The recent ‘impossible’ election of Barack Hussein Obama, an African American, to the most powerful political office on the planet is symbolic of a ‘possible’ dramatic reversal of race relations in America. More importantly it insinuates, as many commentators have noted, the beginning of a post-racial world – hopefully. The genealogy of that event apparently lies somewhere else historically, irrespective of the immediate political dynamics of its architecture. Analysis of the event has focused so much on the rough road to this historical moment – slavery, emancipation, civil rights, black enfranchisement and so on. So overwhelming was the event that, like Jesus, Jesse jackson wept. What has been elided in all of that is the instrumentality of writing, of literature, to that transformative election.
Writing was indeed an instrument, even if a silent one in all post-election analyses. But this does not merely refer to the physical “technology” itself, but also to a process of “distancing” and “backward scanning” which accompanies it and allows for internal self-dialogue, reflection and ultimately for a representation, in permanent form, of changes in the slave’s consciousness and self-apprehension. To forestall all that the slave-owning south in the early 1800s forbade, as a matter of fact, modern education for slaves:
Amatoritsero Ede: Soucouyant is your first novel. For a first book you display the virtuoso of a master – it is highly charged prose within an economy of language, which, nevertheless expands the field of signification and meaning at the same time, and as such pulls in the reader on several levels. I am trying to say that a lot of experience went into that effortless effort. When and how did your literary journey begin?
David Chariandy: This is extremely kind and encouraging of you to say; but I suspect that I’ll forever feel that I’m only just beginning to learn how to write. I’ve told people that Soucouyant began with my efforts to explore both the deeply saddening condition of dementia and the broader mystery of “forgetting” with respect to personal, cultural, and historical narratives. But I also think that my journey in writing Soucouyant began with my meditation on the word ‘Soucouyant’ itself, a word that signalled to me a past that I couldn’t quite understand or authoritatively ‘pronounce,’ a word that I would have to investigate carefully, with a heightened degree of self-consciousness about the story that I was telling and the language that I was invoking.
In spring the willows’ black bark is oiled stone
Its color soaked by the snowflakes’ whiteness –
“Barry? Barry, is this you?” The telephone call was from Nairobi, Kenya, the caller his Aunt Jane, and she had bad news.
March 12, 2009
That Tune Clutches my Heart shortlisted for The Ethel Wilson
Fiction Prize
January 22, 2009
Robert Bringhurst wins American Printing history Association Award
February 10, 2009
New From Gaspereau Press
