A Writing Life (Part 5)

I take no pleasure in looking back at that moment, not just as a reader but as an aspiring writer attempting to create a vision on paper. I did not read about anyone I could recognize as someone in my own family or community when I went to Canadian literature (I had to read books from England, the USA and older Russian novels for such work). I did not see our society in the canon of the country’s “best” writing. This should have been expected. I once read a guide to historical literary sites in Canada and there was not a single mention of anyone in a community I could recognize. There was not even a mention of the hometown I lived in. It was as if we had never really existed in the cultural life of the nation.
This has its advantages. It is only recently that I have realized how lucky I was to come out of two separate environments: my hometown, which had never produced a great writer or artist beyond comedians and pop musicians; and my family and their roots in the Caribbean. With the former, there is no literary history. What history existed there never received a comment in the textbooks we used at school or in the media that attempted to cover the stories of the entire nation. With the latter, the sense of history began and ended with an idea of slavery that was vague and island culture. Everything else had to be filled in by my imagination. To me, my mother’s family only existed as far back as her grandmother. I still have not met most of my uncles and aunts – one aunt died and I could not make it to the funeral. My father’s family history is even more obscure. He died when I was ten years old and I never had the chance to really ask him about his life. I never learned anything about his father. His mother was, from what little I learned, a vicious woman who abused him so badly as a child that he still had the physical scars on his body as an adult. That was all I knew about their lives before they immigrated to Canada, besides the information contained in photographs and the few books that dealt with the history of that small area of land they called home. Like my family, I strived to find anything I could about my culture and the island. I even videotaped a television series based on a novel set there (we never really watched it, although the tape is still on a shelf in our basement). I grew up only half-knowing where I came from. I had to create an identity.