Caribbean Beat — September/October 2017 (#147)

Q&A
“I let the
tides tug
me along”
The
BVI poet Richard Georges, whose debut book
Make Us All Islands is shortlisted for a 2017
Forward Prize, talks to Shivanee Ramlochan
about grounding his poems in his home island,
and the challenges of writing from a small place
Photography courtesy Mark Gellineau
These poems speak compellingly
about British Virgin Islander history
on land and at sea. From what
emotional terrain do you draw the
foundations of your work? Where do
you set your horizons in poetry?
I think, especially with this work, there
was an intense desire to put those remarkable
narratives and experiences in a place
outside of memory and little-read history
titles. I really wanted to commit them to
verse, as a way — perhaps a contradictory
way — to make them real. As a fledgling
writer, I saw all this history, all this landscape,
and all this water sort of carrying on
on its own, outside of the consciousness of
the wider region, and completely outside
of the experience of the non-islander. In a
way, I guess you could say that my writing
it is a sort of profane exercise, as I’ve
abstracted and mythologised things that
are very real already.
As far as my poetic horizons go, I try to
let the tides tug me along, and trust that
they will take me where I’m meant to go. I
thought I’d write a book of poems and then
move on to spend some time experimenting
with fiction, but poems seem to keep
coming. I think I have to trust that.
Make Us All Islands resists oppression
with a tender ferocity, such as in
“Blue Runner”: “we must learn again
/ . . . how to pull the thin / shimmering
spears from our throats.” Where do
you channel the quiet vigilance that
dwells in this collection?
It’s funny that you mention vigilance,
as the motto of the British Virgin Islands
is the Latin word vigilate or “be vigilant.”
I can’t say that was an overtly conscious
motivation of mine, and I am always
wary of messages that call for things
like cultural revivals and draw lines
around national identities, but as I
wrote I often returned to the rituals and
practices that located us here
as Virgin Islanders. That
is the space where poems
like “Blue Runner”, “Bushing
the Pit”, “Boiling Bush” and
others came from, in a spirit
of documenting those rituals
of ours and how those rituals
are a quiet resistance of the
insidious orders of colonialism,
patriarchy, capitalism.
BVI is often overlooked in celebrations
of Caribbean literature.
What is needed for clearer focus on
underwritten spaces in our islands?
The answer to this is twofold. While
BV Islanders have been writing at least
for the last hundred years, that writing
has hardly ever left our shores. Several
of our local writers, for various reasons,
self-publish their books, which makes
it less likely for anyone outside the BVI
to read them. So the first part of the
answer is that writers in the BVI have to
look outward, have to publish through
regional and international platforms
that are listening for new voices, and put
their work through the rigours of those
processes. We have to travel to literature
festivals and book fairs in the Caribbean
and make the effort to become part of the
greater chorus of the region. We have to
look beyond the BVI as our audience in
order to do that.
The second aspect might be that once
those sorts of things are happening in the
smaller spaces of the Caribbean — say,
Bermuda, Turks and Caicos, St Vincent,
and the like — it may take some effort on
the part of festival directors, editors, and
publishers to reach out to emerging writers
in those spaces. For my own part, that is
one of the reasons David Knight, Jr, and I
founded Moko, and I can point to my own
developing career as a template for what
is possible in writing from a small place. n
Born in Trinidad in 1982, Richard Georges grew
up the British Virgin Islands, where he lives
in Tortola. He teaches at the H. Lavity Stoutt
Community College, and is co-editor of the
online literature and art journal Moko. His book
of poems Make Us All Islands, published in early
2017 (and reviewed in this issue of Caribbean
Beat, page 32), is shortlisted for the Felix
Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, part of the
UK-based Forward Prizes for Poetry. His second
book, Giant, will be published in 2018.
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