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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 1st NOVEMBER, 2015
Caryl Phillips and Robert Antoni,
both writers of the
Caribbean diaspora creating innovative historical fiction
and recasting Caribbean-ness, came together for a literary
conversation recently.
Professor Phillips, a writer of fiction and non-fiction,
is a Yale professor, who was born in St. Kitts and grew up
in Britain, and has authored 11 novels as well as plays and
essays. He read from his 2015 novel “The Lost Child.”
As he discussed his inspiration for the book, he
mentioned that he has often speculated whether the name
Liverpool crops up throughout the Caribbean as street signs
and other touch-points harking back to England. He grew
up ten miles from where the Brontes had lived. As a youth
someone gave him a line drawing of Emily Bronte and he
always imagined that there was some kind of umbilical
connection between his desk which held this photo and her
home ten miles away.
The biggest question in Emily Bronte studies, said
Phillips, is who was this seven-year-old boy found on the
docks of Liverpool where he grew up and who became
Heathcliff of Bronte’s famous “Wuthering Heights.”
Increasingly, Phillips thought about life growing up in the
shadows of the Yorkshire moors. Out of these musings, “The
Lost Child” was crafted.
“I didn’t start off with the idea or theme or structure. I
started with the idea that has bedeviled scholars for years:
Who on earth was Heathcliff? Who on earth was this
raggedy boy that started on the docks and then became
this romantic figure of canonical literature?” said Phillips.
Yet beyond historical circumstances and cold data,
Phillips wanted to craft a novel that would explore the
humanity integral to and beyond the question of Heathcliff ’s
origins.
“I started with this question but then it became and
had to become something more in conversation with the
human heart,” he said.
He had perceived that non-white children growing up
in Britain in his time seemed to echo theHeathcliff story.The
parallel is that the pervasive reading of Heathcliff is as a wild,
passionate and brooding character, dark and mysterious,
and certainly a poor fit into the staid andmannered English
society of that time.
In making this link between fiction and current
realities, between history and present contexts, he noted
that a part of writing fiction is that you are exploring the
landscape and topography of your own life. It isn’t to be
taken lightly. It is a terrific responsibility.
Robert Antoni, similarly a celebratedwriter, is an author
whose fiction’s terrain is the British West Indies. He has
written five novels. Antoni read from his novel “As Flies to
Whatless Boys,” which is also a work of historical fiction.
Antoni literally reaches backwards to tell the story of
the Tuckers, a family in his mother’s lineage. Around 1845
inventor John Adolphus Etzler, a Londoner, convinces the
Tuckers to migrate to Trinidad to help form a utopia based
on his machines. The machines were powered by nature
and were supposedly guaranteed to change the Tropics into
a “proper” English garden. The narrator is middle-aged
Willie Tucker who is telling his son how he managed to get
to Trinidad in his teens.
LITERATURE
“My problem was how to get all of that research out
of the way and invent the story from scratch,” said Antoni.
At first, he was hesitant to write the story because his
antecedents were estate owners and he knew he would
“have to talk about slavery and did not want to.” However,
he learned that the Tuckers came after emancipation and
“precisely because the slaves had been emancipated.” Etzler
could not condone slavery, he said. Indeed, the inventor and
family arrived in exactly the same year as the first ship of
indentured labourers arrived in Trinidad from India.
“The difference between writing non-fiction or
history and a novel, is a novel can only be personal. A part
of my process is to have these touchstones of personal
and immediate connection that make all the imaginings
anchored and allow me to push ahead,” he said.
“There is always this question of who you are writing
for. Are you writing for an audience? Are you writing for
yourself? You write for the story that’s being told… at least
I do. I have to believe that wherever I take it people will
respond even if they have never heard of Trinidad. And
they do respond.”
In terms of how an audience receives work, Phillips
added that between 1950 and 1970 in Britain, 70 novels by
West Indians were published, and that as writers mounted
the platform to present their work there were probably
pre-conceptions as to what they would say. Now literature
has become more globalized and national and regional
boundaries have become less important. Old conceptions
of what constituted a region’s writing will be questioned and
perhaps changed, he said.
Antoni’s own form of experimentation with regional
writing, of pushing the envelope regarding expectations, is
with the vernacular as he feels the form has to reflect the
content.
“The vernacular is a hybrid language and I am looking
for a hybrid form to reflect a very hybrid West Indian
consciousness and sensibility,” he said. He is not the first to
have done this, but it remains a gamble in the business of
publishing where publishers can be unwilling to have your
book translated for other markets.
Both writers commented on the role of technology
in our mediated lives. Responding to a question from the
The
Writer
and the Text
Technology has changed how we tell stories
B Y D A R A W I L K I N S O N B O B B
Dara Wilkinson Bobb is a parttime assistant lecturer in the Writing Centre of the Faculty of Humanities and Education, UWI, St. Augustine.
“Part of the great moral purpose of literature is to
imagine yourself into the life of people who are not you.”
—CARYL PHILLIPS
