Caribbean Beat — January/February 2019 (#155)

into the wider world, you encounter this
curiosity frequently. You have to explain
where you’re from, where Trinidad is,
why you speak English, why you are the
colour you are. I’ve never been bothered
by this — on the contrary, I’ve seen it as
a privilege. I’ve always felt, ask me where
I’m from!
I
left Trinidad at eighteen and went to
university in the States. I did physics
— I found it very demanding, but I
stuck it out. At Brown University, there’s
no core curriculum: outside of the
classes required for your major, you
just take whatever courses you want.
It was like being in a sweet shop! I
want that, and that, and that! So I did
some neuroscience, some cognitive
science, I learned Italian. Literature
was always on my mind. It was sort
of a push-pull. Physics or literature?
But I found the literature classes I
took fairly baffling. They seemed
to make connections that I found
tenuous, and reach conclusions, and
then announce the conclusions as if
they were some sort of fact. Coming
from physics, I just couldn’t follow
this at all. I was like: you started on
A, which was just a hypothesis, and
we’ve ended up on Z, but nobody has
ever proved that A was true in the
first place!
I lived in Ireland for a year after
finishing university. I’ve always felt
very welcome in Ireland, but I never
introduce myself as Irish. I always
explain that my mother is Irish, but
I grew up in Trinidad, and I’ve been
living in London for a long time: it’s a bit
long-winded, but at least it’s accurate.
For years, I kept notebooks, filled with
stuff — journal notes, attempts at stories,
phrases, snippets. I was always writing
something — that was always a sort of
parallel to whatever else was happening
in my life. But when I came to writing
more seriously, I came at it from the point
of view of rolling up my sleeves and thinking,
OK, how do I figure this out. I joined
various writing workshops, and I did a
creative writing MA in London. I found
the workshop groups very useful, because
they were data. You write a piece, and
you get, say, twelve responses. Some
people would feel very hurt if they got bad
feedback, but I never felt like that. I was
like, this is great data! I said to people,
don’t just tell me what you liked, tell me
what you hated.
I started working seriously on my writing
after I had children. I had the sense of
time running out. It took about five years
to write Golden Child, with longish gaps
between drafts. It felt slow, and although
I never seriously considered giving up,
I occasionally wished I’d never started,
because it was so much harder than I
expected! But I knew, from reading about
other writers’ experiences, that this is not
at all unusual.
My agent sent Golden Child out to
British publishers first, and I was settling
in for a long wait, because sometimes
it’s like that. But we had an offer within
a couple of days, a pre-empt from Faber.
And shortly after that, Hogarth offered on
it in the US. It’s all been very exciting. I
feel very lucky.
I
wish I had a writing routine. In practice,
mostly I wash dishes, do laundry, and
drive my kids around. For years, it’s
been a running joke in my family that I
keep setting my alarm clock for 5 am,
in the hope that I can get up and do an
hour’s writing before the day starts. The
sad reality is that I’m just not a morning
person at all.
If I make any progress on new work,
it tends to be at night. I can work happily
until 2 or 3 am. Things that looked chaotic
and muddled at 4 pm become perfectly
clear at midnight.
Writing Golden Child, I used to trawl
the TT newspapers online, following links,
watching YouTube videos. I usually wasn’t
looking for anything specific, just trying to
immerse myself in that world again. I used
to download photos, and I have a file
of probably hundreds of photos of
Trinidadian scenes. I found this part
really hard, of having to sort of mentally
be in Trinidad, and sometimes
feel a great longing and nostalgia
— which would remain unfulfilled,
because I knew I wouldn’t go back
to live there — and yet physically be
somewhere else.
I’ve been living outside Trinidad
for over twenty years now. At first,
I went back every year, and then it
was every few years. But since my
parents moved to London, I haven’t
been back, and mentally it feels like
a big shift. It’s a strange halfway
position to be in — and many other
people are in a similar place — of
having a “home” place which is far
away and kind of belongs to the past,
and becoming less and less accessible
as each year passes — and yet
on the other hand not feeling that
the place where you are currently
is “home,” either. But I don’t sit here
agonising about it — this has come
about because of choices I have made.
And it helps that this is a common experience:
there are so many of us now who are
in this position. n
Claire Adam’s debut novel, Golden
Child (Faber, UK; SJP for Hogarth,
US) tells the story of a family quietly
surviving in rural Trinidad in the
1980s. Twin teenage brothers Peter
and Paul could not be less alike.
When the latter goes walking in the
bush one day and doesn’t come
home, his father Clyde is faced with
a life-changing decision .
84 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM