Caribbean Beat — January/February 2019 (#155)

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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
ARRIVE Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo 86 Round Trip All about blue 100 Neighbourhood Road Town, Tortola 102 Bucket List Little Tobago The milky blue mineral known as larimar is unique to the Dominican Republic, mined in the mountains of the country’s southwest
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Jamaica Barbados Trinidad & Tobago
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TOTALTEC OILFIELD SERVICES GUYANA I
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Contents No. 155 • January/Februa
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eyond ordinary... ...Explore the ex
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A MESSAGE From OUR CEO Dear Custome
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Carnival, Trinidad and Tobago In th
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need to know Top Three PAPJAZZ hits
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need to know asife / shutterstock.c
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Page 42 and 43: need to know Vahni Capildeo gets in
Page 44: maria nunes Veteran fancy sailor ma
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Page 49 and 50: ookshelf Q&A A View of the Empire a
Page 52: screenshots courtesy ian harnarine
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Page 57: Immerse jason audain 55 Panorama Be
Page 60 and 61: Dwayne Watkins Photography A masque
Page 62 and 63: This Dame Lorraine, portrayed by Na
Page 64 and 65: Jason Audain The young revellers of
Page 66 and 67: Moko jumbie and designer Alan Vaugh
Page 68 and 69: Jason Audain Surprised by an explos
Page 70 and 71: ackstory You may not know its name,
Page 72 and 73: photos courtesy the artists Subance
Page 74 and 75: Westend61 GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo
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Page 80 and 81: Hydar Dewachi Adam Patterson’s wo
Page 82 and 83: In yet another Caribbean island, Pa
Page 84 and 85: own words “I’ve always felt, as
Page 88 and 89: ound trip All about blue Of all the
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Page 108: In 2017, photographer Caroline Powe
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Caribbean Beat — January/February 2019 (#155)

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