it to the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. But I really, really loved the characters. I loved the setup. And sometimes short stories have the kernels of novels in them, not all of them can be novels, but it seemed to me this one could be.
So, not immediately. I don’t think I started working on it right away but pretty shortly after the Commonwealth regional win I started developing it as a novel.
RG: It’s a beautiful piece. I haven’t read Gone to Drift yet, but I have read The Dolphin Catcher, and it’s a really beautiful piece. It seems to fit into an ongoing theme of yours. Looking at your other novels, you seem drawn to portraits of families, especially through the perspectives of the children in them, and how they view their parents, grandparents, and other older family members. Is that something you find yourself consciously drawn to, or is that a more designed approach?
DM: No, I am obviously drawn to the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy (laughs). Or a young boy at least. One of the protagonists in Huracan is a sixteen-year-old boy. So, I seem to like that point of view. That might need some serious psychoanalysis to really understand why. I like adventure stories. And I like stories where there is a very strong sense of place. And I like this idea of reaching back through to the ancestors. In my environmental work I confront what is really happening to the Caribbean Sea and how recklessly we have been treating it. I started thinking of a relationship between an “old-time fisherman” who would have fished and made a livelihood fishing but would not have done things to harm the sea and the conflict between a modern day fisherman who would have a new set of pressures and values trying to make a living from an already depleted fishery. I saw the boy as a sort of bridge between those worlds. He has been taught his grandfather’s values, not by words, but by example. Then he sees first in his father and later in his mother something quite different.
RG: Exactly. It is a stark juxtaposition of that really ugly capitalist psychology in the parents versus the Eco-conscious outlook the grandfather has. He has a sort of unspoken respect for a nature.
DM: And knowledge of it. So nature is not just a commodity, something to be used and used up, but something that deserves a more reciprocal arrangement. I had a lot of sea in my childhood. So, I’m really quite grief-stricken about this sea, which in a sense defines the whole Caribbean. You start thinking about what the things are that bring us together. The sea has been a very complex entity for Caribbean nations. It has been a barrier for migration; it’s been our method of transport from all manner of places whether we came by choice or in chains. Now our tourism, which is a big part of our various economies, is very dependent on the sea and the coastline.
RG: It’s ubiquitous.
DM: Yeah. I wanted to write something about the Caribbean Sea since I have this view that Caribbean peoples are not really island peoples. We found ourselves on islands, but we are more the people of a continent. A lot of Caribbean people don’t swim. We like to go to the beach, but it’s more of an outing, a lime, or a party situation instead of an experience in nature. I’m interested in how we relate to the sea. We’re not seafaring people like Polynesians. Even though our Taino heritage does have that aspect, it has been mostly lost.
RG: And diminished. We so often start at 1492 and ignore our Pre-Columbian history. Could you speak to your environmental role? Not just how it influences your work, but how it impacts on your life. How did you find your calling with the Jamaican Environment Trust?
DM: It has completely taken me over. I am a founding member of the Jamaican Environment Trust, founded in 1991 so it’s 25 years old this year. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s my life – it’s not merely my job. It’s not been an easy road. I see my role as bearing witness. Just standing up and pointing to these things that are happening on all our islands. I’m not sure that people like me have had enough effect to really stop what’s happening. I’m not sure that the environmental message has really found resonance with the general public. Of course, for people who are at the margins of survival, this conversation is a luxury; they are preoccupied with other concerns.
But for me, place and connection to place is part of identity, it’s part of who we are and everyone needs a place that feels like home. You might not live there necessarily, in a globalized world, but there’s a place that’s home – a place that smells right, tastes right, feels right. You know which way the breezes are gonna come. You know the mountains are to the north and the sea is to the south. There are many places of which you can say: “This is the place in which something happened”. Something personal to you or historical. I think these notions of home and connections to place are very important and we are in danger of losing them. We’re in danger of turning our islands into stage sets for visitors.
RG: Commodities.
DM: Right. Especially our tourism model, which I think is a fantasy. If you look at tourism advertising, it’s nothing like the reality of Caribbean islands. White beaches with absolutely no garbage on them. Also no people. Everything is landscaped. That is not a real view of any of the Caribbean islands. I know that it’s death to fiction to have a message, to be didactic or polemical. I’m not really trying to do that, but I like my books to have a very strong sense of place, to be rooted in the actual physical place. When someone says they love Jamaica, I want to ask them: What do you love? They might say: Well, I love the food, I love the vibe, I love the music, and I love our sports stars. But you hardly ever hear about the physical place. And I want to speak for the physical place. Even people who say Jamaica is very beautiful, I think they say it in a rote kind of way and actually haven’t paid attention to what’s happening to it. The picture they have in their mind is a picture from years ago that’s not very accurate anymore.
RG: Going back to the conversation about family in your novels, we spoke about the narrator’s perspective, but what about the family unit? I think Dog Heart is about a single-mother household but you seem to be very focused not just on the perspective of the adolescent male but on the family and the different dynamics in it before venturing out into the wider world. Could you talk to that familial focus to those novels?
DM: Right. The grounding we have as people, our feelings of warmth, and nurturing, and identity are twofold. They come from the first caregivers in our families, and then from the larger thing of being in this place we call home that we recognize and that recognizes us. For me, those are two important things for healthy adults, for productive adults, for happy adults. In Caribbean societies our families are, I don’t want to say dysfunctional because I don’t mean that, but sometimes we don’t give our young people those feelings of love and acceptance and nurturing. Often the energies of our mothers and fathers are diverted by survival requirements – to do whatever is necessary to earn a living. I think the whole narrative about material wealth and the importance of status; the importance of having money and things has really taken us over. I don’t really want to speak for other Caribbean islands, as I have spent all my life in Jamaica. But I think in Jamaica, materialism and status seeking has really taken over what we see as valuable and important. If our children are being raised by adults who are very much distracted from their role as caretakers and caregivers by survival issues, and children are not grounded in family or place, and they receive a message that they’re worthless in the absence of material things, then you’re going to have angry, insecure, problematic adults, especially men.
RG: That is a phenomenon that I don’t think is peculiar to Jamaica.
DM: I’m not an expert!
RG: (laughs) But that does lead me to the next question. This ease you seem to have of straddling the different worlds of Jamaica with, dare I say, authenticity. How much of that would you attribute that to being at home and not writing back from another place?
DM: Being in Jamaica is helpful for that. But it’s not the only thing you need. I don’t take the view that people writing from outside of Jamaica are inauthentic. I think it is a matter of imagination, and talent, and observation. People used to ask me about Dog-Heart: So, how did you research this book? As if they imagined me with a clipboard, y’know, in an inner-city community following around a family who went through all the things that happened in Dog-Heart. I used to say: No I didn’t research it in that way. I just consciously observed the scenes that play out in front of us as Caribbean people all the time, but we don’t necessarily observe them closely as we go about our daily lives. The other thing I think is needed is an exercise in empathy. And people can do that sitting at a desk. You don’t actually have to have grown up fetching water, as my characters in Dog-Heart do, you don’t have to experience that as a child to write about it. You can know it happens and observe a place where it happens, note the steepness of the road and the length of the journey. You can imagine how it feels. I think that really is the task of writing. It is a task of imagination; a task of empathy. It doesn’t have to be a lived experience. But I am, I have to say, very grounded in Jamaica. I can’t identify as anything else but Jamaican. The only time I spent out of Jamaica is two years for my Masters degree. It’s that home place for me
RG: Now I’m going to get to some of the cliché author interview questions. Influences? Seeing that you are not someone who is a prisoner to a particular genre of writing, do you have any particular writers whose work you admire and how have they affected the trajectory of your development?
DM: Olive Senior. I think hers was the first Caribbean non-fiction that I read. I must say I don’t have a formal literary background. I have been an avid and voracious reader all my life. But I think Olive was my first non-fiction influence. I read her fiction and poetry much later. V.S. Naipaul I did in school, in literature class. I’m not young, so most of what I read in school was English literature. There wasn’t much Caribbean literature, and it was only in sixth form that we started to do some Caribbean writers. I remember the excitement that I felt at reading Naipaul, who was describing the world I lived in. Not necessarily my lived experience but the world that I occupied, that I saw. Some of Naipaul’s descriptions in A House for Mr. Biswas still stick with me because they were so evocative and accurate about the place where I live. More recently, Kei Miller. I think Kei’s non-fiction is extraordinary. His thinking around an issue makes me admire his brain. Monique Roffey. I enjoyed The White Woman on the Green Bicycle and Archipelago, the latter because I love the sea I loved all of the descriptions of the Caribbean Sea in that. Marlon James, his second. The Book of Night Women, is my favourite. Love is not a word that is much used to describe Marlon’s work so much, but I could not stop thinking about The Book of Night Women. I think he is an extraordinarily talented writer. He doesn’t have comfortable subjects, his books are not easy to read but The Book of Night Women really held me. Who am I forgetting?
RG: (laughs) No one. It is one of those unfair questions.
DM: Oh! Kerry Young. Her first book Pao I loved too. It was a section of Jamaican history that I didn’t remember reading before. I’ll stop there. I will probably remember at two o’clock in the morning who I forgot to say.
RG: The last thing I wanted to ask you about, considering you have a multi-genre bibliography, what is the nature of your process? Does it differ whether its fiction or non-fiction? Are you the type that wakes up in the morning and says: Right. I have to write for x amount of time?
DM: I am that type. Because I have a full-time day job. For years and years and years I wanted to write books and I didn’t do it. I wanted to write books since I was 13 years old. I’d start then I’d get sick of it and lose faith and I’d stop. So I found for me, setting aside writing time was the key that unlocked that. So I get up in the morning and I write for two hours before I go to work. But having just completed my non-fiction work that was the Hollick Arvon winner, which is looking for a publisher and is the first book length non-fiction I’ve written, it was very different. For me, in writing fiction there’s a lot of dreaming, what Anthony Winkler called “trusting the darkness”. Oh, I forgot Anthony Winkler! I think he’s hilarious. His earlier work especially. What he called “trusting the darkness” I learnt in writing fiction. I would hold my characters and their situations in my head when I went to bed at night and in the morning, very often when I sat in front of my computer the next thing unfolded. I like to say I’ve written my characters up a tree and I don’t know how to get them down and I go to bed thinking about that and the next morning somehow the way down would appear. I learned it was this mysterious process you had to trust. Fiction has a lot more of that, of dreaming, of letting your mind run on your characters whereas non-fiction was less of that. Non-fiction was for me was more of a structural process. You went out and you did this research, had a whole bunch of facts to get onto the page in an interesting and moving way. And I was writing creative non-fiction, so it was not just a question of recording those facts but to weave them into something of a memoir and that felt much more challenging. I found writing it much harder than fiction. So many times in non-fiction I wanted something else to happen. I wanted to say a smarter thing in a public meeting. I wanted to have a different result. But I couldn’t! I had to write the truth! It was harder to be creative about that.
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Diana McCaulay is an award winning Jamaican writer and a lifelong resident of its capital city Kingston. She has written two novels, Dog-Heart (March 2010) and Huracan (July 2012), published by PeepalTree Press. Both novels met with critical acclaim and have broken local publishing records. Dog-Heart won a Gold Medal in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s National Creative Writing Awards (2008), was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize (2011), the IMPAC Dublin Award (2012) and the Saroyan Prize for International Writing (2012). Huracan was also shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize 2014.