 Welcome again to Don't Call It Magic. We're all magical people in the Caribbean, and it's diaspora, but what do the entanglements of magic, myth, folklore, history, culture, liming, bacchanal, all have in common? I think they're rooted in words, and it's my great pleasure to be moderating this panel with three of some of the finest wordsmiths and word makers I know. My name is Shivani Ramduchan, I'm a member of the NGC Bocas Litfast team, and I am delighted to be joined by Karen Lord, Pauline Melville, and in a few short minutes Ayanna Lloyd Banwoo. Before Ayanna gets here, because she's facing the particular magic that is delayed buses, allow me to introduce Karen and Pauline. Karen Lord is the author of the prize-winning Redemption in Indigo, the speculative fiction novels, the best of all possible worlds, and the galaxy game, and the crime fantasy novel Unraveling. And because you're a special audience here at Bocas UK, and delighted to whisper to you that Karen's forthcoming book, The Blue Beautiful World, will be with us in summer 2023. Please give her a round of applause. Next Karen is Pauline, whose Master of Chaos by Sandstone Press, published in 2021, is the latest short story collection from the acclaimed Guyanese British writer. Karen's work has won numerous literary awards and has been translated into 10 languages of the Master of Chaos. Salman Rushdie, you might have heard of him, says, in this virtuoso performance, Pauline Melville shows us a world in upheaval and reminds us that that's where we live. I'm contemplating introducing Ayanna before she's on stage, and I think I will not. What I'll do is introduce her when she arrives. But first, invite Karen to share a brief reading from Unraveling with us. Thank you so much, Shivani. So whenever I read from speculative fiction, there's always a lot of context that you feel you might have to give so people are not totally lost. Unfortunately, this is a bit that doesn't require a lot of context. We're talking about the characters being in a labyrinth. Hey! Well, no one noticed that, right? I've been here all along. Parts of the theme. Go ahead. No? Sure? Yes. Okay. You have come just in time to start my reading. So the purpose of this labyrinth is to give the protagonist a possible future view. And the two characters who are going to be speaking in this conversation, neither of them are human. And that's all the context I'll give you for now. You'll have to hear the rest. Multiple human shadows. How do you do it? The tricks are marbled. Patients close the door. It has to be done. Everything in the labyrinth is me. For what goes in of its own free will, the trickster guests. Patients gave him a silent nod of confirmation. But dear patients, I've had so many doubts about you and your love of free will that your mastery of puppetry does not appease by concerns. She sat down on the ground without grace as if subtly exhausted. Shall I tell you how I achieved this high skill? The trickster dropped down beside her. He choked back his yes, sensing that the knowledge would be both unpleasant and impossible to forget. But it was too late. She leaned forward, demanding his full attention with an intent gaze. Every path I dreaded to take, every weakness I rejected, even the joyous passions that threaten to overwhelm me. In some, every part of me that I could not control, I set apart from myself. I gave my wild selves their own incarnations and pushed them out to work their will in the space and time allotted to them. I have whittled myself down piece by piece in pain and in bliss until what remains is my core of iron, molten and compressed under the burden of all my ifs and maybes. The trickster had no answer but silence. She straightened, taken away some of the force of her presence and spoke more gently. I am sorry, my love, myself. We cannot escape responsibility for our decisions, even when we want to be persuaded that someone else is to blame for that final yes. That is as true for you as it is for me. I know how free is the will that I gave you, and yet I am also responsible for your actions. How shall we live out this paradox? Unshadowed and true, she rose to her feet. The world is my labyrinth and everything in it is me, except for what enters of its own free will. Free will, he began, uncertain of his own quarry. Free will is a game, only a game, but a necessary game. The greater my power, the more care I take to honour its rules. She bowed her head. The trickster was still unable to speak, but he had to make some effort to convey the awe and concern he felt for her. Crouched on the ground, he too bowed his head. He reached out his hands to her warm, dusty feet and touched them softly, like a small child reassuring himself of his mother's presence and attention. Go back to the labyrinth, was all she said, but the gentleness of her tone comforted him. So that's one small part of unravelling, and I have another small part to share with you that again is dealing with one non-human person, but another who is human and who happens to be his mother. Chats went down the road to the old family house, the place his grandfather had built, the place where his mother had grown up. The village was deep asleep at this hour, with only the occasional barking dog or restless yard fall to punctuate the relentless chirp of the tree frogs and crickets. It was of human eyes that he saw that the three steps of the veranda were occupied. Palmer was sitting there, her form relaxed and un-worried, propping her chin sleepily on her fist. She looked up as he approached and shifted aside so he could pass, but instead he sat beside her and gazed up at the stars shining into spaces between the leaves of the trees. I love you ma, he said. Unexpectedly Palmer laughed. What does love feel like to you? She wondered. Chats sighed, but he was smiling too. This will be hard to explain. You can tell me anything, she reminded him. He eyed her in the dim light. Her face, as always, gave nothing away. Very well. I can feel the spaces where the threads will go, the threads that will weave your life and mine together. If I haven't lived it yet, it feels like a lack, as if I'm missing something very important, missing someone who's very close. Every encounter we have takes away the space that makes me miss you and replaces it with a cord that links me to you and you to me. Loving you when I haven't lived our times together feels yearning and unfinished. Loving you with all our moments accomplished feels sweet, strong, and complete. When you put it like that, said Palmer, her eyes shining of tears and pride, why would anyone fear death? Certainly not I, mother, he whispered fondly, nudging her shoulder with his. She sighed as she patted him on the arm. I was worried about you. I should have known better. Now go to bed. It's late. He squeezed a quick hug around her shoulders, got up and went inside. Just past the threshold he paused, shook his head and laughed a little at his own forgetfulness. He spoke over his shoulder. We'll talk in the morning, ma. I have a journey in mind for you. The last thread has been woven and it's time you met Miranda. She turned her head subtly to face him, eyes wide and mock excitement. No more vagueness. I will find out who she is. You will tell me how you first met? Chance nodded. I will tell you how I first met her, years ago, in the city, sitting on a bench in the shade. And after that, since you know me so well, I will tell you the other story about how she first met me. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. We'll now hear from Pauline, who will read for us from the Ventriloquist tale. Good afternoon, everybody. Can you hear me? I don't trust this small thing. I've got pins in my ear. You can hear? Yes. Good. Okay. I've chosen to read a little bit, well, two little bits from the Ventriloquist tale because it's mainly set in an area that you're probably less familiar with, which is in the far south of Guyana, on the border of Brazil, amongst the Wapishana, Makushi, and YY peoples. And I think a lot of people in the Caribbean aren't so familiar with that. It's a different culture, really. The narrator of the novel is a Makushi folk spirit called Makunaima. And I'm going to read just a little bit of his introduction to the novel. Spite impels me to relate that my biographer, the noted Brazilian senior Mario Andrade, got it wrong when he consigned me to the skies in such a slapdash and cavalier manner. I suppose he thought I would lie forever amongst the stars, gossiping, as we South American Indians usually do in our hammocks at night. But first, I lay claim to the position of narrator in this novel. Yes, me, rumbushtous, irrepressible, adorable me. I have black hair, bronze skin, and I would look wonderful in a cream suit with a silk handkerchief. Cigars, yes. Dark glasses, yes, except that I do not wish to be mistaken for a gangster. But dark glasses are appropriate. My name translated means one who works in the dark. You can call me Chico, is my brother's name, but so what, where I come from it's not done to give you a real name too easily. A black felt fedora hat worn tipped forwards possibly. A fast-driving BMW when I'm in London, a Porsche for New York, a Range Rover to drive, or a helicopter when I'm flying over the endless savannah and bush of my own region. Yes, yes, yes, oh, and I like to smell sweet. I like to rub myself in every orifice and crevice and nook and cranny with lotions, potions, balsam and creams. Why am I not the hero, you ask? Because these days you all have forgotten how to make heroes. Your heroes and heroines are slaves to time. They don't excite wonder and amazement. They don't even attempt to astonish, enchant or amuse. They've forgotten how to be playful and have no appetite for adventure. Sub-zero heroes. A puny bunch, embedded in history or worse, psychology, that wrinkle in the field of knowledge that hopefully will soon be ironed out, leaving us in our proper place between the monkey and the stars. Believe in me, I am the one who can dig time's grave. Oh, I was just going to do another little bit. Hang on, there's another little bit to that. I invite you to my homeland, the parched savannas that belong to the Indians, either side of the Kanakoo Mountains nor for the Amazon. The plains where it is said, people have so little that a poor man's dog has to lean against the wall and brace itself in order to muster the strength to bark. That's all for now, folks. The narrator must appear to vanish. I'm gone. God, sorry, there was one little bit. Shall I read a bit more? What's the time? One little bit. Yes, go ahead. One little bit. I'm just going to read you one little bit because, again, it relates to the theme of this session. And it's about Danny who is being trained to hunt by Shibidin. Gradually, Shibidin unraveled for him the complex tangle of stars in the sky until Danny thoroughly understood which stars indicated which season. Everything has its master in the stars, explains Shibidin. Everything that moves, that is, you don't find plants and trees in the sky because they have roots and they can't move. He pointed out certain constellations. That's the master of fish. That constellation signals the rains and tells you when it's fish breeding time. The little group of stars at the top, we call the tapir. The tapir is also connected to the rainy season. You've heard people say shoot a tapir and rain soon come. Then numerous around the time of the rains. He pointed out the topmost star of the Southern Cross. When that top star reaches the highest point, then you'll hear the Powys bird cry, that grunting cough. It cries at a different time every night, but always when that star is at its height. Danny soaked up all the knowledge. He learned that each constellation was a being who used to live on Earth and had gone up to the sky to avoid persecution and to be in charge of a particular creature. Soon he could tell by the stars when lava or bush hog would be plentiful, when the high grasses or the thunder maize were likely to seed, when the frogs would start to sing and the fish spawn. He could distinguish the scorpion rainfall from the crab rainfall and predict when the black swallows would come twittering from the caves and rivers darkening the sky as they dived after the swarm of insects. Is that short enough? Thank you, Pauline. I, for one, would love to hear you read the entire book. Then where would we be? Somewhere great, actually. Not a bad idea. Ayana Lloyd Banwo is the Trinidadian author of the highly acclaimed novel, When We Were Birds, published by Hamish Hamilton, which the observer named as one of the best debut novels of 2022. She is a creative writing PhD candidate at UEA and, very recently, Ayana was short listed for the £20,000 Echo Center and Hay Festival Writers Award, which I think is a round of applause, don't you? I don't know why, Shivani, trying to get me kidnapped in this go-over season. Ayana, over to you. Thank you. I, you know, amongst, notice she didn't say that she was excellent at timekeeping and navigating buses and directions and so on in that, in that intro. You know, me and London buses have a long-standing battle, but here we are. I'm going to read a bit from Yejideh's section of this novel. The novel goes back and forth between Darwin and Yejideh, who are our main characters and our lovers that meet in a cemetery, very kitchen-esque. And this section is when Yejideh has just inherited her mother's, her matriarchal power to see death. So she sees people in a very different way than we all do. And her mother has just died. So the house is in just, you know, if you can imagine that moment when the house has been in vigil and then the death has come and now everything is sort of crushed and wondering sort of what's next. And then the moths come. Tiny white cotton whispers that settle in Yejideh hair, on the curtains, on patronella armchair, on the banister winding up the stairs. Big brown ones that fly straight at you when you're trying to walk. Open up cupboard and they fly out like a small army, guessing in the tea cups when you're trying to make tea, sitting on the kettle until just before it boils. Then they scatter and fly to the bulbs, the lampshades, the light outside on the porch, casting shadows on the windows. They gather in the walking gallery on the flaking portraits of mama, Deborah with her laughing mouth, broad nose and upturned eyes, baby girl, her face round like a small moon, her hair wiry and frizzy and near-boosting out from under the patterned fabric of her head wrap. They gather on the photographs of houses that no one alive could even identify. Big ones with turrets and demerara windows, small, slim ones with ornate black gates. Other kinds of moths, black with white spots and a purple line running across their wingspan, big like bats, settle only in patronella's room, on her white shrouded body, on the wardrobe, on the sideboard. They plaster the windows and block out the sun so the room stay in dusk light, even after the rain stopped and the sky breaking. They come to see a mother home, Peter tell her, as he brush one from his shoulder. He reach up and pull up a tiny white moth from Yejide hair and smile. This time Yejide could barely recognize her own self. Every time she pass a mirror, she see her eyes glassy and wide with dark circles under them. Her hair spring out every which way and the white, fluttering moths make her a tree in bloom. She find it hard to look at people straight or now, so she stare just past them. Everybody in the house like they split in two. She can see the Peter that she had always known, a strong, kind man who had never left their side, always looking younger than his years, the silent backbone of the house. But she could see something else now, a shadow around his body, his age, the old man he would become. Wasn't as simple as seeing his death, but she could see the time that it would come to claim him. See it around Seema too, even more so around Agatha and Angie, Mr. Homer, the darkest of them all. She wonder if this is how her mother had see everybody, her mother, her mother's mother, her mother's mother before that, their gift, their curse. They all give her a wider birth now as they pat around each other in the house, waiting for the ambulance from the funeral home. They can't take her wild eyes or her fixed gaze and she can't take the look on their face when they see her either. She find that if she stand very still, almost forget to breathe, she could look on at them as they're going on about their tasks and they can't see her at all. Not invisible, just still. Like she become part of the house, part of the air, existing in a dimension separate from where everyone else living. When that wasn't enough, she sneak out the house like she and Seema used to when they was young. She don't take Seema, don't even tell her, can't bear the idea of anybody holding her hand. And later when the outside feel too big like she might drift away in it, she sits on granny Catherine chair in the corner by the front window and watch Seema gather seasoning from the garden. Just once Seema look up and toward the house, like if she feel somebody watching her, but she never give no indication that she see Yejide at all. And Yejide had so full that she wonder if it might not be better so. When night come, she lock her door before she go to sleep. And still she can't get the man out of her head, the green man amongst the dead. Who was he? Only light around him, nothing else. Light and forest and green and something strong and pulsing that draw her to him. How she travel there to see him wasn't something she could ask Peter about. You can't tell your father, well the man who was as good as your father that you see a man somewhere in a dream and you know you have business with him and he have business with you. Last night after the whole house gone to sleep, she sneak downstairs and sit in patronella chair for hours, waiting, hoping, trying to squint her eyes to make the garden look the way it had looked after the vigil, to somehow bring her mother back to her to ask her the questions that only she would know the answer to. But it seemed like they only get one shot, one chance to say whatever else needed saying and that time gone. The ambulance driver behill and pull in front the house. Three men get out, but the driver take one look at the agide standing on the porch, her hair covered in wings, moths all over the windows even in the daylight and get right back in the ambulance. Not me and them devil ting. He shout and lock the door. Thank you Ayanna, Pauline and Karen for those readings. As you will have heard, each of these books and larger bodies of work by these three writers entangles myth and history in captivating ways but also interrogates with mischief, with humour, with peacong and wit what it means to be from a magical place. My first question to all of you answer all at once, have you ever felt like a magical being while writing? Ooh, alright, just gooey it later. No. I can only answer that by saying that if madness is magical, yes. Because when the characters are having loud conversations in your head that you didn't think about in advance, it does feel a little bit strange. Yeah, I think, I think, no, you're sure? I've never felt like, like a magical being, no, I just feel like a worker. Ryan. Maybe my head goes here and there, but I don't feel myself that I've transformed into some kind of jombie. At all. I think sometimes late at night, when you're, I think, I've scared myself sometimes when it was just too late and I should have been asleep and I've had too much gin and I really should have been asleep. It's like the third day of Bender and you know, you kind of have that, am I here, am I somewhere else, am I, it's just, but that's probably just caffeine and sleep deprivation more than anything else. I've heard that caffeine is a kind of magic. A kind of magic. I wrote a collection of stories once called The Migration of Ghosts and actually the stories bore not much relation to the title, but I kept the title because I had a period when I was frightened that not only might we migrate, but those spirits might migrate with us. And I had this idea that Moongazer, I don't know if that's just in Guyana, is it? Moongazer? It's huge, it's about the size of Big Ben and it straddles the crossroads. Ah, yes, big tall legs. Big tall legs, straddled crossroads, you can't walk and talk through the legs, but it doesn't mind if you're smoking a cigarette and it gets bigger as the Moon gets bigger and it diminishes as the Moon. And I thought, my God, I mean, supposing that was in London. And then later on I began to think, no, I think those sorts of creatures are quite territorial, they stay where they belong because you wouldn't like to see Anne Boleyn who was beheaded with a head under her and walking in the bush in Guyana. No, she wouldn't want to get there. You know, so I reckon we're kind of safe, probably. Are there any spirits in attendance with us today? I hope you're kind and benevolent ones. But as the panel is proposing, magicalness, the state of being special and otherworldly is ascribed often to Caribbean writers when book reviews emerge in prominent papers or publications outside of the Caribbean. There's often a sense of, we don't know what to call this thing, so let's call it magical realism. But as Anne and I have said many times, magical realism in Trinidad and Tobago is just what happens when you walk down the road sometimes or buy groceries or feed your family or go to Carnival. Speaking of Carnival, Ayano, I know I had to talk to you about Carnival because as you described recently effusively in a panel here, there is a myth making and a map making to Carnival that every Trinidadian and Barbadian and Guyanese person can understand. How do you felt you accessed elements of the Carnival-esque in When We Were Birds? Which essentially doesn't take place during Carnival. But there's mass running through the blood of the book. I mean, I think that there are so many ways that we are mask making people, not just mask making people. I mean, whether we are talking about this from the masks that we wear to get through on a day-to-day basis, as we do, whether we mask our language, whether we mask our culture, whatever it is as a way of navigating spaces like this. Whether we mask to make ourselves invisible to allow ancestors to come through us in the rituals of Juve, in the rituals of Orisha, spirituality at Feast and so on. I think we are mask making people. And I think one of the things that was interesting for me in writing this book was the idea of making yourself invisible or being invisible and being something else. The same Bernard woman, the part that I read from Yejide, her family is more or less unknown and invisible to everybody else on this island except for those who live very close to them because their work necessitates secrecy. I mean, what you're gonna do, walk down the road and say, hi, I know exactly the moment you're going to die. You know, that's not prudent, wise or necessary. So there is, I think I found the idea of taking on the guise of something that you're not for your own protection, for the protection of others, for the ability to do sacred work that has to be done. I mean, all secret societies and sacred societies require a kind of invisibility, a kind of mask that needs to be worn in order for this work to take place. So I think death is sacred work. Working around death is sacred work. Burial is sacred work. Embarming is sacred work. Funeral rights is sacred work. And the work that these women have to do necessitates a kind of mask, a kind of secrecy. And this is one of the parallels I found evident and beautiful ways between when we were birds and unraveling because the world of unraveling, as you'll know if you don't yet know, is densely labyrinthine. And there are people who walk through it who are both human and non-human, angelic and less angelic. And it's a dense, rewarding novel that's so concerned with what we do in our lives that makes us worthy of living it. Or if we're less worthy, do we deserve to die in it? And walking those paths felt truly important to understanding the heart of the book. And when you were writing, Karen, did you feel that you, as the creator, followed similar paths? Well, that's a good question because this book took 10 years to write. It's a sequel to Redemption, and I jumped into it even before Redemption was published. And why I had to write it is that the question that Redemption asks as an answer and the question is, can you have Redemption for those who are, in a way, living out of time, who have a different kind of approach to existence than we do? So there were writings, and there were rewritings, and there were dead ends. You talk about a labyrinth. The labyrinth is the one that coils, but the maze is the one where you can come up on dead ends. And sometimes you thought you knew where the book was supposed to go, and it was like, nope, can't go any further here. So you had a backtrack and go again. And I think that in a way, it had to take 10 years because there were experiences I had to have. There were people I had to lose. There were entire ways in which the world itself had to change, not even just myself, for me to be able to make sense out of what the book was supposed to be about. And it's hard when you want to be a professional writer who just cranks out a book every year, but this is something that the book just teaches you by, in a way, yes, being its own labyrinth, being its own mode of self-reflection. We talked a little bit, Pauline, back there, when we were getting mic'd up about this responsibility we often face as Caribbean writers to keep harkening to home, writing about a specific place, whether it's Guyano or Trinidad or the White Sargasso Sea, and the master of chaos in really virtuosic ways doesn't do that. It rebels against the idea that Caribbean writers can only tell specific stories. It travels. A lot of these short stories are global. They occur in far-flung parts of the world. Did that feel the process of writing it to be centered in a kind of rootlessness? What was the process of voyaging like? Well, I am quite rootless. And to be honest, I don't want to belong anywhere. As soon as I feel that I belong somewhere, I want to escape. And I did want to show that Caribbean writers can write about anywhere. I think probably there's something that informs the work that comes through. But, yes, I really wanted to try it. I've written in that collection some stories set in Russia, Suriname, Syria, where I have never been. But I think one of the things that is underestimated is the imagination. I mean, because we don't want to be trapped with the sociology of just our own backgrounds, our own history of where we, at least I don't want to. I mean, every writer is different. They've got their own method. But I always want to explore something and sort of break walls. Yeah, the Master of Chaos breaks all kinds of surfaces you would think were impenetrable. And I think one of the things that's really remarkable about it is that it does that with a kind of irreverence and mischief that we could call very Caribbean. A lot of the figures in it are tricksters, they're little miniature enancies, and there's quite a bit of rebellion happening, skittering just beneath the surface. And so in that vein, a question for the three of you, if everything we do as writers is composed of a certain kind of magic and we accept that folklore and myths are intrinsic to how we write, where do each of you find this in your practice? Do the sources feel... Do they feel distinctly Caribbean? Do they come from elsewhere? Are they out of this world? I'd love to know. One thing I noticed, I don't know if any of you in the audience noticed that on the day, on the morning, the very morning that Rishi Sunook went to Buckingham Palace to become the Prime Minister, something strange happened in the sky. Does anybody know what it was? A partial eclipse. So he's on his way to Buckingham Palace and there's a bite taken out of the sun. So I noticed that immediately. And then I thought, oh, my God. I thought, by the time he's finished, his son will be gone. The whole sun will be gone. And we will be living in a gray austerity. So I mean, that's how my mind works, really. Looking for O-mines and portents. Portents. I'm depressed now, isn't it? I think that... God, now a study eclipse, a study in... I think I pulled from... Because I grew up reading all kinds of fairy tales and all kinds of stuff from everywhere. I just think it's my birthright to take what I want from wherever. I agree, absolutely. I feel like I should and, you know... I don't get to take from one place and carry the next place. Well, I might as well make use of every story, every myth, every fairy tale, every whatever. So like, when we were birds, begins with a creation story that a grandmother is telling her granddaughter and she tells about how the Kobo came into the world and how death came into the world. Now, there is no myth anywhere or no fairy tale or anything that I found that tells that story. But there are countless stories about Kobos, about carrion birds, about ravens, about vultures. So I just kind of dove into all of them. Yeah, I would do the same. That's what I wanted, to create this narrative that I needed because, you know, it's there. And it all belongs to me, so I think I can... I can thief. I agree. And in an earlier panel, Jacob says something that struck me, talking about the topography of the human heart, being the same all over the world. And folklore strikes me like that. Whenever you're reading folklore from whatever region, there is this really, really strong echo where you're like, well, that sounds like that and that sounds like that. So, you know, as you say, you're not really stealing, it still feels like yours. Just talking about this sort of baseline human condition. But another place that I take mine from is... When I was an undergrad, I was studying history of science and technology. And the fascinating thing is when you look at these periods of history where people were like, this is a science. We have rules. And then you look back and it's like, wow, you guys just like made some stuff up. You just made it up. So, you know, and then on the flip side of that, there are things that are, you know, depending on which, again, culture or region you come from, are portrayed as magic of ritual and then science sort of comes in and says, oh, well, actually that herb really does do that and this particular ritual really does do that and we have a grounding for it. So, when you recognize there's that lovely blur between the heart of the science and the soft of the magic or whatever, it's just fun to keep crossing that border over and over again. And I suppose that's why, you know, we keep having that thing about, you know, the panel, don't call it magic. Because, you know, for you might be magic, for me, that's science. One might be folklore, for me, that's history, you know. So, it's, I understand why we need those categories. I suppose, as I'm sure you all would agree, you know, publishers and critics, they have their work to do. Marketers. The marketers, let them do their work, but as creators, that's not our work. It's just sit down and say, you know, it's this real, it's magical realism and blah. And also sometimes, like Ventriloquist tells really about the coincidence of science, Einstein and the theory of relativity and how it was finally proved, and a myth, a South American Indian, particularly myth of a brother and sister coming together during an eclipse. And that actually happened. There was actually a true story in Guyana of a brother and sister who went just in the area where the eclipse was showing at that time, and it was all recorded by a Jesuit priest who went to try and break them up. And that coincidence of the science and the myth, both predicting something at the same time is sort of interesting to me. And so, you've learned here at Vocus UK 2022 that a writer with bad manners is the best kind of writer. Always give them permission to steal whatever they would like. From anywhere. From anywhere, including from right here in the British Library. Oh, I planned to, I hoped to. Karen beautifully said in 2016, when something real but traumatic or taboo occurs and it cannot be spoken of directly, it finds expression in parable or folklore. Tell the truth, but tell it slant. What's been the advantage to each of you of telling the truth slants? As often we've been made to do. Historically, we've often been made to come through the side entrance, the servants' quarters, the indentured passage, rather than the grand colonial front door. This kind of access as writers, what has it given you, or what has it taken away? Do you know, sometimes it feels almost more like playing because if you tell something factually which I've had to do because I have a side life as a socioeconomic research. There's more of a challenge to telling it slant. So yes, on the one hand you are maybe processing trauma, processing grief, finding a way to tell things to people that allows them to face it in a way that a hard fact wouldn't. But it's also, there's a knack to it, there's a skill to it, and you're constantly challenging yourself to see how many different ways can I tell this one truth and how many different people can I reach with those different ways? You know, when I, so I decided to make Port of Spain, Port Angeles in this novel. I created a city that was Port of Spain that was not Port of Spain at the same time. And every now and again I think about it and I say, who am I kidding? Of course it's Port of Spain. Like why did I bother? But I think why I bothered or why I felt it was necessary to do that is I think I had so much anxiety about getting it wrong. You know, I had just left Trinidad to do this Emmy and because I'd never left Trinidad before and I'd grown up in Trinidad, I'd grown up in town my whole, whole big 37 years before I left. And yet I still had this fear that I was gonna forget something that when I was trying to write this city, it would be the wrong way or the thing that was here was actually there. And I got so kind of tied up in that anxiety of was I going to tell, you know Trinidad, you tell something wrong. Listen, they would pelt right mango out here, they would ban Tokyo over Facebook, whatever. So I said, look, let me make up, I'm gonna make up a molecular place if I get it wrong. No, you can't say it's not that. But what it did, it kind of freed me from having to say it is this or it is that. It meant I could make, I could make the city as big as it needed to be. I could bring mountains up close, close, close. I could make it so dense that a man could pick up, drive from south to north, unlike nobody ever see him again because he could disappear. Which sounds like it's impossible to happen on an island, but people rarely just disappear and you never see them again. But you know, I think being able to kind of tell Port of Spain's slant made me give me the ability to write it maybe as how it feels like to me rather than if I had to, if you looked at it on a map, you would see, but this place small, how it could be so whatever. But if I could write it through what it feels like and in that kind of slant, then I can write it truer for what I needed it to be for the book. Whereas if I sat down and maybe sat by the map and factor the thing and figure out what was there, it would be kind of dryer, at least for me, to do it that way. Yes, my real worry is that sometimes I write about real people and I'm frightened that they're gonna read it and recognize themselves. So I always sort of add other attributes. But I mean, I don't do it that often, but I have done it and then I thought, well, I know this friend of mine's mother, she never reads a book. Steal her in there. I'm safe, I can put her in. But that's one of my concerns. But the back door is more fun too, Shivani, just using the house image. It means, I think it also lets you... I mean, the front door, a front access is what you show, right? What you say to the world. This is who I want you to see me as. But when you walk through the alley of anywhere, that's where the workers there smoking a cigarette, talking about talking to the boss. You walk through the back. You get to see a whole different part of things. It gives you a different way of approaching story that mightn't have good manners, mightn't be polite, mightn't be whatever, but it could be more interesting to tell something. The more tidy it is, the more fun it is. The more tidy it is, the better, the more fun, yeah. I promise that at the back entrance, this festival is very mannerly. It's organized, the lights, and they're following instructions. So in that case, yes. It's been a delight to speak to each of you, but I want that you escape until hearing a little bit more from each of you in reverse order. And the reverse order, that would be a good one. That would be a good one. Well, relax into the reverse order. Okay, so I will read a little bit from Darwin's section. Darwin is my other protagonist, his novel has two protagonists, and a very quick backstory. Darwin was raised Rastafari in the country, comes to Port Angeles to seek his fortune, among other things, and finds the only work he could get is in a graveyard as a grave digger, which challenges his whole sense of self in many ways. Some days Darwin can't work out how long he in the city. The calendar say nearly two months, but Fidelis, Fidelis is the name of the cemetery, but Fidelis have a different kind of time. The hours longer, the days deeper, and digging graves and lowering coffins in the ground is like watching whole lives fast forward beginning to end. Fidelis make him adopt its rhythm instead of his own, and it's not just Fidelis. Port Angeles crackle and spit like oil on a fireside, and he starts to like how he could disappear into it. That's another one of the many somebody's that come here for whatever it is they come for. He learning that even death in Fidelis does work in sync with the city. Hey there, that mean hospital, courthouse and graveyard. Heavy rain, that mean road accident for so, and they too busy to even laugh and all talk. Then it's half other times when something starts to ripple through the city. The wrong man get killed, the blocks get hot, and his only sirens blaring out through the night. Them days they dig in grave three, four times a day and have to send for temporary workers so they could do more than one funeral same time. But now as it get closer to November around all souls day, it's like the dead and the living come to a kind of a truce. All the graves quiet, and sometimes he don't see the other grave diggers at all for a couple days. He know that it does work other jobs and get little contracts when things light, but nobody let that win in on the cuts. True, he could use the money, but he don't mind. The days when it was just him, even the weight of the keys in his pocket make him feel good. And when the street lamps come on, the outer edges of Fidelis killed in borrowed lights, he stand at the crossroads, right at the center of the cemetery in near darkness and feel his whole body relax. Like how a man must feel when he finally reaching his own home after a long day and smell food cooking. Not like he ever know that feeling, but he forget must feel a little bit like this, like Fidelis at twilight. I'm going to give you a little bit from the book that's coming out next summer. Yay! Yeah, that's a big deal. So there are two little bits, one short and one slightly longer, but it's all a bit quite short. In spite of the breeze, the waters beyond were calm, and Canoes soon found himself in that smooth, steady swimming action which his father called strolling. Even breath, long stretch, relax into each surge and rise of every swell. So hypnotic, he almost found himself drifting off again into a kind of moving meditation. He almost forgot to listen for the parallel splash of his father's progress beside him, but it registered nonetheless as a strangeness, a distressing absence that shook him to full awareness. He stopped, alone, looked around, alone, looked back. His father was floating some 20 meters away, mercifully face up, and his lips pouting in labored breathing. Canoes sprinted to close the distance and immediately positioned himself behind his father's head, one arm across his chest, supporting him and cradling him close. His father laughed weakly. A little discomfort, it'll pass. Then he turned his head to the side, convulsed and wretched a little into the water. Canoes gripped him more tightly as a swell washed over them. I've got you, Canoes said, forcing all hint of fear from his voice as he raised his wrist to activate his emergency beacon. They'll come for us soon, hang on. No, wait. His father's voice was soft and sleepy. His eyes were half closed, but he smiled. Don't stress, it's a good death. Can't complain. In that moment, Canoes knew that he'd fallen asleep again or had never woken up and was dreaming about swimming at dawn with his father because at no time in the real world would his father be dying while the ocean surged around them. And only in a dream would the horizon grow higher like a rogue wave while the water around them turned gray and dark, yet mildly turbulent like waves over shoals. Only in a dream would the ocean stop behaving naturally and turn into a badly reddened VR mock-up, something too bad to even be a placeholder mid-design. He did not panic. The brush of water against his skin, familiar as breathing, became a tickle of seaweed and then a numbing tingle that took away all chance of panic. His arms slackened and his father's body slipped away from him. The gently churning waters parted them and then he could not think or feel anything. And then he's speaking to someone else about this experience. I only want one guess from you, Neraldi. What do you think happened to my father? Hmm, Neraldi murmured to himself. Well, that's not such a bad question. The answer is a bit long, unfortunately, but perhaps a bedtime story is exactly what you need. Kanua turned over and around so that he was on his stomach, head towards Neraldi and the ocean. Tell me, did your training in Havana give you any information on the origin of the Aradanian ships? Very little, Kanua lied. He wanted to hear it all again. All of the human origin planets are related, although there are several hypotheses and no clear reason why this should be the case. Our oceans, land and skies comprise of biosphere which is identical in some respects and merely similar in others. At times there's a marked difference, some beast or plant beyond anything seen anywhere else in the known galaxy. The ships of Epsilon Aridani were categorized as such and there are even more hypotheses to suggest that if they had not been a part of our evolution, we would have developed to be like the Austrinians or even the Lyrans. Our ships were intelligent Leviathans whose origins and domain were the depths of the ocean. They might never have been discovered except for their own curiosity about the humans that dwelled on islands and coasts. They hungered for us and they consumed us in every sense. They became the center of myth and religion, the voices in our dreams, the sacrificial meat of our rituals, the resting place of our dead and the resurrection thereafter. In time, science gave detail and logic to the wisdom of our ancestors and we understood what it meant to join the collective consciousness and travel across the galaxy via dimensions previously unknown. Our religion became a journeying and the paths we traveled became the roots of our empire. Okay, I'm going to read a little bit from the Master of Chaos who was in fact a gambler. But it's an example of the pure theft you're talking about. Nice. Because for some reason, I gave him the attributes of Barrow Samadhi from Vodan, from Haiti. And I don't know why and it didn't matter if the reader didn't get it, I got it in my head. So when I was writing that character, it informed my feeling about him, although in fact he dies after the second page. My grandfather was a gambler. He came from that generation of men in the old British Guyana who were graceful simulacra of the British gentlemen, a charming, mocking shadow of the real thing. In that part of the world, the past sometimes succeeds in pushing the present out of the way. My grandfather was tall, slim, with a pale brown complexion, the color of agate. He liked to wear dark glasses even when it was raining and kept a black silk opera hat that folded down into his suitcase. He smoked cigars and of all the rum in the world, he preferred El Dorado along with his favorite snack of grilled peanuts. He used to visit us in England, but never stayed long. Sometimes when he took off his sunglasses, I would catch his eye and the twinkle in it confirmed an affinity between us. People observed that as I grew taller, I looked more and more like him. Occasionally he took me with him when he gambled. I remember a damp room in Tottenham where I looked on as his long-fingered, brown hand unfurled like the wing of an archangel to cast the dice on the cheap veneer coffee table. His dice were unusual. They were light, knuckle-bone weight and yellow ivory in color. He told me they were made from the bones of a gambling friend, an Amerindian man who died in the swampy interior of the Masaruni River. He thought they brought him luck. As did a constellation to the upper left of Orion when it rose in the night sky. He pointed it out to me one night. The constellation of twins, castor and Pollux, represented his birth sign, Gemini. But he told me that the Aztecs knew it as the constellation of the frog. The two bright stars that represented the twins' head in Western mythology became the two eyes of the frog for the Aztecs. He preferred the Aztec version. Are you superstitious, grandpa? I asked. Only on Tuesdays, he replied. Ayano, Pauline and Karen. It has, I daresay, been magical, speaking to each of you. You will all want, I know, to voraciously get these books. If you don't have them yet, please make your way over to the booksellers table. Run by our project partners, Renaissance One. And get a copy. If you have copies for yourself, get one for your friend, get one for your enemy, get one for your favorite post. And the writers will be around in a couple minutes to sign them for you. When you do that, come right back. We have a lot more festival left. Thank you all very much. Thank you so much. Thank you.