 So this session is called The Trouble with History and the the two writers we've got here this morning are right next to me Amanda Smith. Yes, that's welcome her. So Amanda Smith is the prize-winning Irish Trinidadian author of three novels. The most recent one is Fortune, published just last year, and also the author of two previous novels. Fortune was shortlisted for the Sir Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Is that the proper name? So that deserves a round of applause please. And Fortune is the book that she's going to be talking about today. And then next to Amanda is Cecil Brown. Cecil, oh, I don't know big. Lots of fans in the audience, did you pay them Cecil? Did you pay them to clap? Cecil is from St. Vincent and the Granadines originally, but has lived in the UK for quite, yeah, St. Vincent and the Granadines, SVG, Vinci, but has lived in the UK for quite some time. He's published several books of short fiction, but the piece he's going to read from today is actually a short story called A Hat for Lemmo. And A Hat for Lemmo won the 2022 Commonwealth short story prize to the UK and Europe region. So let's give that a round of applause. So as the title of the event might suggest, and as you might have guessed from the works that I just described, we're here to talk about historical fiction or history and fiction or is history fiction, but not if fiction is history because fiction is not history, it's very much with us. And I think before we get into the conversation part of it, it would be good to hear a bit from the writing, get a sense of the stories, the voices. And so I think I will ask the two writers to read in chronological order, not chronological order of when they were born, because I don't know, but in chronological order when the stories are set. So Cecil's story is set in 1858, in the 19th century, post-emancipation period in St. Vincent. So Cecil, share a little bit of A Hat for Lemmo with us, please, and take us back to the 19th century. So there are stories called A Hat for Lemmo, and it's set in St. Vincent 1858 after emancipation. You have to imagine me as Lemmo, who is a female, so do your best. We're in the whole night in the mountain. It silenced the animals that loved to break my sleep. It joined the wind and lashed my tiny wooden shack with a volcano ridge break for a bit of flat. Next morning, the sun battled back so fierce, the storm seemed like a bad dream. I have to shut the storm in I, the groan still slippery, strange to spot someone struggling up the slope to my home as I'm coconut oil in my hair, caribs and runaways hunting wild pigs I could understand, but a white man and alone so deep in the mountain. From the narrow slip of a window, I catch the figures sweeping back the bushes like a paddler in a canoe. A heavy man with a big red bulging food face, much splatter his choices up to the belt and the green jacket holding back his stomach catch a cake in two. This man brave, what he could want with me? I slip out the back door and take a part through the forest. Sometimes, best to greet and chew the hug in a tree. He made to take a step forward, his eyes on the house as if it might disappear if you look away. Before he could tell himself not far to go, he fall flat on his back. In Satan, he staggered to his feet, furious with some dry stick he didn't notice. When he finished brushing off his clothes, he find maybe side him, my narrow face soft but close. You treat me, he growl. You friggin' throw me down. The blue veins in his next pulse, this local born Creole white who blend our language with his, but I don't step back when he snarl on grunt. He on Cronland, my land. I cross my arms and stay back at him. My name is Norbis Bain, he say after a while. My horseman melt tell me you know the island well. You guide people across the mountain and find those who get lost for a small sum. I dig my toes into the mud and force my body up the hill to my little garden patch, leaving him there muttering. Wiesin turn to cursing as he stumble up behind me. I almost finish picking herbs at the side of the house by the time he reach. I went the estate nine miles from Kingston. Nine miles south of Kingston would place him in the Caribbean Sea. Nine miles north in Mespo Valley. West would find the town of Leu, where the Reverend Alexander shipping his 200 slaves from Antigua because he care for them so much. The Briz Bain now squatting on a stone in my yard must mean east then, the diamond estate. I begin to pick a coconut bag with herbs while he sweep the sweat from his forehead. My work is enlistening, I ask when I'm ready. Briz Bain take my silence to mean that I curious. So he say, you want to know why I hear, I suppose. I don't answer him. My herbs, am I living? Well, two weeks ago I invited an Englishman to my home, Wesley String. The Methodist Church in England sent him to St. Vincent to report on the schools, but his vanished. Schools? Briz Bain asked the question for me then he continued. Remember in Mancipation in 1838? Well, schools bring up on coconut palms stills. And where schools rise, inspectors follow. Okay? We'll leave it there for a while. Yeah. So that's a little taste of a hat for Lemo. I have to say Cecil, I would love to read about the further adventures of Lemo. I mean, I got to the end of the story and I thought, I want to know, like what does she do next? So I don't know. I don't know if that's anywhere in your plans or your imagination, but for those of you who may not have read the story, it's among many other things. It's also kind of a detective story. Yes, it's a mystery, I think is the word that some people say. I'll tell you how the story came about, because it's quite interesting. We've got a group of Vincentian writers, because St. Vincent doesn't have a strong literary tradition. And a friend in Barbados at the University of the West Indies said, why don't we have a big push to get Vincentian writers? Let's knock away Trinidad and Barbados and everybody else. All right? Let's have a push. So I sent the story to my friends and they sent back a page worth of criticisms. I sent it to my sister, who lives in SVG, who always sends back another page full of scaffold. And some of the ideas you take on board, some you say no, no, no, no, no. And eventually I came up with a story. So it's a mystery story, but it's not really a surprise, because I had a slight plug, sorry. I'd written Cassie P. And this is the Caribbean's first female private investigator. And so the idea then was to transplant, if that's the right word, transplant Cassie P 200 years back to the Caribbean, because it gives her then a chance to get to places that a normal person wouldn't. So she's got to, she goes to a brothel, which obviously she wouldn't go to normally, but it's a chance to explore the island and places that she wouldn't normally go to. Wonderful. So now let us, if we imagine we're in the time machine, we're now going to jump 70 years into the future from 1958. And we're going to jump across to Trinidad. Amanda's novel Fortune is, well, as all, as the Trinidadians in the audience all know, and the other Caribbean people in the audience also know, Trinidad and Tobago is an energy economy, right? And the oil industry, which has been the mainstay of our economy for a century now, it started in the early 20th century. And there was a famous incident, which I'll let Amanda tell you about, but a famous incident, an accident, a very tragic accident that happened in 1928. And Amanda's novel is a fictionalized version of that event, but more specifically what led up to it. But I'll let her tell you, I don't want to give anything away, right? Because there's lots of, there are too many possible spoilers to this novel. So I'll let Amanda tell you as much more as she wants you to know, and then we'll hear a bit from Fortune. Okay, can you hit, is that okay? Is the mic okay? Yeah. So Fortune came from this real life story, which was happened in South Trinidad, 1928, when there was a lot of activity, a lot of people finding oil seeping up on the, in the ground, you know, of their, of their fields, cocoa fields and estates. So it was a very, it was a very interesting time because people were also sort of wary of it too, you know, what, what is this thing? What's it going to do? And there was there was some trepidation and excitement. So I have used as a, as the foundation of the story, the, the actual dome, it was an explosion that happened in 1928, when the, the people who were the corporate around this particular spot, there were many corporations trying to get hold of this land. But in fact, it was drilled by a kind of quite cavalier character who had had some experience in drilling in America and came back to Trinidad and thought, I'm going to do this on a low budget. So they didn't have much money. He had a couple of investors and using this land that was belonged to an Indian man who'd, you know, he, he had cocoa trees that were dying. So it was kind of in his interest to give it a go. But because they didn't, everything I read around it suggested that their equipment was kind of old and they didn't want to keep putting money into, into making it into big, you know, too much investment. So they were a little bit, a little bit careless towards the end. And then this accident happened where many, which many people witnessed. So people came from many, like Port of Spain and from San Fernando, when they heard this well was coming in, it was the third well of the wells that they drilled. And what they didn't realize was that at the same time as the oil was coming out in an uncontrollable way, there was also gas. And the trigger for the explosion was the apparently the ignition of a car. So I used this as the foundation and read around, read a great deal around it. My initial idea was to, you know, I went into the archives and looked through newspapers and I thought, I'm going to write about this from 17 points of view. All the people who, who died, you know, I was going to write every one of their stories that took them into this moment in time where they lost their lives. And in fact, of course, that's impossible to do that. And I ran out of steam really quickly. But there were characters that were emerging, you know, that I was more and more drawn to kept going back to them. So I started to discard some of the 17. And then I ended up with this sort of core group of characters. And one of which is Eddie, who is the very cavalier driller. So I sort of fell in love with Eddie. He was a bit of a Jimmy Dean character in my head, you know, very capable gung-ho, and a little bit reckless. So I'm going to read to you from the moment when they begin drilling on the land, when they have to clear the land. It's a very, very difficult thing to do. They had to bring people in. There was very limited resources. It took a long time to clear this land. So I'll begin by reading from that point. Thank you. It took 35 days to clear away the forest on the north side of Chatterjee's estate. The patch where oil first came up and dribbled around the stick like a miracle. 22 men and women came from the villages around with axes and picks and saws. These people known as the Tattoo Gang knew the forest and they hacked and chopped through hundreds of diseased cocoa trees and the immortals above them, cedar, pine around them, dragged away their branches, and the trunks of smaller trees were lifted onto carts and pulled away by buffalo. Women cut and tore at the undergrowth, culled and knotted and tangled bush, seething with bajakants and termite nests, big like heads stuck to the pale immortals. These wilder parts hadn't been touched for some time. Eddie came upon an armadillo, a howler monkey, and a quench. Unafraid, the creatures squatted on rocks and stared at him. Look, Eddie said to the others, we have company. He clapped his hands and the animals scuttled away. Tendrils hung like thick ropes, tangled and knotted. It often took days to clear a few yards. The workers were paid according to the number of felled trees, and by the amount of earth they'd shifted. Eddie assured Tito, that's the investor, although slower, it was cheaper than bulldozers and trucks. And he reminded him of his own words, we're here to make money, not spend it. And they worked from first light, they stopped for lunch at 11. There was rice and bread and beans and oranges. And sometimes cedar made cake or cut up fruits, and they carried on until nightfall. The sun was a bully, hot enough to make you feel to die. The air thick with mosquitoes and sand flies, and then there were the Jack Spaniards. They caught in the hair of a young woman called Mercy, flew inside the tiny caves of her ears. And when she opened her mouth to scream, they dived into her windpipe. Mercy was carried choking to the house where cedar soaked her head with vinegar and tipped aloe juice down her burning throat. Her body puffed up and went down. There were snakes, mackerel, anaconda, even deadly mapper pea, but the men and women were too quick for them. A swipe of the cutlass and their pointed heads were off. Their livers extracted, spread onto the workers' skins to stave off mosquitoes. Eddie found himself a 12-foot bower at the back of the outhouse, curled up in the shade like a small child. He shot it first between the eyes, and then decided to skin it without cutting. Look, he said, holding up the mortal body, like taking a sock off a leg. And with this peeling and rolling came the birth of some 10 small snakes, small and thin as bangles, and half of them dead. You ever see anything like that? He said, tipping the babies into a bucket, delicious, fried up like white bait. Once the trees were gone, they started to level out the incline, and the men dug hard into the dry earth, and the women carried trays of this earth on their heads to the place where they would build a dam, where Eddie said they'd need for overflow. Chattergy couldn't imagine an overflow of any kind, but Eddie told him it would come. Sure as I'm standing here, make no bones, the oil is underneath me like a lake. Chattergy admired Eddie's self-belief. It was something he'd never had. His nature was cautious, mistrustful, but he wanted to believe, Eddie. Thank you. So the first thing I want to ask both of you, and Cecil, maybe you hinted at this a little bit just now when you were talking about the character of Lemo. Writing about the past is almost always driven by motivations in the present. You look for a story from the past to tell it because you think it's relevant to us now for some reason. There's some urgency about this thing that helps us understand something about us now. So, Cecil, you spoke about imagining the character Cassie P and sending her back in time, but what was it about that particular moment, that particular time in post-emancipation since Vincent, because one of the things that strikes me is you know, there are a fair number of books now that are written during the period of slavery. In school, we get taught a lot about the emancipation campaign and all the things, the various revolutions, but there's almost a kind of a sense in which certainly when I was going to school, the story kind of stops after emancipation, and then it picks up again with independence, and there's that whole long period in between that we don't actually know that much about it, and there's lots of stuff going on. I have no idea what was happening in St. Vincent between 1838 and you know, the early 20th century, so why that particular moment, and why do you think, what did you want to tell readers now about what was happening in St. Vincent then? Well, I think the first thing to say is that people tend to lump the enslaved people into one mass. They see them as docile, but I'm saying no, that's never been the case. The people always look for ways to subvert the system, and emancipation now gives them a voice, a stronger voice, so the people suddenly realize they have skills. There are midwives, there are obviously people, the domestic people, there are horsemen, there are porters, and they suddenly recognize these skills. The people who make rum, again, are suddenly saying to themselves, the rum process is a skill process to take canes, and within a short space of time, you've got sugar, molasses, and rum. We have the skills, and so now they're bargaining more strongly with the planters, some obviously withdraw their labor, they're using the provision grounds to sell at the market, and we'll only trade, and we'll only deal with the plantation owners during crop time to get a stronger price. And you mentioned that Lemo visits a brothel, I mean the brothel owner is an entrepreneur, and apparently quite a successful one from the way you describe her. Yes, again, people say, is this fiction or is it true? Well, there was a substantial colored population at that time, and I'm sure their children didn't come about by accident. So yes, the brothel idea isn't that far fished. And Amanda, what was it about this story that you felt needed to be told now? There's clearly, I mean, in the passage, you just read, you talk about literally clearing the forest to drill the well. So there's clearly a kind of, you know, there's a kind of an environmental consciousness to this story, because you're very clear on what the cost was to the natural landscape of drilling the wells. What, was that something that you felt you wanted to bring across very, very clearly? Or what else, what else was it that you felt people now needed to know about this moment in our history? You know, I don't think that I start, ever started with the idea of, I don't know about you, Cecil, whether, you know, you start with the idea of I want to put this message out, or you don't see the themes of the thing that you're writing until you've done it. So I wasn't, I really wasn't that conscious about what it was that I was wanting to say, but I was drawn to the story because I felt like this was, you know, this was people who were overreaching, people who wanted more, they were dissatisfied, they were, you know, trying to better themselves, they were ambitious, it was about, you know, also quite greedy, you know, this just sort of yearning for more and whatever cost, you know, they were willing to go for it. And there was courage, you know, I felt like that must have taken some nerve, some Hootspur, to do that, you know, to have that ambition, to have that goal and to pull it, they pulled it off despite the difficulties and they didn't have the support of the, you know, the big corporations, they were, it was a very small crew and they were, it was their passion, so, and that their passion blew up in their faces and I was interested in that idea of, you know, what led those people to be there that night, the people who came to witness the oil, you know, there were so many strange coincidences, so even in my own family, my, my mum's partner, his father was affected by the, by the, by the explosion in that, you know, people came to his house that night and said, come, come, come and see the oil, you know, come and, this thing is happening, so people piled into the car, he went to get his jacket because it was cold, it was December and his arm got stuck in his coat, so they left without him, which meant he had his life, he wouldn't have lived otherwise, so I was interested in those people that happened to be there, those, my great-grandfather should have been there too, he was an investor and he was apparently somewhere else and he couldn't get back in time, but had he got back in time he also would have died, so I was interested in this thing of, you know, the sliding doors, you know, of what makes us make those tiny decisions on that day that allows us to still have another day alive, you know, and so I was really interested in that and then the environmental strand, you know, became apparent and more so through the editing process with Jeremy, who was brilliant at really getting me to pull that out, so I added more in there to kind of boost that, you know, and then I realized, oh okay, so this is actually really quite relevant now, but I never started with that intention, I just wanted to write about an explosion. And you talked a bit, Amanda, about, you know, doing research in the archive and you talk in the, I think it's the, maybe the introduction or the acknowledgements about, you know, talking to local historians, people like Angelo, Bethesda, St. Richard Britton and so on, but I mean one of the things that struck me is, you know, there's quite a technical process, getting the oil out to the ground and I think most of us who live in Trinidad, if we don't work in the industry, you just assume well, they drill and it comes out and you don't know much about, but you go into quite a lot of detail about, and you know, using fairly primitive equipment and as you make it clear it was not state-of-the-art, they couldn't afford the best equipment, but I wonder how much research you had to do into those technical aspects of it, like how in 1928 you would actually drill a well with what kind of equipment, what kind of bit, what the derrick would look like, because you can see all that very clearly from the way you describe it, and you know, and there's a sense in which if you didn't have that detail, you wouldn't, when the explosion comes, it doesn't make as much sense, because it might seem like it came out of nowhere, but you make it, it's almost like a technical story that builds into a plot point. How did you... Thank you for saying that. Did you have to read a lot of textbooks? I mean... I did, and I loved it. I mean, I do not have a scientific mind at all, but I got really into it, so I had like, on my wall, I had a big sort of, had a big board that I used, like a cheap Ikea frame and I fill it with pictures, but in those pictures were, you know, real oil wells and drawings and tiny details of things, and I read as much as I could and watched as many YouTube videos, there's footage of like 1930s drilling, so I tried to watch all of this and read as much as I could and then forget it, because I thought if I get too bogged down in detail, it's going to be too dry, well, excuse the pun, but it's going to be too dull, you know, for people to read, so I wanted it to kind of, some of it's probably not accurate now, but there was a particular book that I read called Tales from the Derrick Floor, which was, I mean, I was booking a ticket to go to this museum, you know, in Texas to see a real, like, my husband said to me, what are you doing? That's real, and I said, yeah, but I want to go and smell it and really, you know, and he said, you don't need to do that, you know, come on. So that was, that was part of that, but the Tales of the Derrick Floor was a, it was a recording of people's, you know, stories that were, sorry, I can't remember the word, and then documented. So the voices were really real and written in first person, and they were wonderful because they talked about early days in Beaumont Texas, which was, you know, you know, people going out with divining rods, I mean, people rammed into trains, you know, carriages climbing on top of each other, trying to get to these places where they thought they could make their fortune. The passion, you know, the force of this whole energy at that time. So I read all of those, I love them, got used to the language, I knew what a roust about was, you know, and I, I like those words. So I threw them all in. And who knows if it's accurate? I hope there's no, well, I know there are oil people here who probably want to shoot me, sorry. Any petroleum engineers in the audience, you can buy the book at the bookstore afterwards and you can give a technical analysis to Amanda. So forgive me. Cecil, what kind of source material did you draw? And was it mostly imagination and trying to create the world of St. Vincent? And not just because it's, you know, it's set in various parts of rural St. Vincent, it's set in Kingstown, it moves around quite a lot. And I read it and I thought, well, you know, the detail is not, it's not oppressively detailed, but there's just enough there that I completely believed everything about the landscape and the urban topography and so on that you describe. What did you have to draw on for that? I, apart from, you know, growing up in St. Vincent. Well, a lot of it is imagination. And I presume a lot of it is a lot of St. Vincent has changed since 1858. Well, not that much. We had a volcanic eruption last last April. And of course, we had an eruption in 1812. And Lemma in the book actually, her parents leave the estate when she's young and they settle on the slopes of the volcano. And that shows you the level of courage it takes because the volcano is active. It was painted by Turner after the 1812 eruption. So the islands have always been in the British eye, which is something that the politicians are trying to tell us now we shouldn't do. We shouldn't investigate history because it leads to too many things. But the islands have always been popular. There's a woman called Mrs. Carmichael, a Scottish woman who who visited St. Vincent in the 1820s. There's a Bailey who also visited in the same time as well. Thomas Carlisle visited the Reverend Sterling visited in 1835 to comment on the schools. So there's always been this traffic. Of course, the material they leave you is very well, you have to take it for what it is, the you know, the descriptions of savages and and so on. You have to be able to take it and pick out the little nuggets, pick out the little nuggets. So all the research has actually come from from the people who visited. Some leave some pretty ghastly tales and we don't have to go into how depraved and so on it was. But within all this, there are people who are who are forging a life. That's the thing. There are people who are forging a life for themselves, who are suddenly deciding, yes, I can I can do something here with my life. And so that's what Lema does. She doesn't want to take the money that she's offered to find this man called String. But of course, the money that she's been offered could build a house and she has that choice to make. And so she makes it. And so there's a whole range of sources, as I've said, mainly by these writers. And what you come what you come upon are some real nuggets. There's a magistrate called Anderson, because after emancipation, there are magistrates sent to from from England to to arbitrate, it's called it that. And he tells some really good nuggets. There's one, for example, he says that the whites are always having their marooning parties. And so the the colors have their marooning parties, big cook up, if you like, cook up on a drink up, basically. They go somewhere, a tent and eat and drink. And now the blacks are also having the newly free people having their their parties as well. And he tells a story. He calls it. He calls the woman disparagingly Miss Eve, because she comes up before him, charged. There was a ball and so the plantation owner's wife puts puts out her lovely gown on the bed with all her jewels. She's going to wear this gown to their ball. Miss Eve spots the gown. It looks very good. She's going to a party the same night. I don't have to tell you what happens. She goes to the party dressed in in this woman's gown. So when she comes up to, you know, before the magistrate, she says she sees nothing wrong with it. You know, she didn't steal the dress. Somebody stole it and gave it to her. And so the magistrate is always saying the spin that these people have, you know, with words, you know, it's just amazing, that kind of liveliness, that that unwilling to suspend reality really. But he didn't say what he actually did to her. But I'm saying there's so many little nuggets that you find and it just gives you an insight into what the life of the of the people, you know, that there are people suddenly after emancipation as the same Anderson says, you find that plates just accidentally fall to the floor and break. And the owners are always complaining. Bottles of wine keep slipping away from the cellars. Wine seems to be a popular thing amongst the newly free people. Half bottles of wine suddenly evaporate, you know. And so so so there are people finding their voice literally and and saying, yes, we are going to control our lives as much as we can. So so the sources are there. But as I, you know, as I've indicated and you obviously know, some of the language is really quite, you know, difficult to to to penetrate. But yes, I'm I'm looking for instances and I'm seeing people who who are not the docile and subservient crew, but people who have their little subversions. You know, I just like it. You know, the this is what Anderson says. He says they're going to have to send for for for English servants because the quality of the servants they get in has gone down so much. They're going to have to get English servants because these people are talking back now to yeah, they're talking back. If you if you ring, they take half an hour to come, you know. So so so I like I find it fascinating. What I like about that, Cecil, is I feel that that magistrate without realizing it was was an early literary critic because he kind of put it. He kind of put his finger on something about Caribbean literature, right, that these people invent these stories and they talk back. I mean, you know, you could go back and say he was, you know, unknown to himself was an important early critic of Caribbean writing, Caribbean storytelling. What do you think? We've always been great storytellers. That's we have our Californians are incredible storytellers. That's that's where my interest first. I'm of an age where we didn't do Caribbean literature at school. When I was at school, we were doing the Prisoner of Zender by Anthony Hope. Why on earth would you want to teach? And this was the most prestigious school on the island. This was the St. Vincent Grammar School, to which I want a scholarship. Why on earth are we doing the Prisoner for the Zender? But I want to ask you something, Cecil, you mentioned Miss Eve, who borrowed, you know, who didn't borrow. Someone borrowed the evening gown for her on her behalf. Did she turn into the character of Eva in your story? No, that was just a coincidence. This is what I'm saying. Somewhere along the line, I'm going to have to explore it, leave. And there's also there's also a woman called Anne Krieg, who this would be 1818 30s, who applies to the magistrate to to open a rum shop, basically, because the holiday season is approaching and she feels she can sell a shift quite a bit of liquor. And she she writes in this very. What's the what's the word? This florid language. I mean, florid and with spelling misspellings galore. And so the magistrates think, you know, holds it up as an example of how how oppity these people are when they have nothing to be oppity about. And of course, his spelling throughout the blooming book, you know, it's like every page there's five or his spells believe wrong. His spells receive wrong. And yet he's castigating Anne Krieg. And so once more, there's a character that works, that's worth investigating. So the more the more you do, the more your imagination thinks, but let's let's put some flesh to this woman. And 150 years later, she might have been a novelist, right? So you say something there, Cecil, that interests me. You talk about, you know, these, you know, the the historical accounts we have for the most part were written from, let's say, from above. They're written by colonial officials. They're written by judges and magistrates. They're written by travelers, you know, British travelers visiting the islands and writing their travel reports back home. And it's just a fact that for most of Caribbean history, certainly, you know, kind of pre-independence history, that they're the voices of most people are just lost and not lost as an accident of history, in some cases, deliberately suppressed, you know, the, you know, records when, you know, it starts from, you know, withholding education so that people can't write their own stories down. So of course, we do have oral traditions. We've got aspects of history that come through, you know, through folklore, through storytelling. But for the most of the last 500 years, the majority of voices of Caribbean people, whether they're the indigenous people who were there originally, whether there were the people brought from West Africa and the plantation slavery, whether they were indentured immigrants from India, from anywhere else. Those stories, they, we know they exist and there are accounts of them written by other people, but for the most part, we don't have their own stories of themselves. And I mean, those lost voices are really fascinating. I'll just say that, you know, it's this year's, as many of you may know, it's the 60th anniversary of independence for Trinidad and Tobago and also for Jamaica. And one of the, one of the programs we did back at home that Bocas did back at home was we commissioned six writers in Trinidad and Tobago to, we gave a sign each of them a character that was someone we knew existed, you know, at some point in our history, one of them going back 5,000 years, known individuals who are documented in history, but whose voices are completely, their stories were unrecorded. And, you know, in a case like that, what you have to draw on is imagination to bring those voices to life. So what I wanted to, want to ask you, Amanda, you know, obviously the closer you get to the present, the more records there are and the greater the chance that you can actually, if not talk to someone who is there, but then maybe talk to their child or their grandchild, and so it becomes easier at that point. But even in the 1920s, there are some voices that were more carefully recorded than others, right? And that doesn't just have to do with things like class or education or ethnicity, it also has to do with gender. So one of the main characters of your story is the wife of the investor that you mentioned. And so I wanted to, like, what, what were the voices in your story? And had you gone to the original roots of, like, telling the story from 17 different perspectives? What did you feel were the voices or the perspectives that were hardest for you to, to, to, to find, you know, written sources for where you most had to depend on your imagination? I think it's a long process, you know, and I, I found it difficult. I find it difficult to accurately, you know, jump into somebody's head and have them speak. It's the more you get to know your characters, the more they're, you know, the more their voice is available to you, I think. I mean, without sounding too mysterious about it. But I think with Ada, who's the female character, I found her quite easy to access because she felt I could relate to her in many ways. So I could jump into her quite easily. And I think the, the Portuguese investor, Tito, again, he was very familiar to me. So I drew on things that I knew about my, my family and my uncle, who's a very, very Tito-like character, you know, with the big tummy. And, and he actually did eat his own wedding cake when he was jilted at the altar over a period of year while drinking coffee in the afternoon. He just cut a slice each day and he ate his cake. Now he's, he is Tito really. So, so I used, I did draw on that on people that I knew quite a lot. The difficult characters were Chatterjee, who I, who I was very fond of, but I was nervous of getting him right, you know, because it, who am I to know, you know, exactly how he would have thought or without being too cliched or, so it took a long time to get those, to get those. I hope I got them right. I was, I was sensitive around dialect. And although I had, I think I have a good ear for that. It was still, I had to really check and double check. I didn't want to be, you know, kind of brutal and just go in with my, you know, imagined voice of his. So, so they did feel, they did feel reasonably contemporary. So that, and the things they were struggling with, I could, I could access them. But so she was probably the easiest, but it's not, it's a tough thing to do to get it right, I think. But hopefully, hopefully it works. And Cecil, you mentioned, you know, talking about the magistrates' reports and these extraordinary characters who emerge, you know, almost despite the magistrates' efforts. I mean, I'm sure he wasn't thinking that, you know, all this time later that people would be looking at those and saying, yeah, yeah, she's interesting. She's the one I want to. What, what are some of the, are there any other thinking back over, you know, the history of St. Vincent, the things you're interested in writing about? Who are some of the other, let's call them lost voices that you would love to either write about or read more about? What are the parts of the past of St. Vincent that you would like to see more fiction written about? There are probably two, two main things and they're interlinked. In 1675 or 1712 or 1734, the date hasn't been agreed on, but it's probably 1675, a ship carrying slaves capsized just, I don't know if anybody knows St. Vincent, capsized off Beckway, which is nine miles away from St. Vincent. And the people swam to Beckway and were then transported back from Beckway onto the mainland and then married the, yeah, married the yellow caribs, as they were called then. And then we had the black caribs. Now, if that's not a fascinating story, 1675, swimming there, coming back, you know, it's a big motion picture, isn't it? This led to what we call the black caribs and the black caribs were actually at war with the British from 1719 when the British sent a tentative exploration on the island and, you know, they were told, don't come back full stop, otherwise you will suffer the consequences. So the black caribs had, the chief is called Chateau, chief Chateau, and he, he was the commander, there were various of the chiefs, but he was the commander and he fought and fought and fought and eventually in 1795, he was killed by five British soldiers. Again, the history books tell us that he was killed by major leads from Scotland and we now know that's pretty unlikely. They said he challenged a major to a duel at midnight. Now, you have to go back to the Caribbean, even now where there's electricity at midnight, who, who stops a battle, a raging battle and says, let's fight a duel. You know, and, and that's the stuff they were trying to spin on us and had, there's a, there's a plaque in the church to major leads for, for, for, you know, being the one to, to destroy Chateau. So Chateau is our main chief, but that night, that broke the caribs completely. Once he died, the whole spirit seems to, to, to have gone out of the caribs and they were then deported to Central America. They became the Garafuna. The Garafuna people, yeah. The Lees. Yeah. Yeah. And so everything about it is fascinating. There is just so much there. The carib chief, this shipwreck, it's, you know, I'm surprised other people don't want to delve into this and, and, and just, you know, give us a fuller picture because obviously we have an idea, but we really need the researchers and the fiction. I think fiction is sometimes more powerful than, than actual history book itself. Mind you, a lot of what, what comes as history books is fiction anyway. The stuff that, you know, Carl Island and, and the rest, right, Anthony Frude is, you know, when Frude says, for example, will, you know, oh, St. Wilberforce, you know, you set us free. It's foolishness. You know, it's, it's not history. So, so you have to, and William said the same thing. He said he found, when he was writing, when he was researching, he found fiction to be more to give a better picture than, than the history books. But we want, we want all these fictions. We want all those indigenous voices to come back, the current voices that are wax and everybody else. Yeah, we want them back. It's interesting you say that, that reminds me that Lloyd Best, you know, the Trinidadian economist, political philosopher, he always used to say, if you want to understand, you know, the contemporary Caribbean and the moment around independence and post-independence, like, don't go to the sociologists, don't go to the economists, go and read, read the novelists, right? They were the ones who could actually tell you what was going on. Yeah, yeah. Amanda, I don't know where you are in the process of imagining your next fictional work, but I wonder if likewise, if there is a moment in history, a particular historical character, something that you have an interest in that you think you might one day want to explore what, what is, you know, your first book was set, also, well, not that far back in the 1950s, but still, you know, outside of your own lived experience, your second one is more contemporary. Do you, has this given you an appetite for kind of delving into the archives, you know, going further back into history or? No. No. I'm done. Short, sweet answer. I don't think so. Not, I mean, the next thing that I'm doing is a contemporary thing. And that's quite liberating, you know, to not have to worry about too much research. And I feel like the taking a heavy coat off, you know, in the sun, it's like bit liberated by that. So for the moment. But, you know, these things crop up. So the, the, the stories come knocking at the back of your head, and it may come again, but hopefully not for a while. OK. I mean, there are many more things I could ask these two writers, but given that we've got about 10 minutes left, I wondered if by chance there's anyone in the audience who would like to ask something of one of the two writers. Now is a chance. There is, in fact, a microphone which will magically appear thanks to the sound crew. Should you want to ask us anything? Any, any takers? Any questions? Anyone? We've got one right there in front. Martina in your stokely car, Michael, should. Thank you. Thank you so much. And what a joy to listen to you all today. It's really a comment to add to Amanda's story because we've grown up. This is my sister Naomi and we've grown up with that story as part of our lives because our auntie Dilly was the daughter of that family and she was boarding at Bishop Anstey High School in the 1920s because at that point they had to have boarding facilities for girls who couldn't, you know, who didn't have families living near town and obviously you're not going to catch a maxi taxi in those days. And so auntie Dilly was boarding and madam, who was what they called the the principal at bishops in those days, madam refused to give her permission to join her family to celebrate this discovery of oil. So she was a child and overnight she was an orphan and an heiress and she was she was at Bishop Anstey. So I just wanted to add that. Yes, and I did hear when I was talking to Marlene, you know, the Soudine, Marlene Soudine. Exactly. Yeah. So so Marl, the Soudines might anyway, we're related. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Irish connection. Yeah. So Marlene said that she was she had had a premonition also of the event. So she she was very upset and they couldn't understand why and she was sensing something had happened that her sister and her mother and her father were dead. Yeah. So absolutely. And that's down to a madam, madam or I don't know. There's no. That's what strict school teachers. That's the value of them sometimes. Anyone else would like to ask or we've got one right behind there. Thank you for your talk. I'm studying history and English literature at uni right now. And so and I really like historical fiction as like a tool for education. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So I was wondering, especially based on what you said about how a lot of history is actually fiction right now, to what extent, not in like the most technical sense, but to what extent do you view yourselves as historians? I I don't call myself a historian at all. In fact, I'm my my my work for quite a few years. I'm a lecturer in maths who's who's now turned his hand to writing. So so so I wouldn't call myself a historian. I read for my own pleasure, but when I go to Saint Vincent, what one of the things I always did was I would consult the director the most prominent historian, Dr. Adams, and he would sit and teach me history for for two hours, you know, well, talk history, but he saw it as teaching and he was and I would say, I'm only here on holiday. I've got to go and he said, no, sit down, bro, I've got just one more thing. And then two hours later. So yes, I like to discuss history, but I would never dream of calling myself a historian. No, however, if you want an equation, solve today. As your man. Yeah, definitely not a historian. So novelist, I'll take novelist. Good question. Yes, indeed. Any maybe one last question. Oh, here we write in front here. Yeah, I'm going to cheat with two questions of that. So right, Nicholas. So I was just wondering one, Amanda, you said that the stories can come knocking at the back of your head. What takes a story from the back to the front to something that you're that's niggling away to something that is actually going to be worked on? And then the second question really has to do with audience and it's a both of you. Do you consider the audience at all when you're writing, who you're writing for? Is audience a consideration at all? OK, so the yeah, the first question, good question. I think an idea has to keep knocking so the not gets louder. And with with my first novel, Black Rock, I I'd only written short stories. I only wanted to ever write short stories. And it was it was my agent who said, you've got to write a novel or you you're dead, basically. And I said, I'm not writing a novel. I'm not a novelist. And I sulked, you know, for a long time. And then this knock at the back of my head. And then I as I started to explore it a bit, it became I found it was, you know, there was a lot there. I found myself thinking about it a lot. So once it starts to do that and actually it was the father divert eyes essay in the eight East Indian immigrants book that he wrote about the dome in a way that was like a treatment for a film. I don't know if you've ever read that essay, but it is so beautifully written. And it was my mother who'd given it to me. And she said, you need to read this. And I read it. And I remember the moment I read it in her porch in Val Zane, you know, just as I was about to catch my flight. And I said, oh, fuck, I'm going to do this. And that was that I didn't say that. That's that's what and I'll just answer quickly the other bit. I unfortunately, I have not been that conscious of the reader. I think I think about the story and I don't think and that means I don't think about markets as well. And, you know, I think the next thing that I'm writing, I am thinking more about who might pick it up in a bookstore because I never think of sales business markets. And, you know, that's that has tripped me up. So but I am definitely more aware now. Cecil, I feel like Lemma was knock, knock, knocking on your imagination. Well, I'm going to answer the question, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that if you write totally in Caribbean or Vincension, it's inaccessible to quite a lot of people. So therefore you have a kind of halfway house, not always doesn't always work. So yes, you have to consider the audience, the reading audience. On the other hand, you have to be true to the story. For example, if if if Lemma were written totally in standard English, let's call standard English, it wouldn't have the urgency, I think. So some some work need that. That that that directness that comes from the Caribbean, the rhythm of the Caribbean language that it's a different rhythm from from spoken English. And so therefore, in a sense, you do have to consider who's going to read it and explain how to read it, perhaps. OK, well, we've got a couple minutes more and I want to ask both of you, maybe a slightly provocative question. We ask, well, I don't know, maybe it's not that provocative, but we are we are sitting in in the British Library, which is, you know, full of this accumulated knowledge, historical records, archives, many, many books. And as you have said, very eloquently, Cecil, a lot of the history of other parts of the world written from Britain has been a very partial history, if not a fictional history. And I can't help but think that, you know, I was talking to someone last night about the fact that next year is the 75th anniversary of Windrush, thinking about recent British politics about. And I kind of feel like as an outsider, as someone who lives somewhere else, lives in the Caribbean, visiting here, that I feel like the Caribbean obviously has a shared history with Britain. But in some ways, Britain is not so interested in their share of the history. I feel like, you know, there's there's an there's an understanding, we have an understanding of what that relationship has meant for centuries, that maybe the average British person doesn't for whatever reason, whether it has to do with education, whether it has to do with with politics. So anyway, so what I'm getting to in a very roundabout way is I want to ask both of you. If there's one thing that you would like the average British person, this is the mostly Caribbean audience, I think, or largely Caribbean audience, so they'll they'll chair you on. If there's one thing you would like the average British person out in the street, potential voter in the general election that might not happen this year. If you're one thing you'd like them to know about Caribbean history or the historical relationship between the Caribbean and Britain, what would be that thing? Pass. That the very foundations of Britain were built on on the Caribbean slavery. There's no when the historian Richard Parris or Parris, I'm not sure how to say it. The British historian says it's impossible to conceive now that these islands were the most essential to Britain, that everything in Britain derives from from the history, navigation, banking, insurance. When when when you look back at it, all of it or the majority of it comes from from from from the Caribbean is based on it. That's why what is it? Saint Lucia changed hands how many times over history, this little dot of Ireland in the middle of the sea. That's why they kept fighting over it, right? Yeah, it's there would have been no capital for global capitalism as we know it without the Caribbean. Every every single institution and the sad thing now, of course, is that the current group of politicians are saying we don't want any discussion of of of race any discussion of history. You want it's the curious the annoying thing is that Dr. Sewell commissioned a report. Tony is it Tony Sewell? Yeah, a report. And he says slavery times are done slavery times. We don't want to discuss it anymore. It's not it's not relevant. And you you want to give him a box as my sister would say. So this is where we need the writers. This is where we need the fiction writers, the poets. This is where we need musicians, storytellers, filmmakers to step in and fill that gap, right? By telling stories so compelling that they can't be ignored. So on that note, I would like to very much to thank Amanda and Cecil for coming, sharing their books with us. Thank you.