I never wanted to be a writer. Talk the truth, I never thought about what I wanted to be, apart from a mad wish to be a ballet dancer, one time, when I was very young. I let it go when it became clear that I didn’t have what it takes, and I came to that clarity by the time I left to go to college in the US at age seventeen. I can still see Betsy Stewart Beckford pirouetting en pointe and—I think it was Betsy, and if it wasn’t her, it was Jeanette Nasralla—doing a running leap into Clive Thompson’s arms. I couldn’t do that.

https://www.thirteen.org/freetodance/biographies/cthompson.html

I don’t think I considered being an actor, either, though I knew from I was about ten years old that I could reach and hold an audience by being Not-Me. (I shall soon have to write about being “Not-Me,” but I’m not doing that now and won’t do it here.) I had that early talent recently confirmed by a friend who told me that my thespian abilities were noised abroad at her high school in the country by the husband of a beloved teacher, an Englishwoman, who taught me and who was also in charge of drama at Alpha Academy, a downtown Kingston school. So it seems I did have something to bring to the boards. This enjoyment of the performing arts as a child and my possibly seeing a future in them seems to have worried my mother, for I once found something she wrote to the effect that I had the impossible fancy of becoming a movie star. Well, Mama, I did make it to TV, and that, in the event, decided my life, for good or ill, for there I met the late Martin Mordecai, babyfather, with whom I cohabited for 54 years…

I can’t say, as others have done, that writing, or writing poetry “claimed” me, though I could write a well-shaped, serious poem at age nine, when I used Walcott’s ‘pages’ metaphor to describe weather in a poem about Hurricane Charlie, which hit Jamaica in 1951. Walcott used pages for the sea; I used it for the stages of that hurricane. At the start, I wrote poems as a way of exploring experience, of thinking it through. Perhaps my poems reflected on life more than they re-experienced it, recollected it in tranquillity. A poem like “Chapel Gardens” describes a real experience, which I think over, and through, and then pass a “good girl” judgment on. (A recent critic, writing about that poem, says I’ve nothing invested in passion. I guess he hasn’t read “Cockpit Country, a Tasting Tour.”) Maybe that sells “Chapel Gardens” short, though. The University of the West Indies, like every university, needs to plant things “deep as a tomb” to grow in its garden, chapel or otherwise. This highest seat of learning can’t be about whatever used and discarded condoms signify, can it? Perhaps UWI hasn’t planted deep when it should have? Perhaps most universities haven’t? Perhaps that’s one reason why the world is the ravaged place it is?

When I came back to Jamaica in 1963, opportunities came at me and I seized some. I was a member of a couple theatre groups after I came back from college, and had the extraordinary privilege of participating in the first dramatization of Kamau Brathwaite’s Rites of Passage in November 1967 at the Creative Arts Centre (now the Philip Sherlock Centre) on the Mona campus of UWI. The late, great Noel Vaz directed. And I auditioned for the job of part-time TV anchorperson at JIS TV in 1965 and I worked at JIS TV (and at API, which it turned into for a while) till 1980. I worked very briefly for USIS anchoring a TV short clip meant for showing in this part of the world. But TV and theatre were hobbies, not earning-a-living pursuits.

Maybe, because my mother had been a teacher, I just assumed I’d be a teacher too. And that’s what I set out to do, was trained (at UWI Mona) to do, and did well enough that I was able, with an amazing writing partner, the late Grace Walker Gordon, to write textbooks for use in Caribbean schools. Royalties from those books still provide the substance of my earnings, as they have done for the last thirty years. They also led to my first literary publication: Storypoems: a First Collection. And teaching led me into writing and publication, for those textbooks for primary and secondary schools are full of poems and stories.

Now, nine collections of poetry, a novel, and a short fiction collection later, I call myself a writer. Maybe I wondered into the writing business. Maybe God had it there, waiting for me from the beginning. What has become clearer in the journey is that writing kept me sane, was my therapist. It saved me. And there’s the rub.

 

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Martin, my late husband, managed to do this. Every day. He’d wake early, say his prayers and then sit a his desk and write. All the advice given to aspiring writers tells them this is de rigueur: spend an hour or two a day, at least attempting to write, even is you don’t get many words on to the page. The Derek Walcotts of this world, we are told, would sit at their desks, even if they didn’t write a word—I think Walcott sat for at least four hours, though I may be remembering wrong.

I do not do that and never have, so writing every day is a habit that I am only now trying to form, since I do not have lots of time left, and I need to be more organized about how I use it. However, what I want to say as I set about trying to turn up every day is that, despite not having this excellent habit, I’ve written a PhD dissertation, nine poetry collections, a novel, and a short story collection, and I’ve just completed another one of those. I’ve written more than a dozen textbooks and a reference work, both with a collaborator, and I’ve worked on five anthologies of poetry, again, mostly with someone else.

So if you are a writer who does not turn up every day, don’t beat on yourself and don’t give up the calling. Accept that you may be different, that each writer’s style of approaching the writing project is their own, and that what matters is that the words do emerge and make it into the world.

Of course, if that isn’t happening, then… Suffice it to say that one solution to that problem may be to find a writing partner. But we will resume with that another time…

Blessings, till then!

So, here I am, back for the first time since July 2022.

Am I done with grieving Martin, partner of fifty-four years, father of three children that made it and two who didn’t, brilliant storyteller, superb photographer and best of beta readers?

I don’t think I will stop grieving. Ever.

I can’t talk about being a widow. As I write, widow seems to mean more looking back, than it describes how I am trying to be, now, how I must try to be, now. Widow says I once was in the world in a way that I no longer am. But, willy-nilly, the focus has to be on the way of now, with me alone, not the way of then, with me and Martin. For only the second time in decades, I breathe Jamaican air and he is nowhere nearby. He will not ever be near me in this island space ever again. Nor in any other space. Anywhere.

At home in Toronto, where I have not been for the last six weeks, I talk to him in his carved bamboo box of ashes every day. Or I just talk to him, since I can’t always see the bamboo box. I quarrelled with him for a year or so, but I don’t any more. Not much, anyway. Now, it is just the occasional rant, in which I hate him and love him and rage at him—and then settle down, since it changes nothing.

When I ask him for my poem, it still isn’t there… Rant Flash Point!

So it might be wise to veer off into another rant… Today I went to collect my new Canadian passport. Having landed six weeks ago with a passport that I needed to renew in order to stay here in Jamaica as long as I planned to, I went online and did as I was told. I filled in and printed off my application forms, and I paid the required fee. Then I went to the High Commission to take in my still current ‘old’ passport, and was alarmed to find that I handed in the envelope in which it was contained, along with the relevant forms, my photos and a receipt for the fee, by putting it into a box in the security post. I didn’t even get a piece of paper saying that I am a citizen of Canada who has given up her passport to be renewed. Today I collected the new passport. I went beyond the security post and into the High Commission proper to collect this crucial document. Before that could happen, I went through the kind of security check one does before flying. In addition, my phone and Fitbit had to be left in the security post.

I am told this is the new MO in embassies and high commissions all over the world and I know there may be “good reasons” for this. However, it still disturbs me deeply. The same babyfather whom I mourn warned me, when he was a diplomat, that a citizen ought never to surrender their passport.

I plan to write some letters when I go home to Toronto.