 Narhwt am gwaith y ffolwyddiwr Llywodraeth, ond yn ni'n nioleddiad i chi i ti dwi'n gwybod. Mae'n gweithi am hynog i ddarparu yma i ymddangosoddi, i gilydd i'r ddweud o'r sorg pethau, ymddangosoddi, ymddangosoddi, ddefnyddio bobl na'r amser, gyflymio'n ddweudio'i arnosonol. â benodoloddi, i'r ddweudio eich dweud o'r bwysig o ffordd o'r cael pwysig o ffwyaf ymddangosoddi, a ydych chi'n gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gennau i'r awr. Felly, dwi'n meddwl, rwy'n meddwl i'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gweithio, Siobhani Ramlechan. Siobhani yn y Pwysig Trinidadian, Criwtig ac Loger Cymru. Yn ystod y pwysig ym Mhawr, mae'r pwysig yn gwneud am y hawnting Felly, mae'n pwysig yw hwnnw i'r Pwysig Trinidadian. Cymru yw'r gweithio ddraeth Cymru, rydyn ni'n leddúch hynny i gael y dyfodol ac mae'n ddorpan i'r Ffélix Dennis Aberlledigol pa gael y fbinnen o gwbl yn Rhyw unig. Siobhani yw'n ddodpan i'r Pwysig Trinidadian. Y cy année reddedigadu ddw am y cyflwyno ddebygau, fe wasg gweithio a safonny o alurthau ar gyfer holl alw a ddillu o dd 좋아하ffordd, ar y Cymru gan Gwladrae Ff Bahamas. Fe maen nhw i ddiwedd i mi yw Siobani. Mae ar siobani is Sophie Jay. Sophie is the author of Wildfire's, published by HarperCollins. Wildfire's is the author's debut novel. It led to being a writer-in-residence and a visiting fellowship at the University of Oxford. Wildfire's was also long-listed for the 2019 Peggy Chapman Andrews Awards for First Novel. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Jay splits her time between Toronto and London. Wrth dugwydd, drwy'n ddweud i'n ddweud am y Cyfnodd. Wrth gafodd, nid yw Attion Joseph. Attion Joseph fynd â hynny yn gwnaeth USAID, Penedig Dyn Niferthir, Norellus, Aedda Cymru ac Aelodau gynhygrwr sonol 5 o gydagau clyweddriaeth ac 3 nofil. Yn y 28 o gwnaeth sy'n gyllidech y ffrifio a mynd i'r clywys ymwyllur i Caelysiriw. Fy yna i ddaw ar eich Cyffwyr yn y Cymru yna ddwyng yn gyterwylo cyfrifiadol a'r boi sydd wedi'i gweldol ar y glas ddweud. Fy hoffa mwy o'r album ar y cyfnod o'r ymdwys mwy o'r llyfr yw'r hyn de'ch chi ddweud ar gyfer a'r cyfnod o'r gwaith yma ar y Llyfr Genedlaethau. Fy hoffa mwy o'r llyfr yw'r llyfr, Sônysfa Albert, yn ymgyrch i'r pryd yma o'r pryd, ymdweud yma, at y pryd sefyd i'r pryd sianol a'r Prid T. Mae'n leisiad o'r llyfr yw'r llyfr yw'r llyfr a'r llyfr Lund. Fy hoffa'r Antony Joseph. Felly mae'n fydda i gondol yn gweithio'r ysgolig o'r bobl ar ôl, ac rydym ni'n gweithio'r cyffredinol sydd eisiau ei gwneud o'r hanes o attaith o'r rhai yn y ffamiliau. Felly mae'r bobl yn gweithio'r marwm bwysigol, o'r ysgolig sydd o'r rhai i'r ysgolig, ac mae'n gweithio i ei wneud o'r unrhyw o'r ysgolig o'r ffansiol. Felly, i gydai'r ysgolig, yn ddiwch i'r ffansiol, mae'n mynd i ffifioi, Rydych yn dda'n ddefnyddio a llydaethio'r blodau a hwnnw ddim fydd ymddi Creator yn ym dda wedi'i bodai'n ffordd digud fod yn y morhau gwiriol, dyma'r ddiflwg? A wnaeth eich ffyr出ion yn y ddiflwg gyflwyno mewn gwiriol o erdwch i arlygu ein bod yn ein sgwr wishes a rydyn ni'n ddiflwg ar yr ôl. Rydyn ni rydyn ni'n ddiflwg. Roedd eu ddweud. Roeddwn i'n ddiflwg rydyn ni'n ddiflwg, Po'r twyd i'r llygu參 dda gweithio'r newid gyda'r newid, ond y gallwn ddku'n ei wneud enghraifft â'r ffrom ni. Mae'r ffrom ni yn ystafell i'r ffrom ni, dda'n amgylcheddol o'r ffrom ni. I mor clywed i'r ffrom ni mae hynny yn ddall i'r ffrom ni yw'r stori. Ar fyddau yn gweld ffifio, cawn yn daith yn dda'r ffrom ni, hefyd yn ymddiriaid yn gweld ffobl yn i. Ond oed yn ddechrau'n meddwl i'w unrhyw, roeddwn i'n rhan fydda'r ysgrifennu, ond arall hyn arall yma. Rhaid i'n ddweud o'r ddweud? Rhaid i'n ddweud o'r ddweud, wrth ymlaen nhw? Dyma'r ddweud o'r ddweud? Rwy'n yn ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Rwy'n gweithio'r ddweud a'r ddweud o'r ddweud a'r ddweud yma. oes o'r bwysig y cerddau a'r bwysigbeth, oedd y gwir yw'n gweithio wedi'i adael y cerddau, rydyn ni'n angen i siwr wrth yn ysgol o'r buffasol o'r gw exercise o'r ei awr, o'r bwysigio o'r bwysig a'r buffasol o'r bwysig. Rydyn ni'n angen i adael y byd. Roedd y gweithiaeth yma yma i gyd yn eu gyfrifio. A oes o'r bwysig ym mwy o'r honnw yma a'r rhaid o'r bod yn cerddau erroed. Felly, y gwrth i'n rwyf wedi'i rhoi'r llwy i'r bobl, fe fydd yn teimlo ar y rai a'r deall a'r llwy i'r bobl llwyddiadau. Yr bobl llwy i'r bobl a'r bobl neu radd乎'r gweithreffau. F braking. Aredr? I'n fydde i mi, mae'n iawn a'r gwneud. So on a personal level I realised many years ago that the more personal you get in your work is the more universal the work becomes. So the more you tell your secrets it's the more universal the work spreads out a lot more. If you try to write something that is for everyone it never works. But if you write your deepest truths it touches a lot of people. So I've always sort of aspired towards doing that and to being really honest in the work. So when I came to write about my dad it was everything had to come out. Everything, all the honesty and all the truth about him, who he was and my relationship with him in a very true and honest way. That was what I wanted to do. But also as a Caribbean writer and I think Sophie's hinting it is that as a Caribbean writer part of our responsibility is to be the historians from the Caribbean. Part of it is to be the historian, the storytellers, the people that collect the stories because so much is lost. So much has been taken from us and so much is lost. So the writers, the novelists, the poets, the musicians become the people, the historians, we keep the history. So that's part of my responsibility as well as a Caribbean writer. Writing about the life of what we call a typical Caribbean man, a Trinidadian man is not the sort of thing that you encounter every day in British literature or in literature in general. So it's our responsibility to illuminate those lives, I think, as part of my role at least. Wonderful, Siobhani. I'm working on a collection of essays right now. So a departure from poetry that explores Indo-Caribbean women's disobedience across generations, starting with my grandmothers, then my mother and myself. And after I wrote Everyone Knows I'm a Haunting, to which I'll say I had immense familial support from my parents and my siblings. My mother asked me almost with a kind of hope that knows it will be defeated. So is your next book going to be happy? And the answer is no, I don't think so. But I feel great responsibility to these essays in a different way than I did to the poems because they're talking about not just my life. I would say anything and I have done. But how to write about people who are both dead and both with us. People with whom I love and have loving relationships and whom I love a little less, let's be honest. There are always people like that in your family. Holding the weight of that is a great privilege and it is also really damn heavy sometimes. And so I've been here in the UK for a few months just writing through it. And I don't know if Anthony and Sophie relate to this as writers who travel frequently, but there's been a way in which writing in this place has enabled me to write some of the most difficult things in the essays about my family and about love and disobedience and recklessness and drug use and all the rest of it. That's really great. One thing that I'm getting from all of you is that it's a heavy responsibility, but it is a responsibility that you have found rewarding in some way. And I think one thing that I notice about all of your books is that you're not just telling stories, but there's either a silence that you are shattering or an absence that you are filling up and inhabiting and re-measuring and reconsidering in new ways. Sophie, in your book, Wildfires, you have the central character of Chevy who doesn't talk and he is very much the focal point and this gravitational point for the whole family. In Anthony there's poems like Flack and Hathaway where the father's absence is just absolutely palpable and Tobago family and there's not only the father's absence but also the possibility of another family. And then in Shivani there's all of the, just for example, the abortionist daughter and granddaughter poems, rewriting and reclaiming stories which are not necessarily considered by the dominant hegemonic mainstream to be acceptable and giving those people a voice. So I think that's really wonderful and I just love to know how you felt about addressing those absences and how you went about writing through them and addressing them. Shivani? What if I looked really focused to the two of them who were just flying for me? I spent a lot of time as a young person and a slightly less young person making myself palatable to people in Trinidadian society which mostly happened to be people I feared who mostly happened to be Indo-Caribbean men. I learned, it was never taught to me, I think I taught it to myself unfortunately how to make myself foldable, biddable, docile, doesn't sound like me does it but that's what I did for a long time and when I committed myself to this practice of writing poems and sharing them in public which as we know is a different enterprise to being a private poet I developed a manifesto I suppose that has served me very well which is that the poems must never apologise for themselves and that they are always committed to uncovering the truth beneath the truth which is to say not that Columbus discovered the Caribbean in 1492 which of course he fucking didn't but what if, if not for the truth of your poem what would never be spoken at all and I dedicate myself to exploring that this landed me in hot water and I don't care well I guess I do care but again I'm incredibly supported by my immediate family and I think that's been, we're speaking of families really essential to how I make this work and since I have that I feel like I can do whatever the hell I want Thank you I think for a book that's about silence there's an awful lot of words about it for me writing about the silence of this particular family of course I drew from personal experiences but for me it was absolutely terrifying because that silence was sort of placed there for a reason and by putting words on a page you start to confront that silence of what is usually a blank page, a silence so for me it was terrifying, paralyzing, completely interrupting daily life not being able to get anything done because I realised what I had done even though fictionally I had broken a silence and who this book mattered very much for me was my family and they are also very very supportive of me, they're very very proud but being a quiet person in my family and having written a book about family and about silence it was almost like oh Sophie has some thoughts about this quietness that none of us ever speak about so in that sense very very scary to see things on the page that necessarily didn't make it to the published process you know there might be 20 or so words in the book that are true that only I know are true but it is an absolutely terrifying thing to see those things in front of you and then even more to know that people are going to see it and you know think things about you etc but much like Shivani, I didn't care I did care and then I didn't care afterwards it's both at the same time but it is completely liberating, so freeing and then the world didn't end, I was okay afterwards I made it out the other end Great, more than okay I'd say Yeah Anthony Absences, yeah my father wasn't around but the fact that he wasn't around meant that he was more present in a strange way and Flacon had a way talks about that his myth grew huge, the mythology of him and the anticipation of him was so huge that I felt his presence even though he wasn't there so yeah there's that aspect of silence and absence and there's also the fact that I'm writing about my dad but it's personal and I'm connecting with readers at the same time and the way I think it works is that the reader brings their own experiences their own experience of loss their own experience of unconditional love their own experience of parenthood they bring that to the text and they're able to fill in the gaps they're able to fill in the coefficient, the absence so I think that's how absence works for me of course I got to know my dad much later on in life we got to spend time together but he was still absent even though he was with me we were talking, he was very... he was not aloof but he was very hard to get close to emotionally like a lot of Caribbean men and the book kind of examines that as well that sort of absence, presence but absence physically present but emotionally distant emotionally absent so there's different layers of absence that are working within this Definitely, like with all of your books I definitely get a sense of literal hauntings but also figurative as well like feeling the absence of people feeling the presence of people even when they are physically absent the emotional absence was very striking but I wonder if we could get a short reading from your collection Yes, yes, yes so I'm going to read probably just three sonnets they're short so shouldn't take that much time I'm going to read a piece called Jogi Road Jogi Road is a road in Trinidad near Orangwes, near where I lived in Montlambour people from Trinidad will be familiar with it but what happened when I came to write this poem thanks to the internet I was able to research and figure out where certain things were where certain streets were things that I thought I had gotten wrong and this poem kind of speaks to that and it's also the only memory I have of my father and mother together it's not a great memory but it's all I have Jogi Road from life from love in shame the red sawmill on Jogi Road with cedar grain in its fibrous air red the old train tracks and the bridge where my mother's rage was bruising the dark her fingernails ripped at my father's shirt his face this is blood the way he looks away then down with open palms in a resignation but memory has a curious sting the red sawmill was not on Jogi Road but on Silvermill and in the savanna there were five salmon trees which cried when cut, not six my father held me over his shoulder that night and I know I was looking up from the road what do I know of my father's body not even a bottle of duty free rum or a carton of the moirier this time I come with both hands swinging arriving first at the funeral home where you are already waiting in your pillow box exuding a kind of warm you are my father's body I know so little of you I know the soft weight of your hands on my shoulder at the airport I know your rings and I felt the muscle of your panic wrist once when we were far out at Maracas and the ocean almost overcame us I have seen your gut grow into its own sonnet and your head grow gleaming and bald but today it is your chest I come to know how rigid it is when I press upon the crisp sheen of your burial sheet to tread a rose through the eye of your lapel and I find the pawl bearing weight of your life when we grip the casket's chrome to lift and carry you down to the hearse waiting in the bright yard and I'm going to do a piece that I think I can do here because it's in Trinidadian Creole and when I read it for non-Trinidadian Creole speakers I have to say that I'm sorry if you don't understand or get anything when I read James Joyce or Keats sometimes I don't know what they're talking about either but I got to make sense of it but here I think a lot of people are going to understand what I'm trying to say here Tina was my sister and Martina and my father had a really good relationship even though he wasn't her father but my mom for some reason gave all her children the name Joseph I don't know Martina and my dad became really close and this is what this poem is about, their relationship Tina, hear this one The big man surveyed a house he said, okay, all you will have to break down to build back that kitchen while they're building them pillars could support the bedroom you and your daughter could stay in there the living room need new flooring TNT not connecting electric until you fix that roof the wiring faulty, fire you're talking good money, materials, cement, labour but Tina, you can't live like this with termite in ruins he had left quite Santa Cruz to go to Five Rivers to see what could be done for Tina and Trish Tina not Albert Daughter but Baptist, no Baptist and she have his last name she dies two years after he does serpent didn't possess her womb was stomach cancer and two weeks after the house she suffered to save fell down and I'll just read one more actually this features my mom and dad again I have this really amazing photograph of them together on their wedding day which you can't see but trust me it's there it's in the book and yeah a gap in language they are captured forever in monochrome on the leaning lawn of their wedding day in September 1966 before my grandmother dug up the ground to plant flowers she sewed the dress my mother wore but who sews a wedding dress press a footing on a wasp waste machine I am also in the image I am a gap in language silent until November by then they had already begun to drift apart my father told me how 20 years later my mother arrived at the board house he was building on squat land in Chagronas he thought was to reminisce but was to serve him divorce papers on a Sunday afternoon I can imagine them together there but only as myth sitting in his unfinished house I came to know them apart and I cannot bring them together in death Thank you Anthony I really like that last poem how you kind of grapple with limitations of language that even poems there are certain gulfs that language and poetry can't traverse and I just wonder were there other things that you wanted to write about but struggled to write about because perhaps they divide articulation or they were beyond definition or maybe you just weren't ready No there was nothing that I purposefully stayed away from a lot of stuff there was not a lot there was just little fragments of my father and I wrote a lot of poems that probably didn't end up in here because they weren't very good but there was nothing that I stayed away from I just couldn't remember everything and I had very little to draw on No, I don't think there's anything really what happens now is that I remember things and I'm like oh shit I should have put that in a book but it's too late and I think that's going to happen for the rest of my life a book is only a beginning this is not the whole story So how far do you think that your book was about you memorialising your father and how much was it about you processing your relationship with your father I think it's the same thing I think I'm processing my relationship with him of course, trying to understand trying to hold him in place because he's in here, this is him in life he was very hard to hold on to so I have him in a place that I could go to and other people could read about it so there's that but I'm also processing my own life as a parent as well my own mortality when a parent dies both parents and both of my parents are gone so it does make you question your mortality and towards the end of the book that comes in a little bit more so it's looking at life and death as well and dealing with seeing my father's body was an interesting moment for me really life affirming life changing so I write about that a bit it's processing my relationship with him but processing myself as well Sophie, you mentioned earlier that there were things you didn't feel like you could write about you don't have to tell us but just what was the process of like you said that there were things that you left out what were some of the things questions you were asking yourself the things you were considering are they going to go in another book? Yes, probably I don't know if it'll be a book maybe sorry I really don't know but the reason I didn't put it into this book is it just didn't fit it was just just kind of wanted to stick to one story and it just felt like maybe I was talking about or writing about too many things at once for the sake of my own therapeutic writing and it just did not fit with the story as much as I it felt good to write it this was not the story for it Okay, and there's an essay that you wrote in Wassafiri where you were talking about the process of writing the book and you mentioned that you read Gaston Bolshalad's The Poetics of Space and that was like an inspirational point for you and you know one thing that I one thing that was very clear in your book is that the domestic space the house in which all the family family members gather is very important and I was just wondering like do you think it could have worked in another space or how important was the space to this story? As in a space other than a house? That house specifically I think the house structure quite literally the structure of the house really did defa it had a definitely an impact on how the family navigated around each other but at the same time the family navigated the house also around each other they were very much dependent on each other I always think that I always treated the house as a character of its own and I drew out the house before I knew really the characters and I knew the mysterious one would go ahead the liar would go ahead but I do think that if the house was much bigger, much brighter I do wonder how that would have an effect on the relationships, how would they talk or not talk about things if the house was much smaller and there was 8-9 people in it would they be more combustible or would more people involved so I think it would be a different story but things might happen in a slightly different way but definitely the structure had an effect on them and they on it that makes sense it's kind of like the idea when people say that an idea swells and contracts based on the amount of time you give it so if you give a task 20 minutes it will take 20 minutes if you give it 2 hours it will take 2 hours I think that kind of applies to people especially what you're saying about how the way they feel it kind of defines the house and the house so that's really striking can we have a reading from your novel yes so in addition to betrayal and secrets there's also a love story in my book so I'm going to read a scathing letter from a woman to a man here is what I go right when I really feel in plain English I's not a poet what I want to say is I'm going to meet somebody and feel like you know them and they know you within only a few hours of the same day I never had that feeling before in my life even though we only went out for that walk once remember it was getting dark and it was explaining to me the blues musicians you like and when I tell you I never heard the blues you were shocked and we start to laugh that walk home feel like a lifetime a whole next life only a few hours and I still can't forget less than a day self it's a hard feeling to let go I don't know how to explain it it's a strange thing to fail to forget something you can't explain but maybe that is the reason self I can't forget and it does bother me to this day it does bother me well it's obvious it bother me I write to you almost 16 years since we first meet at the supermarket I myself could explain every detail of your face like I only see you 20 minutes ago so that is the first thing I want to say the second thing I want to say is what I want to know and what I will never know is and I go say it in plain full face English so you can't mistake what I say in why it wasn't me I'm not saying that as a question I saying that as a fact why you walk with me in the sunset so why you ask me questions about my father like you care why you walk me home why you bring dandelions for me you just bring dandelion and savannah flowers for everybody so it must be so because when I had come to your apartment after we didn't hear from you the first time when you had gone and run when my sister was pregnant with your second child your landlord said tell me you went to caracas where you had sons sons I did nearly swallow my whole tongue right there you had children and you didn't tell nobody look I write down my question and answer it myself you pick plenty flowers in your life don't get mad don't stop reading I say nice things about you at the start it's not like I hate you I try to hate you I smile at you and everything for the rest of my life but I don't hate you I try so long to understand why you was the way that you was I try to say to myself maybe he had a bad upbringing maybe he parents was a nice to he maybe something real bad happened to him like it happened to me and that is just how we turn out he just bouncing from here to there here to there not really thinking or feeling but just moving always moving so he don't have to sit still I just think what it is about sitting still that is scared this man why he always needs to run why he needs to lie so but I get tired there was just circles I running in my head and eventually it start looking like one big zero I'm sorry to say maybe bad things that happened to you but that is no excuse for what you do use connected to my nephews to my sister to me we's not strangers you know we's family now I know I say it's not my place to say these things but the things you do you do it to all of we it's only as I write and I feel the rage boil up in me so I say nice things okay but it wasn't a nice person in the end sometimes you was but look at the end look how it end you leave me so but we getting on we getting on and that is good enough but you absolve yourself of responsibility you slap your hands clean from me like we was dust and for that you must live in shame forever if not by your own recognition then by we own go on and take a long hard look in your mirror not that you need a mirror to see yourself a guilty conscience don't need any accuser I will hope that if you decide to look at yourself and it never too late he's never too old if you decide to look at yourself you must see yourself and forgive yourself so that a better man is born from the shedding I did see him once thank you Sophie I love that letter it does such a great job of evoking the pain of loving someone who is not there and you know and Rani she kind of lives her life you know in love with someone who isn't within her reach and yeah that really captures it in a very moving way and it also this idea of the object of one's affection being absent it's something that runs through all of your books but it really evokes for me an aspect of your book Shivani which is that there are this idea of motherhood which comes up in many different ways there are women who are unable to be mothers there are women who choose not to be mothers there are women who wear mothers but are no longer mothers perhaps because their child has died but for them being a mother is still very much a part of who they are and it's still how they communicate with the people who are no longer there but still mean a lot to them and so I was just wondering what do you think mothering can mean when there is no one to mother I am not a mother yet as far as I know but it's something I think about a great deal I used to say that by the time I was 30 which was some time ago now I would have either a book or a child and I I wonder if it was the right choice it's always choosing I think when it's a woman identified person who wants to womb this child in themselves and gestate them and spit them out and begin the business of loving them for the rest of your life and I think like many women and non-binary people must have this struggle with themselves against the tyranny of biology which limits your choices and also the ways in which motherhood to me seems like it would be absolute I can't imagine a thing above it not even a marriage and there are ways in which is the eldest eldest daughter club I know you're out there eldest daughter syndrome I know who you are we know who we are us to care and nurture even if you're not particularly maternal whatever that means so I've tried to care for the poems more than I care for myself which has been a really humbling practice so whatever they needed to say the most secret and abject things I have tried to let them say it and to remove myself almost as their maker I hope that's a kind of mothering that is honest in the work, yeah, wonderful. I love what you said earlier on that if not for the poem, what would never be spoken at all. Definitely a call to action I think for every writer out there. Yeah, I love that. There's also this question of when we look at things like absence, there's also a question of grief. What is something that you, or for all of you, what is something about grief that you think is perhaps not talked about enough? Or what is something that you discovered whilst writing the book? Or what is something that perhaps struck you as you were talking about it or moved you? That's a tough question. Interesting. Think about it. It is a very tough question because that's exactly what I struggled with in this book. There was a chapter where this character is trying to explain grief but it doesn't go well because it doesn't make sense. It just doesn't make sense to her. It's just all over the place. I remember myself trying to describe it but you can only understand it once you've been through it. It's kind of like an inside joke unless you were there, you won't really understand, you won't get it. That's the best way I can explain grief is you have to have been there. I think that's a great explanation. I've never been through it so maybe I'm kind of morbidly curious. Wonderful. One other thing, there's a lot of totems throughout your books. Things being inherited, things being passed down. In Antony you've got the father's rings in the poem rings. Siobhani you have the lecture of dead gold with the grandmother's gold. In Sophie there's this diary that Sangita keeps which records which is like an old manac of the family's, the major events in the family's life but seems to just be about a garden. I was just wondering, were there any other objects that as you were writing the book that helped you to write it or inspired you at some point? I can answer. For me it's photographs. Simply photographs because in putting the book together I used a lot of photographs in the book. Most of them, all of them in fact, I took of my father throughout the years. Actually not all of them. There's a couple of passport pictures that I didn't take. But photographs are really interesting because they're like time machines. So not only do they fix you, they fix the subject in space and time. They fix something but also when you look at them they can transport you back to that time. So you're operating on two different levels. You're looking at the photo remembering a particular time in the context of where you are now. So I think that's interesting and also the power of photographs to transmit information into the future. So they're operating on all these levels, the past, the present and the future. So I thought that was interesting and the photographs were important to me. A lot of the photographs are on digital. They're like photographs I took with my phone which makes you question the idea of permanence as well. Because if I lose the file, I lose the pictures and they're like, what are they? A series of zeros and ones. Some of them are physical but not many. Most of them are digital photos and that's interesting. How do you interact with a digital image as well? That's interesting. It was photographs and rings. Wonderful. With your collection there's a lot that could be said about you have the poem All the Dead, All the Living, which is such a great carnival poem which I just love. There's a question of masquerade that runs through the places where people dress up and use alter egos and drag and to express themselves. So I was just wondering how that helped you to think about... I suppose also transformation, like there's the poem, I see Llyddeth have been with you again. Where the daughter literally transforms. How did you think about transformation or kinds of transformation as a way of thinking about characterisation and family and being a daughter and being a mother? I think there's, again, a palatable Caribbean that we are often taught through colonial means to digest and understand as acceptable and we understand our place in it as functional citizens who work and are in wages and take care of their families and go to church or temple or mosque. There's always this active subterranean need for more than that or that, but things that hold that in a cradle and then are free to be so much wilder, so much more transgressive, so much more subversive. I actually don't think I'm more any of those things than anyone else. I just think we all learn how to punish ourselves mercilessly with shame and so we don't get access to those stunted growths in our body. The important thing became about a place where people converge or diverge, but verge to find meaning with each other in queer community, in the community of women who've accessed abortions and the community of people who cross-dress and transgress because none of these things are not ever Caribbean and none of these things don't have to do with family and how we make ourselves and shape ourselves and therefore each other in blood and out of it. Could we have a reading from you? One of the first things I started writing about was abortion. Abortion remains illegal in Trinidad, which is to say where it is illegal in any place. It simply means that not that there are no abortions, only that there are no safe ones. Woman and people who carry children have needed to find ways to not since the beginning of time. And I write about a family of abortionists, which is not my immediate family. My grandmother's grandmother would like you to know. I feel like parallel to this book, I need to do a pamphlet of disclaimers from my mom. This is not us, this is not us. They're God, this is not us. So this family of abortionist women carry out this difficult work and I cared writing about it very much. This poem is now more than ten years old and I realize now it was a conduit into beginning to write about dangerous things that were very, very close to me. The abortionist's daughter declares her love, hair is the church, these are the doors that open to the sea. My grandmother once knelt hair, ord a special guest to an exorcism. It is nothing like the movies would have you think, she told me and I believed her. They have called me many things between these aisles, she told me and I believed her. That is the trouble with our trade, she said. When men aspire to terrible jobs, we offer them hushed respect, the blushing necks of virgins, women wearing the same gloves, sorting the same straight-backed pins between the prayers of their teeth, are taught to deserve nothing more than an acreage of sorrow. Why an acreage? Never give a woman more sadness than she needs. From this fabric, from this persistent earth, she will wrangle greater things than men can fathom. She will wrestle squalling tar infants from the mire and those children shall stumble upwards, slicing through the spines of men who have offended their mothers. Give a woman an acreage of humiliation with one spade, one crucifix, one box of straight-backed pins. You've given her nothing she can hold. Within the air, she will run up hard against the borders of her land, shrieking, scouring the air for a way to flee her sex. Give her enough land to hang herself. Here is the church. It lies close to the land that they gave us. Come see the land of my grandmother and her mother and hers. Come walk on the borders of my mother's land where no trees grow. Thank you so much, Siobhani. I love that so much of your book is about women reclaiming their power and creating it for themselves. I just wondered for you, do you feel more powerful having written the book and what do you think power means? That's a dangerous question to ask me. The legal answer to that is that I think power has increasingly meant accepting that I will probably be afraid in almost any given situation, but learning that there is great strength in being terrified. I've been here for about two months now and what I forgot about being in this country is all the ways in which it seemingly innocuously but really insidiously, almost in this serpentine way, conspires to make you feel small in your body as a black or person of colour, a person from the global south. It's been an active process of reclaiming my space, my breath, the room I take up on the underground, the way in which I refuse to let random white men on the street brush past me and push me into... Whatever the hell they want to push you into, it doesn't matter. It could be like a baby and they would do it and continue walking. How to try to insist for myself in the ways that I've always tried to make my poems insist for themselves? Again, this idea that we were talking about of how to mother things that aren't children. If I am an advocate of care, I have to try to care about myself and that's what I try to do. Wonderful, wonderful. I'm going to do a very sharp segue. I think just like to close, I would love to... Thank you so much, that's a really wonderful answer. It's really wonderful. I'm just wondering what the lasting impact of the book is for each of you in general. We're talking about mother's, daughter's, father's, son's. What has writing your book taught you about being a son or being a daughter? There's some guilt that came around a couple of times when I was writing this book, which was the very terrifying part, one of the very terrifying parts. But I did come to understand that having your own voice doesn't make you a bad daughter. Writing is most definitely the most rebellious thing I've ever done, but it's the best thing I've ever done as well. But in a nutshell, it doesn't make you a bad daughter. It makes you your own person, I think. Wonderful. Which of the daughters do you most relate to in your book? Just daughters. I would say Cassandra. See why I resonate with the most. You're a bit of a peacemaker, mediator. A middle child? I'm the eldest daughter. You're the eldest. Yeah, pretty quiet, but... Eldest daughter's club, yeah. Sorry? Eldest daughter's club. Yeah, I'd say probably the peacemaker. Probably. Yeah, Anthony? Oh wow. What I learned was that I was very different to my father. And I also, you know, realised... Well, my dad wasn't a great father in any way. My dad had probably about 12 children. Actually, we're not sure. It's about 12. He had a lot of kids and he wasn't a father to any of them in the sense of a father that's there and present in their lives. And I've been asked, you know, why would you write a book about a man like that? You know, how can you write so much poems about this man that was really terrible father? And what the book has taught me is that it's possible to love someone, even if they are, you know, questionable. If they do questionable things or, you know, it's possible, it's about the capacity to love, I think. That's the sort of thing that I get from this, that's possible to love someone even like my dad, you know. That's it. That's what it's taught me. And there's this inextricable thing about, you know, the fact that our father, regardless of how they behave, same thing with the mother, they're the one who brought you into the world. Yeah, but with my dad, it's not just that. It's not just that he was, you know, he donated some sperm. It's not just that. It's that he, as a person, he was a lovable person. When you were with him, he was very charismatic and a very loving, very lovable person. So it was hard not to like him, you know. It was hard not to fall in love with him. He was very charismatic, charming. So, yeah, that had something to do with it as well, the fact that I still have good feelings about him, even though, you know, he wasn't around, you know. Siobhani? I think what everyone knows I'm a haunting taught me about being a daughter is that even if you are the most difficult, according to yourself, unlovable, troubled, rebellious person in your family, then you're still a part of that family. And there's nothing anywhere that says that you need to understand or be understood perfectly by anyone in your family to love them. But I think it took a while post-wanting to understand this part specifically, which was that making these poems, which felt like an act of great defiance and subversion, was also simply me being true to who I was and that my parents and my brothers, specifically them, my extended family, you kind of get like a little murky past there. But again, I don't care because I have that nucleus of what feels like unconditional love, which is probably a falsehood, but within that space that we make for each other, we are able to say, I love you as you are, even though you will probably continue to confound me in some ways and I am always here for you, hopefully even after death. Wonderful messages. I would so love to hear each of you read for another minute or so. Anthony, can we start with you? Yeah, okay. So I'll try to be quick. Many years ago I was at a conference in Washington at Howard University and this poem is set there. It was probably the first time that I began to think about my dad in relation to his absence and my becoming a poet. And I wondered if there was a connection between those things. So this is breakfast in DC. That night, after the conference in DC, we broke free of post-colonial tautology to gather in the small room of the writer-in-residence. We were young scholars, poets, novelists, or journalists. We drank white wine warm and nodded to Neo Soul. I saw them recoil from the British resident when in the marrow dark of 3 a.m. he rightly said that there was nothing like the sweet kick of crack cocaine. At dawn, we drove out in the doctoral candidate's car. We saw the Doric pillars of the Lincoln Memorial glowing in the unclear distance. Then the white gasp of the monument. We ordered pancakes with blueberries at Peats on Second Street and shared our commonalities. And what we shared, besides our blackness, was that in our childhoods, our fathers had all been absent. Sophie? With the safe distance between them all, the years went by. Six years after my cousin and aunt died, I was born right there in the Macaria where it all happened. And despite the sorrowful womb that nursed my sister into this world, she was a jubilant and gorgeous child. The little planets that we were sucked into the vortex of everything before. We fell into place in our positions as the good daughters. The subservient daughters, the domestic daughters, the unopinionated Ask No Questions daughters, the completely normal Everything Is Fine falling apart on the inside daughters, circling, circling what? What was the centre of this force? What was both pulling us in and passing through us? What was its name? Why couldn't we break free? It was the past. The lecture of Dad Gold. When my grandmother died, we melted the gold she never wore in life. We unearthed the prias and cahns boxes like confection houses of the dead, prizing loose bangles and arm snakes, shaking out the hutch horde of dowries, taking inventory of a thousand joys. Wear them for love, Mama says, sinking thick posts into cartilage. My brother wears the earrings and kisses his man role. He calls it Gafsemini on the priority bus route after midnight. Sucks olive oil out the red stripe of Khaled's mouth. I wear the earrings three evenings before Diwali. They are too heavy, too holy, an all-soul slap to the jaw, dealt, slant and sharp. Like the first time my grandmother cut my cheek with her love. The hooks draw blood, digging for Sunday drives, trolling for breast milk, pushing Argentum through sore flesh till memory sings, till I quit the graveyard at Freeport, ears stretched and bleeding out. It's been so wonderful talking to all three of you and thank you to everyone for coming. We can talk for so much longer, but I think for now we'll just have to say goodbye. Have a lovely evening and have a lovely event. Thank you as well.