From Repeating Islands

In this article writer Oonya Kempadoo defines the Caribbean as a place with shared experiences but simultaneously contradictory: “We are one and we are specific, competing island nations at the same time. Different languages add to the feeling of distance, but this diversity and contradiction is a part of our identity also – a big part, at least for me, but I may be considered more pan-Caribbean minded than the average person.” Here she writes about the Caribbean condition and where her love of books has taken her:

For Oonya Kempadoo, growing up in a small village in Guyana was no hindrance to living among books.“My teenage friends and I opened a library in the village with the family (book) collection,” recalled the novelist, who now lives in St. George’s, Grenada. “We would spend the overdue fees on soft drinks and cake every Friday as our reward.”

It should be pointed out that the family collection was big enough to supply a small library of its own, at least partly because Kempadoo’s parents had uncommonly broad cultural interests for their surroundings. Her father, Peter Lauchmonen Kempadoo, is a novelist; the family had moved back to their native Guyana after a spell in England, where Oonya was born.

“Having so many books at home, and unorthodox parents, made us outsiders and a community centre at the same time,” she recalled of the family’s life in the ’70s. “Hearing my father’s typewriter at all hours of the night, stories and arguments at the dinner table, artists always visiting, has helped me to connect writing and reading to community and interdisciplinary connection.”

“Growing up home-schooled, with an international curriculum, I was introduced to Caribbean literature parallel to eastern and western publications,” the 49-year-old Kemapdoo said. “V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street, combined with John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, read while living in my village, made me appreciate the power of observation and believe I could write. Caribbeanist nostalgia, sensibilities and loyalties laid a literary foundation, but I must try to keep focused on the present and future by pushing the boundaries still.”

Kempadoo has pushed those boundaries, and extended the often-overlooked tradition of female writing from the Caribbean, via three acclaimed novels. Her semi-autobiographical 1998 debut Buxton Spice and its Tobago-set 2001 followup Tide Running were both nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, while her most recent novel, the Trinidiad-set All Decent Animals, got a huge profile boost when Karen Russell, author of the cult hit Swamplandia!, took up the Kempadoo cause in the pages of O, The Oprah Magazine. “How am I only now finding out about this writer?” Russell wrote. “It’s as if she’s inventing her own language, which is incantatory, dense and lush. The authority and blood pulse of it seduced me.”

“Trinidad chose to give me a story to write,” Kempadoo said of her chosen setting for All Decent Animals. “I spent my young adult years there and the character of the island, carnival and Port of Spain society presented a complex challenge.”

Having lived not only in Guyana and Grenada but in Trinidad, St. Lucia and Tobago, Kempadoo is perhaps better qualified than most to comment on the question of how identity plays out in a part of the world where the components making up that identity are so far-flung.

“This is what is confusing even to us,” she replied. “We are one and we are specific, competing island nations at the same time. Different languages add to the feeling of distance, but this diversity and contradiction is a part of our identity also – a big part, at least for me, but I may be considered more pan-Caribbean minded than the average person.”

A current Kempadoo project reveals that, for this book lover, old habits die hard. “I am now a co-founder of a small library and literacy centre in St George’s, in response to the closure of the National Public Library,” she said. “My father is extremely proud of this.”

For full article, see http://montrealgazette.com/entertainment/local-arts/voice-of-the-islands-oonya-kempadoo-has-a-pan-caribbean-perspective

For more on this story go to: http://repeatingislands.com/2015/04/25/voice-of-the-islands-oonya-kempadoo-has-a-pan-caribbean-perspective/