Caribbean Beat — March/April 2018 (#150)

His earliest experiences of separation and loss, dislocation
not just physical but also emotional, may be responsible for his
Nowherian identity (a term coined by St Lucia’s Nobel laureate
Derek Walcott). When he was barely one year old, Alexis’s
Trinidadian parents decided to migrate to Canada: his father
to study medicine, his mother law. They left their two children
— André and his baby sister Thecla — with separate sets of
relatives. His mother Ena Borde now says, “André felt we should
not have separated them. I think that affected him a lot when he
was young.” Alexis lived with an uncle for two and a half years,
until — pregnant with her third child — Ena reunited her family,
bringing the children to Canada.
Alexis views this period of his life as “two breaches: there was
the loss of my parents, and (subsequently) the loss of my home.
It makes you re-examine what the world is, at a very basic level.
And doing it at three or four, you don’t have the equipment; you
have to invent the equipment to understand the world. And so
Canada was the country to learn home in, not to be at home.”
His books reflect this split: both cultural realities are overt
in the narratives; neither is denied, neither is idealised.
His description of a wedding or a wake is instantly
recognisable by any West Indian, anywhere in the world. A
costume parade in small-town Ontario is Trinidad’s Carnival in
miniature. Alexis writes in pristine English, but the occasional
Trini phrase slides slyly into the prose (“Oh lors!” wails one
character, with not even a hint of explanation to the nonplussed
non-Caribbean reader, who probably dismisses it as a typo). Alexis
loves it when a fellow-Trinidadian catches these little winks, like
a secret code.
“My work is the work of an immigrant,” he says, “and couldn’t
not be. If you take a mango seedling and put it in Canada, what
is it? It’s still a tropical plant, and always will be. I’m a tropical
plant.”
Which would make perfect sense, if his works were overtly
about transplant: the hackneyed immigrant story (stranger in
a strange land, obstacles/triumphs/heartbreaks/redemption).
But they’re not — his dislocations are more often mental
than geographical. This mango seedling has been thoroughly
naturalised: writing about Ottawa and Toronto, or the Ontario
countryside, Alexis achieves a sense of place that is more vivid,
more real, than the born-and-bred Canadian novelists, most of
whom are still searching plaintively for “identity” (“We are nice,
we are polite, we are not American”).
In an early interview with Canadian literature professor
Branko Gorjup (published in Books in Canada, April 1998), Alexis
declared: “I don’t feel myself particularly part of any branch of
the Canadian literary tradition, but I don’t feel myself disconnected
from it either. As to the West Indian heritage . . . yes, I
am very much West Indian in the way I grew up . . . Trinidad is
and always will be the first environment that I was exposed to.
However, that doesn’t mean that I consider myself a West Indian
writer. I couldn’t write as I write now had I stayed in Trinidad . . .
It may be that alienation was necessary for my creativity.”
Alexis was drawn to writing early in life. “I wanted to be
either a musician, or something artistic,” he recalls. He started
playing guitar around age fourteen, and picked up writing
shortly afterwards. He still plays the guitar, but clearly writing
won the creativity derby. (Though not completely: at the time of
our interview, he was working on the libretto for an opera.)
He studied English at Carlton University, but after a year “I
realised I didn’t really want to do English,” he explains, with
no apparent irony. Next he took a shot at Russian, lasting half
a year. “That was the last time I was in university. I don’t have
any degrees,” he reveals, almost proudly. His high-achieving
parents were less than thrilled. Says Ena Borde: “As a parent
you think, he has a good mind, why doesn’t he get a degree
that would take him through life?” But she knew better than
to press her shy, bookish son: “I always gave my children the
freedom to make their own decisions.”
Abandoning academia, Alexis found a job in a bookshop — a
way to be surrounded by books without having to fit them into
the “completist” framework of formal education. He read widely
and esoterically, but denies being erudite: “I just like ideas.
Ideas are my natural subject, because I think the human mind
is my natural subject.” Nevertheless, his books are studded with
names and theories that the average reader would struggle to
recognise.
At thirty, Alexis moved to Toronto, where destiny patiently
awaited him. His daughter Nicola was born a few years later
— shortly before Alexis was fired from his job at Book City for
refusing to work overtime at an event. (“Insubordination?” I
suggest helpfully. “Yes, insubordination,” he exclaims. “I like
that word, it makes me look like a rebel!”).
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