Who said that? Monolithic? As far as writing about the Caribbean I think that I am trying to revise a colonized history, a history that's been interpreted from a European perspective only, and I'm trying to revision it as a history that is more complex. I don't like the word "Monolithic;" it sounds so heavy handed, but that's a critical thing, so....

I had trouble with the term revised. So much of your work seems to be about revealing.

I would say "re-vision" In the sense of re-visioning something, not in the sense of revising as in correcting it, or editing it, but in trying to see something from a different point of view.

In an article you wrote for Ploughshares you’re discussing two prisons, most specifically the Fishkill Correctional Facility near San Francisco, and you write that: “One of these places reminds me of another." 

It's about places of captivity.

Writing about Fishkill Prison allows you to write about other prisons as well?

I think so, yeah. It's like a concrete representation of a landscape of captivity and that leads you to see other places of captivity. I think that's how it goes. And captivity being the physical act of holding people in one place, like in South Africa, which I refer to in that piece also. But also the metaphor of holding people captive, their imaginations captive...

In Claiming an Identity they Taught Me to Despise, I was struck by the two juxtaposed definitions of "pinion." As the wing and the section of the wing, as well as the severing of the wing.

The elimination of flight.

That seems to suggest a meeting place for two contradictory ideas -- in language.

So much of what a writer does is unconscious, it could well be. Absolutely.  I like to play with language a lot, find alternative meanings for the same words, like I do with “pinion”. I like to use it to liberate myself and to, I guess, use the English language in a way where I own it, that it becomes mine, and it’s not something imposed on me. So I don't use just the King's English that's imposed on me, I use all the different versions of English that I've experienced, including Caribbean English, American English, Literary English, whatever . . . but there's a sense of liberation in being able to reconstruct one's own language, that's connected up certainly to reconstructing history, and also reconstructing experience

You were born in Jamaica, and moved when?

A couple of times. I went back to school there when I was ten.

Was traveling back and forth difficult?

I don't think so. It was interesting. My parents were very mobile. I think it’s very enriching to live that way as a writer. It wasn’t like just living in the United States as an immigrant. Having a consistent experience with my native land throughout my childhood as well as my adopted country, the country that had been adopted for me, was empowering because I was in connection with my native land; I didn't have to be born again as an American.

How do you negotiate between what the reader might perceive as autobiography in your fiction?

I can't, I can't. But there's a terrible tendency to read almost everything as autobiography.

Today in particular?

Yeah, today, because of memoir and all that. Obviously I use my life, but it’s not autobiographical at all. Harry Harriet, who's a transsexual in the novel No Telephone to Heaven  -- he's not really a transsexual in the sense of having two sexes -- is much closer to who I am. Not in a sexual sense, but in his work on himself to be a complete human being, taking in everything of who he is, reflects much more my own struggle than Clare's who is a fragmented person, or Christopher who is also fragmented.

The last line of my first novel Abeng. It may sound a little jejune now, but I still believe it. It ends by the narrator saying that everyone we dream about we are, and in a sense, when you create characters these are the people you dream about; they are you, you are them. They're coming out of your unconscious, and you’re responsible for them. You're responsible to make them, you know, characters, and to maintain a kind of integrity about them, and so in that sense you're everyone in your fiction, but that's different than writing an autobiographical character.

So, in regards to what you mentioned about the prisons, it's being a person that allows you write about other people.

To be a decent writer, you have to be able to approach people with compassion on the deepest possible level and cast yourself into their lives.

You have said, "Love demands accountability" in reference to your love of the United States . . .

Where did I say that?

In “Fiction as History, History as Fiction.”

Jesus! Yes, this country is endlessly fascinating to me. I find it absolutely interesting, fascinating, heartbreaking, and beautiful. Everything at the same time.

When you say accountability, is that a historical accountability?

No, I think what I was trying to say there was that if I'm going to be in this country, and stay in this country, I have to be accountable.

Personally accountable?

Yes, that means loving it and being able to criticize as well -- being a social critic, a political critic, whatever.

Did your creative writing begin when you received your Masters of Philosophy, or were you always a creative writer?

No, in fact I didn't start until much later. When I got out of the University of London, I came back to New York, and I worked in publishing as an editor and then I was also teaching at the New School.  In New York, I started talking to the authors I was working with and I got involved tangentially with the Women's Movement. It was an exciting time, and people were writing and publishing, and talking about writing, and I just fell into it. It was quite accidental. The first thing I ever wrote was after I'd read an article in Ms. magazine, which was about Jamaica which was such nonsense it made me very, very angry. And I wrote a letter to the editor of Ms., which was edited in such a way that it made me praise the article, and they never passed it by me and so I started writing about Jamaica.

You say that came out of the Women’s Movement. Do you see yourself as a feminist writer?

No. I didn't see myself as a feminist writer then. I was given permission through things in the feminist movement to be a writer.

Your first book, Claiming an Identity they Taught Me to Despise, reminds me, in many ways, of collage.

Yeah, it is like collage. I wrote that book when I had a 9-5 job and I didn't have time to sit down and write a sustained narrative, so I wrote it in sketches in my office. I think the form reflects the conditions under which it was written.

And also video art.

But a lot of my work has to do with movies, I mean that comes out of having been just, I don't know, drowned in film since I was a little kid. When we lived in Jamaica, there was no television, and we read books obviously, but we went to the movies several times a week.  My father adored the movies, we'd go to triple features, which is three movies in one night, sometimes outdoors under the stars. It's really quite an experience: watching Spartacus in Jamaica under the stars.

You write both poetry and prose.

Well, I haven't written poetry in an awful long time. I don't consider myself a poet at all.

What compels you to choose certain forms. Is it unconscious?

Well, I live with a poet, so I think its natural to choose prose. No, I'm kidding. I really don't know. I know the Caribbean books, Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven. They couldn't be contained in a book of poetry. I had just so much to say, so much to get in there. I'm not saying that poetry couldn't do that, but I couldn't do that in poetry. And then Free Enterprise, which is a novel very close to my heart, and which is out of print, was a really concerted effort to rewrite history with regards to the raid on Harpers Ferry, and so that was a conscious decision to write a historical novel.

I guess the prose work that is most poetic are my short stories, and those are quite poetic and quite brief, if you talk about the use of language.

Besides writing, you’ve also worked in publishing.

I worked for Life magazine.  I worked to put myself through college, and one of my jobs was as a babysitter, and one of my clients was and editor. He was a very nice man. I loved working there. I worked for them in New York and in London. Great place to work. In New York, I researched the astronaught program, especially the first moon landing. I flew down to Houston and interviewed the astronaughts. I was very young. I was literally just out of college. It was 1969 and I'd spent the summer in Paris, then came back to New York.

In London, I was sort of a researcher too, then worked a lot in Northern Ireland, because we were covering a lot of stuff there. That was a lot of fun, working in London. I worked with a lot of photographers. Vietnam was still going on, so we had guys coming through who literally had just gotten off the plane coming from Vietnam with their film, which we'd process then fly to New York.  Photographers are very interesting people. I find them very interesting. They aren't as arrogant as writers, to be honest. It's like when I'm at an artist’s colony, I gravitate toward the visual artists because they seem like nicer, more regular guys, in all honesty. I think it's also that romantic idea. I was very young, and there were these dashing guys who came off the plane, and there were women photographers too, but it was mostly guys.

Do you think the publishing climate has changed since you began writing?

Oh god, yes! It's much more commercial.  There's much less space for experimental writers. The memoir has taken hold. It's what James Wolcott calls half-lives, which is true because there are all these memoirs by people too young to be writing memoirs -- they haven't accomplished anything. They're just writing about their angst or whatever. It's nutty. It's taking self-involvement to an absurd extreme.

Do you think writing is essentially political?

For me it is.

Is there such a thing as non-political writing?

Sure, but I chose to write because I had something to say about the place I come out of -- so it was a conscious choice to construct political fictions.

You taught at Trinity College for ten years, and in Germany for six months.  Do you enjoy teaching?

I enjoy teaching literature, which is what I taught at Trinity, which was what I taught in Germany.  What I taught at Stanford. I don't enjoy teaching creative writing at all. I really don't. Because I'm much more interested in what people have written. When I teach creative writing, I try to have people read a lot. This is going to sound perfectly horrible, but I don't know that writing can be taught. I know that literature can be taught, and you can learn from literature, but I don't  know that you can just teach someone to be a creative writer without studying literature.

Do you think the notion of the workshop is helpful?

I think it’s helpful to the students, but I don't feel inspired as a teacher. I like my students very, very, much, don't get me wrong, but my real strength as a teacher is teaching literature.

You've completed a novel, but have yet to find a publisher.  What is this new novel about?

A lot of stuff. It's very funny. It's kind of a comedy about colonialism in England. It's kind of zany. I'm very fond of it. I've worked very very hard on it. But it’s hard to get political work published now, and it’s a very political novel. But I'm philosophical about it.

What writers have influenced you the most?

Let's see. Several, and mostly for matters of form and a sense of the possibilities of fiction -- how far you can take it. I'd say: Beckett, Hemingway, and Faulkner, and for inspiration as far as being a woman writer and writing out of a colonized society, and writing political fiction critiquing that society, I'd have to say Morrison and Gordimor, and James Baldwin, though he wasn’t a woman.

Evan Boland wrote that, “The expatriate is in search of a country, while the exile is in search of a self.”

Gag me with a spoon. Why can't the expatriate also be in search of a self? I think I'm in search of both, but I think I am my country. That kind of facile characterization really bothers me; it's too neat and tidy. It's like when Walcott says, “I have no nation now but the imagination.”

My final question.  Do you see a future in online publishing?

I think there's a place for it. I just wish they'd get their act together. There are so many incorrect things on the Internet -- like my age. They have a website on me. Somebody put it together, and they have me off by ten years. It drives me crazy. But seriously, there's a place for it to coexist. I think we don't know what to do with it yet, frankly. It's very, very powerful, and very chaotic. It's like being in somebody's attic when they're crazy

Copyright 2002, Jim Clawson

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.