A.E.: I am guessing that the Caribbean is as ‘macho’ a society as most and that heteronormativity is the norm. But could you give our readers an idea of what it is actually like in real life and how that colours your fictional representations. Are there gay parades say, in St Vincent, St Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago or Port Au Prince?
H.N.T.: I’ll answer your question with specific examples. In 1998, Evangelicals in the Bahamas invited their followers to come to the port and protest against the presence of a cruise ship “carrying gay passengers.” The ship was stoned, and for several years passengers of such ships were greeted with hostile placards and stones in many Caribbean ports. In 1995, if my memory is correct, when Jamaican gays and their supporters attempted a peaceful protest against gay persecution, objecting Jamaicans lined the protest route with stones and broken bottles to attack the demonstrators. The protest had to be called off. Three or so years ago, the Nevis harbourmaster denied docking permission to a cruise ship allegedly carrying gay passengers. He said he feared the passengers would bring disease to the island. As late as March of this year (2015) a gay youngster was stoned to death in Jamaica. In 2005, in my birthplace, St Vincent, a government minister stated quite publicly that he would like to set all gays on fire. He now holds a diplomatic position in North America and tells the U.S. and Canadian governments that gays face no discrimination in St Vincent and the Grenadines and should not be given refugee status.
But there has been a change in tone (not through antigay laws as would be expected) in some places: in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and St Vincent, for example. Four years ago, when the police and a posse of journalists surprised two men having sex in an SUV on a remote beach in St Vincent, the director of public prosecutions threw out the charges. There was an uproar against him, but he stood his ground. This would have been unthinkable, never mind doable, five years earlier. The LGBTQ organisations in Trinidad and Barbados operate publicly. This would have been unfeasible ten years ago. And surprise of surprises, the first Gay Pride celebration ever to be held in the Caribbean took place in Kingston, Jamaica three weeks ago.
A.E.: Despite the positive developments, can we still say that the West Indian Carnival, with its array of naked skin, is nevertheless hetero-erotic through and through. Is that ‘fair’, then fair?
H.N.T.: Carnival seems to have always functioned as a limited ephemeral space. It is usually two days, in which one had the freedom to display behaviours that wouldn’t be otherwise tolerated. Much of what’s otherwise repressed is allowed to be on full display. In the Caribbean, Catholics were required to burn the accoutrements of carnival on Ash Wednesday. It’s not difficult to see, then, that carnival functioned, among other things, as a form of scheduled exorcism. Reality contains its paradoxes. Sexologists know that many heterosexuals are actually repressed bisexuals. I’ll venture to say that carnival offers an opportunity for them to come out of the closet for two days and to return to it right after. Sex was an integral part of the Mediterranean version of carnival. Remember the Dionysian Women who’re so sexually inflamed that they hurl themselves onto the horns of bulls? In Rome carnival was conflated with the festival of Priapus. In his film, “The Darker Side of Black”, Isaac Julien expresses amazement at how the Dancehall culture, out of which the most venomous antigay sentiments have come, has embraced gay styles of dress.
A.E.: Rawi Hage in his blurb about your new work, No Safeguards, remarks that “Nigel Thomas’ writing merits serious notice.” Do you think your work has received the kind of serious notice that your sizeable oeuvre should command?
H.N.T.: I avoid answering such questions. The literary marketplace is complex and full of aleatory elements. But there are a few things I can comment on with a bit more certitude as regards West Indian readers. West Indians have been instinctually programmed to stay away from anything that’s gay lest they too be accused of being gay. They’ve also been programmed to punish gays. I suspect that factor plays into the paucity of criticism my work has received. The ostracism gays are subjected to extends to their art. The editors of the Dictionary of Caribbean Literature did not include the entry for my work. I know that my gay characters account for the bookstores not carrying my books. People who go looking for them are told that my books promote homosexuality. Bookstore owners cannot risk being accused of promoting ungodly morality and losing their clientele. Another factor is that most of my protagonists are atheists or agnostics. Even today, atheists and agnostics in the Caribbean do not disclose their beliefs. Doing so would make them instant pariahs and they would be blamed for the natural disasters that periodically strike the Caribbean, much like Pat Robinson blames gays for those that strike the United States.
A.E.: In another interview you remarked that you “listen to [your] muse and resist the pressures of the marketplace.” Would this have something to with your work not yet having received the kind of buzz I think it ought to in Canada?
H.N.T.: Books, like all forms of merchandise in the Occident, are successful or unsuccessful based on the size and power of the machinery that promotes them. According to what some literary agents have reported, Canadian publishers are loath to publishing black authors—they claim that generally our books don’t sell—and when they accept our books they offer very small advances. The result is that literary agents, who’re paid a percentage of the advance, rarely take on black authors; without a literary agent, our work cannot get to the major publishers. We are therefore fated to publish with small presses that do not have much of a budget for promotion. Why our books aren’t bought is a complex story that may have to do with how Blacks and Black products are perceived. In Quebec, a project that’s doomed to fail is called a plan nègre. It’s not difficult to see how this attitude transfers. It’s present in every aspect of our existence here. We’re paid less than Whites with similar qualifications and holding similar positions. . . These decisions are usually subconscious. In such an environment a writer like me simply writes and hopes someone publishes it. Few writers, black or white, can sustain themselves by writing. Perhaps Lawrence Hill can. I suspect there’s no one else, not even George Elliot Clarke.
A.E.: In what ways might literary (in)visibility be linked to the kind of subjects or themes black Canadian writers engage?
H.N.T.: Black writers explore themes like racial injustice and colonialism, themes that make white people uncomfortable. Such themes also make some black people uncomfortable. They sometimes tell me that they’re depressed enough by the oppression they endure, they don’t want to read about it. In other words, they ask me to write escapist fiction. My response to that is: enough has been written about the great kings and queens of Africa and the implements Blacks invented. Such topics don’t engage me. These same people make hostile remarks about the works of Toni Morrison, so imagine what they say about mine.
A.E.: Would you say that market dynamics have to do with the above situation? I ask that with this in mind from the blurb of a book you edited, Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists: “these poets and fiction writers also respond to the exigencies of craft, the manipulation of publishers, the criticism of readers, and the absence of a clearly identifiable market for their works.”
H.N.T.: In terms of manipulation, here’s an example: a Penguin reviewer for Spirits in the Dark commented that the dialect would not discourage readers. Quite obviously Penguin had asked him or her to respond to that feature of the novel. In a New York Times review of one of Austin Clarke’s books the reviewer was incensed that an educated writer like Austin Clarke would use the Barbadian dialect. In other words, she was saying that readers are the purchasers of books and they dictate the language registers that writers use. And of course readers do. In a query to Penguin five years ago about my speculative fiction manuscript, the response was they didn’t think it would sell sufficiently. If my name had been Lawrence Hill the response would have been different. You’ve seen the rampage to acquire copies of Go Set a Watchman, although everyone’s been forewarned that the book would be disappointing. It didn’t matter. It came branded with the name Harper Lee.
A.E.: I note that you have written poetry as well. What is the difference for you between writing poetry and writing prose fiction?
H.N.T.: Both poetry and prose fiction begin in a semi-dream state. But poetry requires a deeper level of dreaming and one that has to be sustained until the essential images and metaphors have been captured. Afterwards it can be trimmed or expanded. In prose fiction you literally slip into the skins of your characters and set out on the imaginary journey that will become the novel or short story. You must imaginatively experience all that your characters undergo and witness, even if you don’t record it all. But you can suspend the journey and resume where you’ve left off. When I begin a novel I never know where or how it will end.
A.E.: How did you manage scholarship and creative writing while you were still an academic given the stiff competition between both preoccupations?
H.N.T.: I remember surprising a couple of scholars at a conference when I said that I was an atheist. Both had taught Spirits in the Dark. I’m trying to say that when I write I’m able to switch personalities. I can enter the very rational world of literary criticism and later switch to the dream world of creative writing. I was asked at that same conference if my work as a critic influenced my creative writing, and my answer was no. There is, for example, a certain playfulness with metaphor and language, not to mention frivolity, that’s at the core of fiction; it has no place in literary criticism. Occasionally students of books contact me and toss-out their jargon-laden questions of literary theory. I understand the theory, and suggest that they apply it in whatever way they want to my work. I’m usually more at ease with questions that are thematic. That said, a couple of those students have told me that I helped them in their application of deconstruction theory to my works. And I guess they were right inasmuch as my works oppose the dominant (master) narratives. In 1997, when I applied for promotion to full professor, my department chair wrote in his recommendation that I was the only member of the department who practised literary criticism and creative writing. I did not disdain the former. Moreover, there were then—and it’s still the case—few black literary critics in Canada—critics who understand the culture out of which the creative work has come—so I felt it was something of a responsibility. However, in 1995, I decided to abandon funded research because it would have obliged me to abandon creative writing. In the process I gave up writing a scholarly book on Blacks in the US literary marketplace, 1920-1940. I did, however, publish a few articles on the topic, one of which, “Langston Hughes and Patronage: A Paradoxical Case,” is included in Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Langston Hughes (2007).
A.E.: Apart from sexuality what other themes do you engage in your writing? Can you identify a thematic pattern in your works across the different genres you engage?
H.N.T.: I would say that how power is wielded is one of my preoccupations. The oppressive and occasional beneficial nature of religion is another. It’s a major theme in the tetralogy, which begins with No Safegaurds. Sometimes I show it as an extension of colonialism. In Spirits in the Dark, neo-African religion is depicted as resistance to colonial domination. The shadow of slavery is another of my themes, and it’s usually presented in terms of how a large percentage of West Indian men deal with sex, women, and children. I have mentioned earlier my preoccupation with trying to understand the raison d’être of human cruelty. I also show many of my characters stumbling through life. I believe that humans have very little control over their lives, that we are determined by our individual physiology and our environment. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was one of the first books of poetry I read. I think I was around eleven. It made me aware of how little control people had over their lives. The residents of the village in which I grew up had none, until they were able to migrate to England. In a couple of years, the village almost emptied.
A.E.: I note that your settings traverse the Caribbean and Canada – naturally. How does geographical setting shape or inform your narrative; I mean how does geographical setting redefine how your characters relate to their environment and themselves, for example. Consider No Safegaurds and Jay and Paul’s characterization in the Caribbean and in Canada.
H.N.T.: Usually my characters leave Isabella Island and St Vincent full of illusions which they quickly lose. They also lose their cultural and spatial security and live with a sense of spatial and social dislocation. This is best shown in my short story collection, Lives: Whole and Otherwise. What the host culture censures they suppress. What it approves of they exaggerate. Hence the popularity of Carifiesta and Caribana. They quickly fashion the masks needed to cope, and usually discover, when they attempt to resettle in the Caribbean, that they’re at odds with the culture. It’s only then that they realize how much they’ve changed. In Behind the Face of Winter, Pedro returns to Isabella thinking he’ll never return to Canada. His years here, he says, coated him with shit, which he was returning home to wash off. Of course, upon arriving “home”, he finds no such cleanser but plenty shit. His ‘indefinite’ return lasts only two weeks. In No Safeguards such changes are most visible in Paul. Unlike Pedro, Paul moves from wealth into poverty, from an elite school to an inner-city one, and the result is disastrous. It’s based on my high-school teaching experience, where I’ve seen students who arrived in Montreal at vulnerable periods of their lives and couldn’t cope with the disruption. Some of the ingrained habits of West Indians, the prolific use of corporal punishment on children, or males physically abusing their spouses, for example, get them into serious trouble here. It did not surprise me when I heard that 40 percent of the children in the custody of Toronto’s child protection services are black. It frustrates me when I hear educated Blacks defend the use of corporal punishment. I explore many of these issues in my short story collections and most of them in my novel Behind the Face of Winter. It will appear in a French translation, De glace et d’ombre, in October.
A.E.: How does Africa feature in your fictional world or, put differently, what is the relationship of Africa to the Caribbean in your works?
H.N.T.: Africa, namely Ghana, has a prominent place in Spirits in the Dark. In the novel a delegation of Ghanaian youths comes to Isabella Island. It was my stratagem to familiarize the protagonist Jerome as well as the village community that he’s from that aspects of Africa were present among them. Colonialism has so vilified Africa that even someone as intelligent and sensitive as Jerome is intellectually deformed by its propaganda. At the same time I did not romanticize Africa. Years later when Jerome undergoes a healing ritual that’s in part inherited from Africa, that visit by the African delegation turns out to be very useful in his understanding of the experience. Ghanaians who’ve read Spirits in the Dark seem satisfied with my depiction of the delegation. In Behind the Face of Winter, one of the males who mentor Pedro is a Shango worshipper; he explains to Pedro what Shango worship is and the tribulations followers of the religion bore until 1951. Shango Worship does not exist in St Vincent. It does in Trinidad and Grenada. One reason I chose to set some of my work on the fictional Isabella Island is that I can incorporate practices found in other islands but absent in St Vincent.
In Return to Arcadia the second phase of Joshua’s recovery from mental illness—mental illness is the arch-metaphor for colonialism in the novel—is through rituals, habits of thought, and a different approach to nature, all of which are derived from residual African beliefs and practices.
When I visited Belize in 201l, I sought out some of the Garifuna communities there. I had long been reading about them and had already visited their communities in Nicaragua and Guatemala. Although the available documentation on them emphasises their Kalinago component, I saw that it was West African practices and beliefs that constitute their worldview. In Belize I had strong confirmation of this. Out of that experience came my short story “Garifuna,” published in When the Bottom Falls Out and Other Stories.
A.E.: We would like to thank you for taking the time off your busy writing schedule to talk to MTLS.
H.N.T: It’s my pleasure. Literature is not a discipline in which to make money; therefore, we are grateful to you and others who labour to give it a prominent place in our culture.
