Authors Marlon James and David Chariandy Talk about Literature

By Neil Armstrong

Photo credit: Toronto Public Library  Authors, David Chariandy and Marlon James, in conversation at the Toronto Reference Library on April 17, 2018.

Prize-winning authors, Marlon James and David Chariandy, recently met in Toronto to discuss how fiction has reclaimed representations of the Caribbean within mainstream American, British and Canadian literature.

Entitled “Re-Imagined Homelands,” the conversation was moderated by Brendan de Caires of PEN Canada, -- an organization which “envisions a world where writers are free to write” -- at the Toronto Reference Library on April 17.

Chariandy, who was born in Toronto in 1969, is inspired by the works of celebrated Canadian writers, Austin Clarke and Dionne Brand.

He says he finds Brand’s work profoundly daunting and her words have moved him.

“Both of them, born in the Caribbean, and then coming to Canada and producing bodies of literature that speak to life for black people in Canada, speak to life in the Caribbean and then all the places in-between,” says the author who lives in British Columbia and teaches contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University.

Chariandy said Clarke’s first book set in Canada, “The Meeting Point,” was part of the Toronto trilogy and in it he wrote among other things about black domestic workers from the Caribbean.

This was how Chariandy’s mother came to Canada.

“My mother didn’t really want to talk too much about her experience coming to Canada in those early days, which were no doubt difficult and alienating in many ways. So I found those lives represented in the works of Austin Clare and it was strange to see it and to know that that could be a topic of literature – something that was so close to home.”

James, who was born in Jamaica in 1970, lives in Minneapolis and teaches literature at Macalester in St. Paul, Minnesota, was influenced by Jamaican novelist, John Hearne, who was his creative writing teacher.

His recent novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings” won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award.

“I never even thought of the whole idea of a literary life until stepping into John’s office, and talking about books in a way that wasn’t necessarily in a literature class.”

He said Elizabeth Nunez, a Trinidadian American novelist, was the person who sent him to read tonnes of books.

James was at a writers’ workshop at the Calabash Literary Festival in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica where he presented his first novel which became “John Crow’s Devil.”

“Elizabeth said ‘you’re a pretty good writer but you don’t have a clue about women,’” he noted. “And then she asked me the question which usually leaves male writers dumbstruck ‘which women have you read – not the dead ones?”

He had only read Jessica Hagedorn so Nunez sent him Toni Morrison’s “Sula” and “Song of Solomon,” and books by Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark.

James said “The Book of Night Women” could never have happened without him reading Morrison.

“I just didn’t know literature could be like that,” said James who was convinced he was going to fly after reading “Song of Solomon.”

He said Hagedorn’s work spurs him on and after reading her novel, “Dogeaters,” he thought it was the best novel that had ever been written about Jamaica but set in the Philippines.

“And if you’re from places like Kingston or Port of Spain or Manila or Cape Town, you know the situation where you’re always in the middle of an election or a beauty contest.”

When he read the Filipino writer’s book he recognized himself even though the book was set in Manila.

De Caires noted that between 1960 and 1974 there were about eighty West Indian novels published in London by writers of the Windrush Generation.

These were writers associated with the BBC show, Caribbean Voices, such as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, Edgar Mittelholzer, Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris.

Asked where do they see their way in that landscape and how they found their way, Chariandy said the first thing that struck him about that list is that if that is the way the Caribbean itself recognizes its own literary heritage it is an exilic heritage.

“It’s people who have gone away, found publishing opportunities, found a space to write, mentors and so forth, and then thereafter have represented the Caribbean.”

Having never lived in the Caribbean or in Trinidad where his parents are from, he considers himself part of the Caribbean diaspora.

However, he maintains that Trinidad lives through him in different ways – “it’s in music and taste, it lives in language, it lives in stories, spoken and unspoken, that I’m exploring and represented in my own work.”

He said, for him, it’s the generation, like Clarke that is that first generation to then settle in a new land, like Canada.

Explaining why his imagination carries him to the Caribbean in his writing, Chariandy said it has a lot to do with how he’s made to feel as a Canadian, the reasons why he might be interested in origins versus another second-generation immigrant who wouldn’t be interested.

James, whose first novels are written in Jamaica, said he had read the list of writers that de Caires referenced and he could tell that the authors, when writing about their countries, were doing so from a point of exile and there was a sort of nostalgia in them.

He said the gaze of those writers was still the UK, whereas growing up in the 70s and 80s the overriding cultural force was America.

James said the character, Lilith, didn’t appear until page 45 in the original version of “The Book of Night Women” and she hijacked it.

He said Lilith does some despicable things that he thinks some people have a problem with. “Where is the noble suffering that we want from the Caribbean? And these are Caribbean people asking that.”

“It’s funny saying it was liberating writing that book because that book was not liberating when I wrote it. It didn’t feel that way.”

James said he wanted to say something that he hadn’t read before, noting that Morrison said ‘write the books you want to read.’

Commenting on his new book, “I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter,” – a meditation on the politics of race -- which will be published later in May by McClelland & Stewart, Chariandy said Canada has a 200-year history of imagining itself distinct from America and in a world of intolerance a space of exception.

“I think we have to think about anti-black violence and oppression as continuities across spaces and throughout time, and that’s telling here, Canada, and the Caribbean, and drawing that link between now and the deep past.”

Chariandy’s debut novel, “Soucouyant,” was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award and was long-listed the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

“Brother,” his second novel, won the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2017.

[A shorter version of this story was published in the North American Weekly Gleaner, May 1-9, 2018.]