“I wanted to write a work of reconciliation”

Your childhood was rocked by the poetic language of your mother and by the surf of the ocean… Reading you, one feels carried away by waves. Did you write in this sense?

Absolutely! I am so glad that you feel this as a reader. My home, White House, being close to the ocean, I bathed in the sea, the nature, that my mother described to me. As a Caribbean author, I want the reader to feel immersed, to feel the humid kiss of the air, the salty caress of the ocean.

When I was suffocating as a teenager, a teacher advised me to write down my emotions. Then came my first poem Silver flows through my veinsand my first collection Cannibal (not yet published in French, Editor’s note). In 2018, I started my novel, then in six months, during Covid, I wrote it in a crazy fever, like an immense wave.

This White House still belongs to your family. Do you go back there?

Yes. Distant family lives there. It is the only place in Jamaica that still belongs to the local population! All the coasts of the island are now privatized. Walking along the beach is a luxury reserved for the rich, foreigners, tourists, because you have to pay (most often, in dollars) to see the sea. Paradise belongs to those who can afford it. This is also the story that I wanted to tell, that of a people gradually pushed away from their lands.

Is this why you open your novel with a historical scene: the incredible welcome in April 1966 of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in Jamaica?

Yes! He is welcomed as the black “messiah” by hundreds of Rastafarian families, because he fought against colonization. He himself, an Orthodox Christian, found the situation absurd, declaring that he was not a savior. But these people, victims of manhunts, needed a model.

Your father was little when Haile Selassie travelled…

Yes, but it was a founding element of his commitment to the Rastafarian movement. (social, cultural and spiritual movement that developed from Jamaica in the 1940s, Editor’s note) . Faith in a “black messiah” has carried generations. It has given pride to black men who were marginalized. As a teenager, my father – who never knew his – was abandoned by his mother. After months of wandering, he was found by musician friends and formed a new family, the Rasta community, with a substitute father. Reggae music, emancipatory, also carried him spiritually.

What inspired you to tell your story as a Jamaican girl raised in poverty who became a famous poet?

I always knew I was going to write my story, but I didn’t know when. I wanted to show what’s behind the postcard paradise of Jamaica. Many stereotypes circulate about my country and Rastafarianism. First, this community is a minority – it represents 1% of the population – and it has been persecuted. Then, within it, sectarian excesses and male omnipotence have developed. More than anything, I wanted to talk about the women and girls of this movement. No one knows their lives. An existence of submission and obedience. It took me ten years to finally feel liberated to start writing.

What was stopping you from moving forward in this work?

As a young woman, when I left Jamaica for the United States, the wounds were too fresh: I had developed an immense anger against my father. But I did not want to write from this suffering, but guided by hope. My ambition was to understand what had happened, to return to the origins of his commitment, of his anger, too. To describe it with its complexity. In 2018, I went back to see him, at the time when I was starting to write. He told me: “I hear you; I listen to you.” Then I knew that I could build a peaceful work, of reconciliation.

Your father founded a Rastafarian family. What was that about?

There are several currents in Rastafarianism, but the one my father belongs to is sectarian and misogynistic. The rules are strict. Men have all the rights, women must obey, be silent, and submit. Like children. Everyone must let their hair grow in dreadlocks, dress in a certain way (long dresses for women), and not mix with the Western world, which represents evil: racism, colonialism, consumption (of meat, alcohol*)… They call this evil entity “Babylon”.

But he didn’t protect you from him. He was violent…

Yes. We all suffered from it and had to distance ourselves from him. Why? My whole book revolves around this question. I don’t know the right answer! He’s the only one who knows. A musician and singer, he went to Japan to record an album. Unfortunately, he was manipulated. To feed the family, he ended up singing Bob Marley in tourist hotels. I think he felt humiliated – a poor black man in a ruthless postcolonial society. But that’s no excuse; feeling diminished doesn’t give you permission to diminish others. Also, my father probably, clumsily, wanted to protect me from the dangers of Babylon, which he saw as an evil entity that abused, especially young women – which happened to me. He became paranoid.

Your work touches us because it tells of your emancipation thanks to your mother, through literature.

My mother has always been this calm, protective and nurturing presence. Without her, I don’t know how I would have survived. She gave me the tools and the confidence to get out of this narrow environment, with her love and literature. We lived in precariousness and isolation. Mom dressed my wounds, massaged me, reciting poems. She knew dozens of them by heart. Her favorite, the one she recited to me constantly was If (“If”) by Rudyard Kipling.

You dragged her and your two sisters into your emancipation. How could she endure this submissive life for so long?

Mum was born to an unknown father and a mother who died young. A small, light-skinned mixed-race girl, she was left to fend for herself and found solace in raising the children of the extended family. Later, in a dispensary, she was told that she would not have children, which traumatised her. She met my father at a dance, they fell in love. The young Rastafarian predicted to her that what the dispensary had said was nonsense – “lies from Babylon”. I was born quickly, the first of four siblings: my mother had found her “saviour” and embraced Rastafarianism, much to the dismay of her maternal family of fishermen.

How did you realize that another life was possible?

Mom gave me my first books and encouraged my vocation as a poet. She recited to me the poems of Mary Shelley and John Keats, of William Blake. The Tiger Blake’s poem was a revelation: “Tiger, tiger! fire and flame/In the forests of night/What immortal hand or eye/Could shape your formidable symmetry.” What she gave me was gold! I learned that Blake had been dead for a century. And his words touched me more than anything. There was a place, a nourishing world, where I could fit in. And the little rasta in me began to dream. The first poem I wrote was a window that opened me to a wonderful world where I mattered.

The bigger you get, the closer you get to Babylon. – of Western culture…

Yes, I met people, I went to the United States to study, I cut my dreadlocks… For my father, I was corrupt. But I just wanted to be me, to be free. He understood, I think – and it was violent – ​​that he could not keep control over five people.

What do you have left from those years?

I never adhered to Rasta spirituality, even as a child! But I retain the notion of black pride: that of not feeling diminished because I am black. And that was very important in the United States. I realized that people expected me to stay in a very small place, because I was a black woman. No way! I grew up in confidence about the color of my skin.

Your father called you “Princess”!

Yes. And now he calls me “Young Queen”! The ultimate stage is “Empress”.

* On the other hand, marijuana is permitted by the Rastafarian movement.