(Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with H. Nigel Thomas, Novelist, Poet, and Short Story Writer<\/em>)<\/p>\n Amatoritsero Ede:<\/strong> It is a pleasure to have this chat with you; especially because it has been a long time in coming. To begin, please give our readers a sense of your literary background and influences.<\/p>\n H. Nigel Thomas:<\/strong> Thanks, Ama, for paying attention to my work. My first influence was my maternal grandfather, John Dickson. At the age of three I went to live in his household. He was then 73, and he was always reading. I wanted to read too, and he taught me how. Soon I too was reading. As soon as I was able to take books from the library, somewhere around age 8, I did. By the time I was ten, I was fascinated by the images and rhythms of the hymns we sang in the Methodist Church I attended. Even so school assignments were the only writing I did then. Around age 19 I wrote and directed short plays to raise money for the Methodist Church. I never considered such writing to be serious, and never saved any copies of the plays. Around 19 too, I began to pay attention to style in the books I read. I specifically remember re-reading and underling some of James Baldwin\u2019s sentences and comparing them with Richard Wright\u2019s. I cannot tell you why I was so struck by their beauty, because even though I had passed English literature at the G.C.E O level, writing style wasn\u2019t among the topics we\u2019d covered.<\/p>\n I immigrated to Canada at age 21, and my first priorities were food and shelter. To obtain those I took a course in psychiatric nursing. While working part time in the field, I attended university intending to study botany, later I thought it would be sociology, but it ended up being English. At age 28\u2014I had already completed an MA\u2014 I became aware one Sunday while taking a solitary walk on Mount Royal that the thoughts investing my head were poems. That\u2019s how the serious phase of my creative writing began. From that Sunday on, for 7 years, I wrote poetry every day. I found it bizarre. Fiction came later, when I was 34. Characters and their stories began to fill my head while I was in bed and sometimes kept me awake until 4 a.m. I had no choice but to get up and record what I was experiencing. I never considered most of those stories publishable, but they were my apprenticeship in fiction writing. Some of them are in my short story collection How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow?: And Other Stories. The title story has been widely anthologized. Another of the stories morphed into what became my first novel, Spirits in the Dark. At the time, 1981-82, I was pursuing a doctorate at Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, and the late writer Hugh Hood was one of the professors in the English Department. I knew him only because the department was small, and he was a very gregarious man who was exceptionally generous with his time. Today, I doubt I would have pursued creative writing as assiduously if I hadn\u2019t met him. He met me in the department office one afternoon and began a conversation about the use of ritual in African novels. (His field was English Romanticism). We chatted away, and at the end of the conversation he asked me if I did any creative writing. I said yes. He offered to look at some of it. When he did he said it was good. A year later, when the earlier version of Spirits in the Dark was written, I asked him to critique it for me. He did and suggested I offer it for publication. I didn\u2019t. I wasn\u2019t comfortable with it. A few months after he\u2019d read it, he was the guest editor for Rubicon (a literary journal publishing out of McGill at the time; it\u2019s now extinct) and asked me to send the section which is now published in a few anthologies with the title \u201cAt the Market.\u201d<\/p>\n Fast forward to 1991. By then I was assistant professor of English at Universit\u00e9 Laval. I returned to the unpublished manuscript with a better understanding of what I wanted to do. In the interim I had read all the novels of Trinidadian writer, Earl Lovelace, had even interviewed him and written a paper on him (my field was African American and Euro-American literature), and had come to the conclusion that the hitherto unexplored aspects of Caribbean reality were what I wanted to pursue. Two works\u2014Leslie Marmon Silko\u2019s Ceremony, and Toni Cade Bambara\u2019s The Salt Eaters gave me the confidence to discard all but 50 pages of the earlier manuscript of Spirits in the Dark and start over. Heinemann rejected the manuscript initially, claiming that because of its homosexual content, it would certainly not sell in the Caribbean. Penguin expressed a strong interest in it but eventually said no because of the ongoing recession in 1991. They said If I didn\u2019t find a publisher within a year I should re-submit the manuscript. I again got in touch with Hugh Hood. He read the manuscript and told me that upon completing the last sentence, he called his publisher and told him, he\u2019d just read a manuscript that they should publish. Next day I got a call from the publisher, and the rest is history (including Heinemann\u2019s recanting). Not all of it pleasant. I know now that I should have got an agent, but then I knew absolutely nothing about the publishing industry. My PhD thesis was published in 1988 through a process which now seems to me like a fairy tale. I\u2019d submitted it to the publisher in 1987 as a prelude to revising it, and a month later, I received a contract and glowing reports from the assessors. It fooled me into trusting publishers.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> Although, the representation of homosexuality in literature is old, I am not sure that it is common in contemporary Caribbean-Canadian literature. But you have had an abiding interest in the subject from your first novel, Spirits in the Dark (1993) to the ongoing tetralogy, the first of which has been recently published as No Safeguards (Guernica, 2015). Why the sustained focus on the subject as represented in characters from Jerome Quashee in the first to Jay and Paul in your most recent novel?<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> As I\u2019ve said earlier, the aspects of Caribbean reality that Caribbean novelists have overlooked were what seized my imagination. One of the flaws I found in the early version of Spirits in the Dark was that I had imposed heterosexuality on a character who was essentially gay. I had to do some soul-searching about why I had done so, and I understood that it was because I did not want to draw attention to my own homosexuality. By then I knew that writers subserve their characters, not the other way around. Because of the way I write\u2014characters come to me and ask me to explore them\u2014I don\u2019t choose to write about homosexuality. But neither can I deny that it would be challenging for me to create a novel-length heterosexual protagonist. I have one in a speculative fiction manuscript that I\u2019ve been sitting on for several years precisely because I\u2019m not convinced that the protagonist is a plausible, three-dimensional heterosexual. It is equally true that much of what I explore by way of fiction is reality that mystifies me. Human cruelty baffles me. Women and gays everywhere have been victims of it, but that cruelty is even more ruthless in the Caribbean. There, heteronormativity and patriarchy are omnipresent, and behaviours that deviate from them are punished\u2014brutally in the case of homosexuality. My bookishness, use of standard English (something imposed in my grandfather\u2019s household), and high-pitched voice marked me in St Vincent as being gay, and I was constantly mocked and ridiculed from the time I was five until I left at age 21. I have felt the need to depict human cruelty in order to understand why it\u2019s so casually and universally practised.<\/p>\n Having said the foregoing, I would like to emphasize that it\u2019s issues of identity that predominate in my first three novels. That\u2019s especially true of Spirits in the Dark and Return to Arcadia. When Jerome invites the congregation to burn their Bibles, he is asking them to renounce colonialism. His psychic sojourn culminates with a vision of Africa in which he is guided by an ancestor \u2013 his deceased grandmother. In all of this Jerome\u2019s sexuality is secondary; it becomes an issue only because all aspects of himself must be laid bare. In Behind the Face of Winter, Pedro\u2019s homosexuality is hardly ever mentioned. In fact, until his mother mentions it on her deathbed, most readers will not have noticed it. Initially the quest to know who his father is consumes him (Caribbean children, even those with resident fathers, spend their lives trying to \u201cfind\u201d their fathers); later it is surmounting the obstacles of racism; and eventually it is giving his life a purpose. In all of this, his sexual orientation is of no importance. I have told my publisher that it\u2019s erroneous to call Behind the Face of Winter a gay novel. In the case of Return to Arcadia, the dominant theme is the pathology that colonialism has engendered. Joshua\u2019s form of sexual gratification, masochism, is symptomatic of that pathology. In all three novels the protagonists seek their fathers. Jerome is the only one who finds him, and it is only during his psychic sojourn. H.N.T.:<\/strong> I\u2019ll 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 \u201ccarrying gay passengers.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> 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 \u2018fair\u2019, then fair?<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> 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\u2019t be otherwise tolerated. Much of what\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019ll 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\u2019re 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, \u201cThe Darker Side of Black\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> Rawi Hage in his blurb about your new work, No Safeguards<\/em>, remarks that \u201cNigel Thomas\u2019 writing merits serious notice.\u201d Do you think your work has received the kind of serious notice that your sizeable oeuvre should command?<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> 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\u2019s gay lest they too be accused of being gay. They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> In another interview you remarked that you \u201clisten to [your] muse and resist the pressures of the marketplace.\u201d Would this have something to with your work not yet having received the kind of buzz I think it ought to in Canada?<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> 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\u2014they claim that generally our books don\u2019t sell\u2014and when they accept our books they offer very small advances. The result is that literary agents, who\u2019re 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\u2019t bought is a complex story that may have to do with how Blacks and Black products are perceived. In Quebec, a project that\u2019s doomed to fail is called a plan n\u00e8gre. It\u2019s not difficult to see how this attitude transfers. It\u2019s present in every aspect of our existence here. We\u2019re 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\u2019s no one else, not even George Elliot Clarke.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> In what ways might literary (in)visibility be linked to the kind of subjects or themes black Canadian writers engage?<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> 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\u2019re depressed enough by the oppression they endure, they don\u2019t 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\u2019t engage me. These same people make hostile remarks about the works of Toni Morrison, so imagine what they say about mine.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> 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: \u201cthese 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.\u201d<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> In terms of manipulation, here\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t think it would sell sufficiently. If my name had been Lawrence Hill the response would have been different. You\u2019ve seen the rampage to acquire copies of Go Set a Watchman, although everyone\u2019s been forewarned that the book would be disappointing. It didn\u2019t matter. It came branded with the name Harper Lee.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> I note that you have written poetry as well. What is the difference for you between writing poetry and writing prose fiction?<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> 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\u2019t record it all. But you can suspend the journey and resume where you\u2019ve left off. When I begin a novel I never know where or how it will end.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> How did you manage scholarship and creative writing while you were still an academic given the stiff competition between both preoccupations?<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> 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\u2019m trying to say that when I write I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019m 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\u2014and it\u2019s still the case\u2014few black literary critics in Canada\u2014critics who understand the culture out of which the creative work has come\u2014so 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, \u201cLangston Hughes and Patronage: A Paradoxical Case,\u201d is included in Harold Bloom\u2019s Modern Critical Views:\u00a0Langston Hughes (2007).<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> 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?<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> I would say that how power is wielded is one of my preoccupations. The oppressive and occasional beneficial nature of religion is another. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019\u00eatre 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.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> I note that your settings traverse the Caribbean and Canada \u2013 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\u2019s characterization in the Caribbean and in Canada.<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> 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\u2019re at odds with the culture. It\u2019s only then that they realize how much they\u2019ve changed. In Behind the Face of Winter, Pedro returns to Isabella thinking he\u2019ll 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 \u201chome\u201d, he finds no such cleanser but plenty shit. His \u2018indefinite\u2019 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\u2019s based on my high-school teaching experience, where I\u2019ve seen students who arrived in Montreal at vulnerable periods of their lives and couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019ombre, in October.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> How does Africa feature in your fictional world or, put differently, what is the relationship of Africa to the Caribbean in your works?<\/p>\n H.N.T.:<\/strong> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n In Return to Arcadia the second phase of Joshua\u2019s recovery from mental illness\u2014mental illness is the arch-metaphor for colonialism in the novel\u2014is through rituals, habits of thought, and a different approach to nature, all of which are derived from residual African beliefs and practices. A.E.:<\/strong> We would like to thank you for taking the time off your busy writing schedule to talk to MTLS.<\/p>\n H.N.T:<\/strong> It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dreaming the Caribbean Body<\/strong>
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\nA.E.:<\/strong> I am guessing that the Caribbean is as \u2018macho\u2019 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?<\/p>\n
\nWhen 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 \u201cGarifuna,\u201d published in When the Bottom Falls Out and Other Stories.<\/p>\n
\n(Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with H. Nigel Thomas, Novelist, Poet, and Short Story Writer)
\n
\nAmatoritsero Ede:<\/strong> It is a pleasure to have this chat with you; especially because it has been a long time in coming. To begin, please give our readers a sense of your literary background and influences.
\n
\nH. Nigel Thomas:<\/strong> Thanks, Ama, for paying attention to my work. My first influence was my maternal grandfather, John Dickson. At the age of three I went to live in his household. He was then 73, and he was always reading. I wanted to read too, and he taught me how. Soon I too was reading. As soon as I was able to take books from the library, somewhere around age 8, I did. By the time I was ten, I was fascinated by the images and rhythms of the hymns we sang in the Methodist Church I attended…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":763,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-roundtable"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":701,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}