 Hello, everybody, and welcome to this 2pm session at the British Library. Thank you so much for coming, everyone. So as you know, the Bocas Lit Fest is on tour this year, and we're here at the British Library in person, hooray, with an audience of live people in front of us and people at home online. So thank you to the Lit Fest for bringing us together and to the Library for having us. We're thrilled to be here, and you're all very welcome. So I'm here today with three amazing writers. We've got Celeste Mohamed, we've got Jacob Ross and Celia Sohendo, and I'll just take a few minutes to introduce them all first, and then we'll get started with our discussion. And each of the writers is going to read about five minutes for us, and we'll just have those kind of space throughout the session. And then if we have time, I have a lot of questions, so we might not have time, but if we have time, we can try and fit in some questions from you all, okay? So I'll start with Celeste. So Celeste Mohamed is from Trinidad, a lawyer turned writer. Pleasant View is her debut novel, a novel told through linked short stories. It was published by Jacaranda Press in 2021, and it was the overall winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2022. It also won the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and it was the finalist for the UK Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize. Celeste has an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she received a 2018 Penn Robert J. Dowell Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Welcome. Jacob Ross, in the middle, is the UK-based Grenadian author of the critically acclaimed works, Tell No One About This, Pinter Bender, Song for Simone, A Way to Catch the Dust. His crime fiction novel, The Bone Readers, which was published by People Tree Press, won the inaugural Jalak Prize in 2017. His latest book is Black Rain Falling, and it was one of The Guardian's best crime-read books of the month in 2020. Jacob is also an associate fiction editor at People Tree Press, and he's done a lot of work tutoring with organizations like Arvon, Curtis Brown Creative, a lot of mentoring, and he teaches narrative craft. He's done a lot of people who know Jacob very well. Too much. And at the end, we have Celia Serhendo, who was born in the Commonwealth of Dominica, brought up in Britain, and is now based back in Dominica. Her first poetry chapbook, Boa Bansi, was published by Papaiot Press and long-listed for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Radical Normalization is her first full-length poetry collection, just published by Carkinet Press. And just to say who I am, so I'm Claire Adam. I'm originally from Trinidad, but I've been living in England a long time. And my mother is Irish, which is why I have the Irish accent. And I'm the author of a novel called Golden Child, published 2019. So that's all of us. Let's have a little... We need a round of applause. Yeah. Okay, so that was a lot of introductions, and I want to get these guys talking. So what I would like to ask you to do is just to talk a little bit about your books. So we'll go into it one after the other. And just also to say the title of our session today is An Island is a World. And I think that it's a fantastic title, and it really speaks to each of these books that have such universal themes. So I won't get warmed up, but I'll just ask Celeste first to talk a little bit. Just introduce us to your book, please. Well, hello, everyone. Thank you for coming out. I'm so happy to be here, excited that it's also warm. So yes, my book is Pleasant View. It's a collection of nine very closely linked short stories, which you could read each one on its own. But if you read them in the order in which I've presented them, you get a different feel, the feel of a novel. And I would say that your title, Claire, is so apt. It really does touch and concern what I see as the lingering theme at the core of this book, which is islandhood, physical islandhood, and also the islandhood of the self. And I would say that every character in my book is in some way approaching the edge of the island and trying to decide what to do next, either physically or metaphorically. So, okay. Thank you, Celeste. Jacob, did you tell us about your book? Yes, well, the book I'm going to be talking about and reading from is called... That's this one, it's Tell No One About This. Jacob has so many books. It's a very nice book and it's not expensive. And it's one of my best works. But it's called Collected Short Stories. And you know, like when an author begins a hard work collected, it means either dead, they're dying or they're given up. Well, I assure you I'm none of these, okay? But I began writing these stories since I was very young before I left secondary school. A lot of them I wrote lying down in this public road in the village where I grew up because I was so frustrated, couldn't get a job, and not wanting to live in the world that I was living in, which was extremely difficult. Put it to put it euphemistically. But you know, I think that the title is up simply because very few writers write more than 100 characters, you know, in a novel, if any at all. And that is because as writers, we tend to look for the microcosm, we live in a microcosm despite the fact that the population might be 65 million or more. We don't know that population, we know the world. So in a sense, if I'm writing from an island, space is hardly any different from a writer born in a metropolitan space who is writing. It's really a lie and a kind of, you know, deception to claim otherwise. The other thing that I always say is that the topography of the human heart is the same everywhere. We all love, we aspire to be accepted, we aspire to be loved, we take care of our offspring, we have dreams, we have aspiration. And in that sense, no culture, no reality, no geography superior to ours. Now, indeed, it's ours today, okay? Because we write about humans, more often than not, humans in trouble struggling to get out of it. That's what most great books of literature are about, about people in trouble. So at the end of the day, I like that because it's my way of responding to a certain kind of self-deception about writing from a small island. What does that mean, you know? It means nothing, it has no resonance. You read any of these writers' work. I've just finished reading Celeste's wonderful book. I haven't read Celeste's yet, I will. And you know, what characters can come from anywhere except that they are located very specifically within Trinidad? It's so true. And Barbados. And you know, you place them somewhere else and this is, you know, the same aspirations, the same, you know, so I do, that's what I think anyway. Thank you Jacob, thank you, that's lovely, thank you. And Celia, tell us a bit about your book. Well, my book is called Radical Normalization and everything they said, basically, but especially what Jacob said. So my book deals with the ancient, long-time existential questions. Who, what, where, why, who am I? You know, those kind of questions, the big questions and what is normal? What is the normal brain? What is the normal time? What is the normal world? So yeah, regardless of where we come from, regardless of the fact that I come from a tiny island with a population of about 70,000 people, it's not a small island in any sense of the word. So yeah, what is the human heart about? Thank you, that's lovely, thank you everyone. Okay, so we'll go into the readings next and so we'll start first with Celeste. So Celeste is gonna give us a little reading about five to six minutes and then we'll have a couple of questions to Celeste. Okay, thank you Claire. I will be reading today from the story Endangered Species, which is the second story in my book. Like I said earlier, island hood approaching the edges. This character, the main character in the story, Omar is a 17-year-old boy who has finished high school. His mother has sent him to work in Pleasant View, an urban area compared to where he's from and he's struggling with approaching the edge of childhood and going into adulthood, yes? So I should also say he's rooming with some people called the jar groups who aren't the best. So you hear the news, Mr. Jar Group said, your landlord might be a member of parliament soon son. They asked me to be the UNC candidate. But that real good, Mr. Jar Group? Yeah, only the background checks now. That is real dig up in your past, you know. By the time they finish, they know everything about a man, down to what size jockey shorts he does wear. True, that's why I have a little favor to ask Aaron. I can't send money, but I need somebody I could trust as much. I was there in the hammock thinking Lord who? And then bam, you woke up. You as the quietest fellow I ever see. I know I could trust you. In his head, Umar repeated Mr. Jar Group's words. Somebody I could trust as much. As much as Manny or as much as a son. There was a difference. Umar wouldn't want to be equated with Manny, lazy and always reek enough rum. But for Mr. Jar Group to trust Umar like a son, well, that Umar didn't mind. He answered, for sure Mr. Jar Group, but what it is? Jar Group patted his pocket, a just needier to run inside and hand somebody this. You think you could manage? Umar was still nodding as they turned onto clogged Evans Street. On one side, the university campus sprawled, bounded by their neighborhood of East Pleasant View. So Umar, is which village you're from again? Matura and Mr. Jar Group asked, gearing the truck down to a crawl. Umar nodded, distractedly, mm-hmm, taking advantage of the traffic to muck inside the university fence. Boys and girls, no older than him probably, reclining on the lawn. Some read fat books, others chatted, under a salmon tree, a couple kissed. If he'd had a real father, maybe Umar might have been among them, studying something, anything related to the sea. And maybe he would have had a girlfriend too, somebody pretty, but quiet like him. All them North Coast villages the same, turtle, turtle, turtle, not so, mm-hmm. Umar noticed another couple wiggling sandwich triangles at a skinny black dog. The Mrs. tell me your father was a white man, a doctor or something, that is true? A turtle scientist, Umar corrected, as the dog inched closer to the couple. For the briefest moment, Umar considered going further and sharing Josephine's Nancy story, how Jacob had been serious about the environment and had come to Matura to open an eco resort, how she'd worked there as a cleaner, how after six years Jacob had gotten fed up with Trinidad, how he'd left them for Dutch Guyana to help save the Amazon. But Umar didn't want to talk about Jacob, especially after the things Josephine had said this morning when she'd slid the picture frame across the kitchen table. Ma, why you giving me this thing? Umar had asked, pitching his spoon down as if a lump of shit had surfaced in his porridge bowl. Because he is a big man now, but you're turning out just like your father, selfish and ungrateful. Take this, put it up in your room in pleasant view and watch it good every day. Tell yourself you will be better than him son, that you will be a real man, the kind that will sacrifice and mine his family. All these years I do my best for you. Now it's your turn to work. Now get your long bony backside up and go. The stray dog finally nuzzled the bread. Scientist, Mr. Jaguop wobbled through a clump of snow cone. I as a nature lover myself, you know, I always say one day me and Manny go drive up like big time tourists and do some turtle watching. But work Umar, work is a bitch. Umar felt a tiny flicker of superiority. He had seen the famous leatherback turtles a million times. He had proof right there in his bag. He felt generous. Like a quick glimpse was at last something he could gift to Mr. Jaguop. He unzipped the duffel and fell for the square edges of the picture frame. He drew it out from the t-shirt he'd used as padding. The picture frame was unbroken, the photo was intact. Look, Mr. Jaguop, look a leatherback. Mr. Jaguop glanced down at Umar's lap and almost choked on the ice, way, he said, that thing real big. And who's that woolly head boy with no frontie there? Umar smiled, me. There he was, a grinning six-year-old with blondish brown curls, tiny beside the turtle. And does your daddy? Dyes why you so fair and your eye damn so orange? Jacob knelt on the other side glaring at the camera. Yes, they did have the same fiery brown eyes. Without answering, Umar tried to shove the picture back into the bag. But Mr. Jaguop grabbed his wrist, still marvelling. Watch how you kneel down there like you were even frightened. I wasn't frightened, Umar snapped. Well, you're better than me, son. Mr. Jaguop patted Umar's hand, then released him with a promise. When we're ready to make that north coast trip, you as the first man we call in. Umar softened. Anytime, Mr. Jaguop, anytime. He rewrapped the picture frame. Maybe it had been a good idea to show it after all. Maybe Josephine was right. You have to put out some of yourself. Show some of yourself if you want people to like you. Thank you. Oh, that was wonderful. Thank you, Celeste. It's such a treat to hear you read it. I have to say at home, I read in these things a lot. I'm like, oh, God, but listen to this. It reads so smoothly and fluently. And it's just so lovely to hear something in my own language and a language familiar to us, isn't it? So the first thing I wanted to ask you was just about process. I mean, I have to say, I just want to pick everybody's brains because as a fellow writer, I want to hang out with you all. I want to know how you all work and how you do your things. So for Celeste, it's not so much about how you put together the collection because I know you wrote some of the stories while you were on your MFA. But it doesn't have to be this particular story. But in general, like if you could talk a little bit about where you start with a story and like what does it kind of all come out and, you know, are you one of those lucky ones that comes out straightaway? Do you rework it over a long period? Yeah. So what you said there about being a writer and being inspired by other writers, it's so relevant. Especially when I was, I mean, I'm a toddler writer now. When I was a baby writer during the MFA, I was very much influenced by things I was reading at the time. And so this particular story, I had read a collection by a South African author called Alex Laguma, who was an apartheid activist and he became exiled. I don't think he's alive anymore. But the opening story of his collection, A Walk in the Night, is this young man kind of disenfranchised walking. And so the first iteration of this story I read was Omar just walking in Pleasant View towards his home and then my teacher was like, this is so boring. You need to do something else, right? So for me, every story kind of begins with and just an idea like, you know, a spark. Wow, this person, like if it's a spark of inspiration from another writer, it might be, wow, look what she did. Look what Claire did. Maybe I could do that in my Caribbean island context. Or, you know, I might hear something or see something, something that speaks to conflict or duality or something that even I don't understand. And I feel like writing is my way of trying to understand things that I don't understand. So I'll sit down and just, at first I just write. Anything can be fixed. So I try not to edit myself too much in the early drafts. I just try to get the story out. And then once the story's out and from A to Z or whatever, then you can always fix it. But I feel like it's death to the imagination to try to edit yourself as you go along. So do you have sort of a vision for the whole story before you start? Do you just kind of have something in your ear? Well, I would know the crux of it. I would know in this story, I want this person to start here emotionally and end here. Okay. What happens along the way? I might not know all of the plot points, but I may know the inciting incident or I might know the climax, but I never know the whole thing. And quite often when I'm rereading that first draft, it dawns on me. Hello, we need to do this or this, you know, so it's sort of a cumulative process. And I mean, I've sort of looked up other interviews with you and podcasts. So I sort of know a little bit about the journey towards putting this together, which is part of your MFA. But I mean, it struck me, you know, these stories, like, you know, they are linked stories and they sort of make them a novel together and it's, you know, this fictional setting of pleasant for you. But, you know, what struck me when I read it was all these characters who are so trapped by their circumstances. And they try, I mean, they just try, they just beat against their circumstances, trying to escape. And all of them are kind of doomed. It's like trying to climb up this mountain and they just fall back. And it's, you know, it's like there's no way out for them, which, you know, it's something that I could, I felt like this really speaks to, you know, part of our experience growing up in, you know, in Caribbean. I feel like there's certain people, certain characters, who don't find their way into the spotlight very often when you talk about islands and island literature, island-based literature. And I feel like we don't acknowledge how much agency it takes for a character in a situation like this to wake up in the morning and try. So sometimes it's not that the situation, the plot is gonna work out in their favor, but I want you to see that these people are getting up and trying. And as you said, they're beating against this thing. And if you ask them if they're doomed, I don't think anybody would say they're doomed, you know? So that was the point of the book, yeah? Thank you. Okay, and so next, let's move to Celia for the next reading. If that would be okay. Celia, have you got something ready for us there? Thank you. Yeah, so hi everyone. It's such a pleasure to be here. And thank you, Bocus, for making this all possible and everyone behind the scenes. So the first poem I'm going to read is called Massacus. Probably the most well-known writer from Dominica is probably Jean Rees. And so not only do I share a birthplace with Jean, I also share a birth date. So she was born on the 24th of August and so was I. So I feel there's a connection there and I see some of those Virgo traits in her. So this is called Massacus. Like when a fish hook fits into an open eye, once again powerless, she could not afford to flee free. What else to do but stop tugging against the barb? Let this sink in, she said. I learned to love the lean into perpetual pain, the conscious let go. How can I afford not to use run with exotic currency? If I will do that, there's no knowing what I won't do. If I will it, Terry, she smiled pleased. He turned to cut the line and run but she had already bit through. He felt a tug, a real back, in out of the blue against his will. So that's Massacus. The next one I'm going to read is called Fragments of Epic Memory and it comes from Derek Walcott essay. And as you can tell by my accent, it's I, my family and I migrated to England when I was eight years old. So I grew up in Ipswich. So I developed an English accent and I always say my parents took us to England and then they left us there because later on they moved back to Dominica and we stayed in England but I soon followed them not long afterwards but I'm stuck with the accent. So going back home, it's always like you get called English or whatever. So I'm trying to hang out in the rum shops and stuff and hopefully one day I will have a different accent but this one's called Fragments of Epic Memory and it's for Edward Kamal Brafway and Derek Walcott. That's a troops by the way. I see talk continues still about the way we sound. Standard English, Pigeon, nation language, dialect, accent, Maliflis Patua. I don't know where the noises I make fit into any of it. No clue which side to take. Dominica born but Ipswich raised my husband says on the phone I sound so strangely Scottish and I tried to Patua or dialect with this accent. Well, let's just say it's sounding funny, funny wee. Yesterday I saw a headline on social media worlds, languages, trace back to single African mother tongue. It was a US academic laughable comment that baited me click and read. I also learned dolphins click communicate their seen images to each other. Today I'm reading the secret history. A machine with metal parts is sliding in and out forming images and Inca, temple, click, click, click, pyramids, the Parthenon and these words push a piece of magic forwards. A while back I fell, hit my head hard. Just a hairline crack the doctor said, no dizzying spells, no blackouts, no noticeable memory loss, no loss of speech, no need for concern. But for months after quiet click, click, clicks were added to my internal dialogue. Weird but not worrying, I thought then. Now I think perhaps history's phenomenal fragments still lie low beneath breath, eyes, memory. Constantly changing every moment, affecting each phonem we make up, sound out, inside or out. So thank you. Oh, that was lovely to hear you read, Celia. Thank you so much. That was such a treat, wasn't it? Thank you. I mean, I have loads of questions to you. So where will I start? I'll start with, so you read those two. So the first one, which was masochist, which was dedicated, I think, to genius, wasn't it? I mean, so one of the questions I was going to ask you is that the, I mean, I know poems these days do this. Like the poems are like all different shapes on the page. And I wanted to ask you about that. And masochist is sort of, you know, it's way over that and it's one word per line. And, you know, I'm really not a poetry buff at all. I'm sort of, I'm very much in the learning phase of my poetry life. And I just wanted to ask about that, about how you choose the different forms for these poems. And why, you know, I don't know, is it okay to ask that? Why this poem has, you know, why did you choose this form for this poem? Yeah, I'm very much a visual, I very much go with the visual aesthetic in my poetry. And I try to, I find the white space and the black lines utilizing that. I find it really powerful. So I try to just use everything I can on the page. So with that one, it was tried to kind of emulate the theme of the fishing line. And in all the poems, I try to make the layout enhance or contradict the themes, you know? So, yeah, even the punctuation, my punctuation is not just for grammar. My M dashes are voodoo pins or purlins or, you know, my semicolons are like a curtain. So I try to use absolutely everything on the page to try and enhance the feeling of what I'm trying to portray. I see, okay, that's wonderful. Because I mean, it really is quite stunning. Like some of them, there's, you know, their words are sort of spaced out in different places on the page and the words, they kind of, it makes shapes like this. So it's really fascinating. So do get a book, they're all for sale over there. And so another thing I wanted to ask you was that I have to say some of the poems are so bold. Like, I don't know if I should dare read this myself. Like some of them I'm looking through them and I'm just like, wow, that's amazing. And you're such a gently spoken person. And it's, you know, I would love to hear you this. So this one, I am not amused. So it's a, you know, there's a little bit of swearing but for me, is it okay if I try reading it a little bit? Yeah, I mean, and take this as a compliment because you know, I'm walking around my house saying to my husband, listen to this poem. So it starts with, listen, I am so freaking mad. This bloody poem just barged its way into my body. So that's how it starts, which I think is, you know, I just think it's so wonderful and so arresting. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this poem that just barged its way into your body and what that was like. Yeah, it's true really. It's like, sometimes I think, where do these words come from? Where do, you know, where does poetry come from? It's the same questions that have been going on from time but sometimes I do think they really are, they're a bit cheeky I think and, you know, they expect me to finish them, you know? I was like, I don't even know why you're here. So, you know, but, and also this thing is, you know, we are never just one thing. Like sometimes people say, oh, you're so nice or whatever, but when I am not just nice or whatever, I think we are such a spectrum of different things depending on who we interact with, depending on the situation. So I'm a big fan of Carl Jung and the idea of the shadow self. And one of my, I'm very late for coming to poetry. I was actually a computer programmer in my previous existence. So one of the reasons I love poetry is that it allows paradox, it allows complexity, it allows for things not to be binary, it allows for things to be complex and nuanced and we are all complex and nuanced. So I quite, in the poetry, I'm quite willing to look at my shadow side or the shadow aspects of the world, of other people or whatever. So the poetry is a real attempt to unravel my brain, unravel my mind and I really like the concept of know thyself and I kind of use poetry to kind of get to know myself. Although I know I never will, but I quite enjoy finding out different aspects of self, yeah. No, I thought it was beautiful and as I say, I'm not somebody who's, you know, I'm sort of learning with poetry, but I really connected with this collection. I mean, partly maybe the language, but also that it was, you know, it's so natural and I think, you know, some of the, like one of the things it does here, there's quite a few questions that you sort of, that the poem sort of pauses to the reader and I just, I love the sense of this sort of consciousness who's sort of puzzling out what it means to sort of exist in the world, because some of the questions, there were some really funny ones. There was this one here in Prima Materia, which has ever exploded your head. So I just thought it was, there was this sort of sensation of this, of this sort of intelligent consciousness just trying to make sense of the world, which I thought was so lovely. So I'm really happy you brought up those questions, Claire. Thank you so much and like, I really, it's so hard not to self-censor because when I'm writing, I'm like, what's my mom gonna think? What my aunt is gonna think? What's so-and-so gonna think? So I just have to like, blank out all those voices and like, sometimes I read back and I go, I can't believe you wrote this for less like, well it's out there now, so I'll just like distance myself a little bit. But yeah, thank you so much for your questions. Oh, you've done so well. Thank you. Thank you. And okay, so Jacob, thank you for hanging out there and let's have your reading next, Jacob. And then I have a few questions for you. Thank you for coming and thank you for having me and it's wonderful sitting in the middle of these two or three, it's one letter from me, right? I've been looking forward to this. But you know, you asked a question, oh, you're on Claire. You asked Celeste a question about how stories come together and with me, I would like to just touch very quickly on how this particular story from which Arduino extract came about because I think it's really indicative of my own creative process. It took me about 15 years to write this story because I wasn't thinking about it one and two. I didn't know I was gonna write it in the first instance but I remember being in Cuba with a friend of mine who he was one of Cuba's leading dancers. His name is Eduardo Rivera Walker. Some of you may know him, but he certainly has been very important for the national dance theater company of Jamaica in terms of developing the dance and so on. Anyway, the point is that he was very conscious of his history as a black Caribbean man, as a black African Caribbean man, or a Caribbean African man, whichever way you wanna put it. And I remember him taking me to the Museum of Slavery or the Save Museum and then he took me, we went down to the Malacón, they call it, I think it's where the sea front. And he just said to me, do you know about the road of bones? And I said, what the hell are you talking about? The road of bones. And I said, where? The road of bones, and he said there and he pointed at the Atlantic, at the ocean. And he gave me this narrative, which is he said the way he learned to remember the history of Africans arriving in the Caribbean. It's that over 25 million people were taken from the West Coast of Africa and further in and brought across. But the number of them who never arrived, nobody, there hasn't been a calculation for that. But what was interesting about that, he said is that there were those who jumped, there were those who died on a pushed overboard, there were those who were killed, there were those who, whatever, you know? And that stayed in my head as a metaphor, this road of bones. And then quite a few years later, I was doing some research and I came upon the story of the zong. You've all heard about the zong, which is where this guy, I think was calling him, Luke calling him. An English man decided he was gonna make his fortune by, you know, because there's a lot of money in transporting Africans to the Caribbean and stuff. But he must have actually begun this journey across the Atlantic, looked at the weather, looked at, you know, thought about the journey he was going to make. And he just said, you know, shade, I ain't doing that. What I'm gonna do is just throw everybody overboard and claim the insurance, which is what he did. And it caused a big scandal here. Now the story came out of this trip I made to the Gambia and I saw an amazing young girl, you know, it wasn't any, you know, it was just, I just thought she was fascinating to look at. And I wasn't doing the stuff that you might be thinking in terms of looking. And even if I was, that's my business. Anyway, no, no, sorry about that. Taking the mickey. No, but I'm serious about it, you know, I kind of saw, it's a kind of personal. And I see men too I'd like to write about because of their physicalities, just very different. But anyway, what happened in my head was, I said, what happened if this young girl was one of the people on the ship thrown overboard but didn't die but walked on the road of bones. And arrived on our side of the Atlantic 400 years later. That's the first question, that's the first premise. The second one was, how would we react to her as an African arriving? And Barbara Jenkins talked about that, you know, the idea of denying the Africanness and so on earlier on. So that was the premise of the story. Which story are you going to read for us Jacob? I think it's called A Way to Catch the Dust. Okay. Right. And that was the premise, you know, how we interface with ourselves, our African selves and heritage because we were taught to be ashamed of it. And later on, of course, Rastafarianism, Black Power Movement did a lot to, you know, get all of that stuff, exercise that from our systems. But there was a time when, you know, to be called an African was an insult. Okay. And this is a story about love. And it's about this girl turning up 400 years later and meets this guy who is an outcast. And he's an old man now. And he's talking about his experience of this young woman, this girl walking out of the sea. All right. I think I've set it up for you good enough now. And he's talking. And when Caribbean people talk with very strong feelings they get very poetic, very lyrical. I don't know if you realize that, but it's very true. Caribbean people when they have strong feelings they get very poetic. Yeah. So he says, she come on the curl of her wave like he was sitting on the edge of a moving rolling cliff that lifts you up and rests you down right there on the ground in front of me. I didn't see her come. I figured out, oh, by the way, she just appear. It had to be the only way. A girl naked as a knight and just as dark standing there in front of me, trembling from the cold. She must have say something, ask for help, tell me something. I don't know, I noticed the voice straight away. Soft like if it come from inside my head. She didn't speak like we speak. And I couldn't see her clear, except that she was slim and tall and she was in a bad way. Questions start popping up straight away. Maybe she was one of them foreigners in a boat all day with other people and the storm dragged that boat from under them. But how she managed to swim across that kind of seat? Well, miracles has happened, not so. My heart was going like an engine. I wasn't frightened. I just know I had to bring her in the house and dry her out, which is what I do. Don't think I didn't tell myself that I was mad or dreaming that maybe my distress fly up in my head and make a woman out of air for me. But if it was distress, I was damn well glad to stay distressed for the rest of my life. But she had weight, she had weight and voice and warmth. And when I carry her up the hill, the little light from the sky fall on her face and I see that she was one of us. I fix her bed on the floor for her. I do all this in the dark with the lightning that come through the house from time to time. Don't ask me why. It just didn't feel proper to light no light. And as soon as I finished, before I could blink my eye, she gone to sleep. And that night, I sit down on the floor and watch her for a while wondering who she was, where she might have come from and how anybody could come out of that kind of sea alive. I fall asleep, sitting on the floor with my head full up. Next day, the whole world looked chastised, flattened my shop and turned upside down or wrong side out from the storm. And before I step out, I look on the floor to see if it's really dream that I was dreaming. I was sort of hoping that it was, or at least if I wasn't dreaming, I was expecting that whatever it was I made out there passed away with the passing of the storm. She was still there, lying on the floor, still sleeping. And now I could see her better. I see how dark and smooth she was. Hardly any hair cut low on her head like a boy. Her face, I never see nobody so pretty, was long and slim and quiet. Her face, you couldn't read. Everything about her was slim and long and smooth. It had three little marks, right there, just under the bone, like three little fish you lay one on top of the other. I never see a person so perfect. Is that that make me afraid? Not the strange way that she come, or even how I was going to explain her to everybody else out there, was the perfectness of that girl. I'll stop here. Thank you. Thank you. Isn't it such a treat to hear these readings, to hear the authors reading from their own work? It's wonderful. We love it. Thank you, Jacob. I don't think I have time for a lot of questions, but I'll ask you this one, which is probably a question you've had a lot of times before, which is just about this, you know, men and women. So I think one of the themes that emerges in your work is to do with explorations of sort of men versus women. Men, women, children, how whole societies sort of fit together, how we live together, the burdens and responsibilities and failures. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. And we, you know, we could talk particularly, you could choose whichever one sort of speaks to you the most. I mean, you know, there's so many stories in this collection and to be honest, you're quite hard on some people, I find, like them, you know, when people fail, they rarely fail. They fail badly, you know. Some of the stories, the earlier stories, you know, we see children who are, you know, in quite vulnerable situations in their, you know, living with them, maybe just their, maybe they're only their father or only their mother and they're trying very hard to please or to sometimes for, you know, sort of fighting for survival, trying to put food on the table. So it's quite an open question, but I'll let you respond to that in whatever way makes sense to you. Okay. I mean, look, part of a writer's job, I think, is to interrogate, to ask hard questions about society, about culture, about self, about inherited dispositions. And I grew up in a society of women, for example. I grew up in a society that was run by women. I grew up in a matrilineal society. So for example, my name is Jacob Ross. My father's name was Samuel Phillip. So any child born to a man outside of marriage in my family carries their mother's name, right? I happen to be told by a Jamaican. I don't know if it's true that it happens differently in Jamaica. Women rule, and they rule for a whole range of reasons. They rule because our society, our Caribbean societies have been used for a very long time as a labor resource for the metropolitan countries of the North, North America, the Orange Fields, the Panama Canal, and so on and so forth. Building the railways here, coming and work like doggie and being treated like shit, right? You know, in this country. And who leaves first in vast numbers is the men. So the Caribbean is almost always a bit like what I imagine Ukraine to be right now. All the men gone to war. Or what Britain was in the 1940s, the men gone to war. And who runs a society? The women, all right? They are the ones who shape the children's minds. They are the ones who sometimes teach their children, Miss Algini. Let's face it, all right? The boys. Miss Algini, okay? So I write about that because that is what is there. I mean, my natural extrapolatory conclusion is simply that there should have always been more women prime ministers in the Caribbean than men if you follow the logic of the society, that women run society. And it's very stark in some islands like in Bermuda, for example. Go to Bermuda and you see women run things. They are the technocrats, okay? So that's the first thing. The other thing is about children. Britain's idea of children, Britain's attitude to children is a recent thing, right? And it has not necessarily reached the Caribbean. And it's a recent thing. All that stuff about children vulnerable. And it's true, children vulnerable. But children used to go work up in chimneys. They used to go down in the mines in this country not a long time ago, right? And in the Caribbean, children sometimes are not allowed the opportunity to be children, right? They have to be providers. They have to be, you know, and I can go on and on. You see, I'm getting on my high horse now. But the point I'm trying to make here is that, and as a writer, I cannot ignore that. I cannot fall into the old kind of troops about what a novel is, unless I look at what a novel about my people is about. That's really what I'm getting at. So when you read my work, you know, even my crime novels, you know, anybody who reads my crime novel, I think it's just a crime novel, then they have to read the book, right? And maybe I should give you back your, no, I won't give you back your money because it's a good thing to do. But what, you know, it's about an interrogation of society. And one last thing I have to say about this is that, look, two things, people ask me, for example, why don't I write about England and because I've been here so long and stuff, I do write about England. But my answer to them has always been, well, England doesn't need more writers. They have a holy paradigm. You can pick them off a tree. The Caribbean needs its writers. That's the first thing, right? The second thing is that I can write a decent book, right? And I want to make my contribution, right? And the final thing is, well, I forgot what the final thing is. But the point is, you know, okay. Thank you. Thank you, Jacob. That's wonderful. Very good. Good. Okay. We have about 10 minutes left. So I'll just come back to all three of us again together and just sort of ask some open questions that we can maybe we can, you know, sort of all respond to or have a little bit of a discussion. If we talk, if I could sort of throw out like influences and people could sort of respond to that in whatever way makes sense to them. So I'm asking, you know, what's your influence? Who or what your influences are? What you sort of bring when you come and sit down in front of the page? What do you think is kind of flowing through you? It might be other books. It might be other writers. It might be words from different places. It might be things that you've heard. I don't know if that's too open a question, but I do want to sort of, if there are other sort of books or writers that you kind of keep close to you, I would love to hear about that too. Let's see. Can I start with Celeste? Okay, I just knew you were going to see that. I'm in the hot seat next to you. I would say when writing Pleasant View, like I said earlier, I really was a baby writer. And so I was very heavily influenced by what I was reading. And so I took care. I knew that I would be writing into the Caribbean space and I took care not to read other Caribbean writers during that time. Interesting. Because I wanted to develop my own voice. And I read more, I would say, mental texts. I mentioned that South African author. I feel like I was really heavily influenced in a way by Zadie Smith and her book, NW, which we were speaking earlier, sort of like a confluence of different people's lives in a city space. And so that format didn't form the way I structured Pleasant View. And whenever I'm writing a story, I do try to find mental texts. It doesn't have to be Caribbean. It could be anywhere in the world. It's just, I'm trying to see, to understand the topic, whatever the topic is, and then spend some time mulling it over and see, well, what is my perspective on that topic? VS Nipole, of course. I feel like you can't but encounter him if you're a Caribbean writer. And even people as far afield as the guy who wrote the Dubliners. Oh, James Joyce. James Joyce, yes. Absolutely. That guy. James, you know James? My friend, man, my bread. James from... Don't get rolled up. From up here. Yeah, so even James Joyce, I mean, I wouldn't say that I love Dubliners, but I certainly respect it as a writer, what he was doing. And so wherever it comes from, I'm inspired by it. Fantastic. Thank you. Brilliant. Cecilia, could you answer the same question, which is sort of about influences which might be in the form of written texts or might be somewhere else? I always say, I'm always a bit nervous about this question because honestly, I would say that every single thing I interact with in whatever way is filtered through me and into my writing. So, you know, literally everything. And I have no concept about low art and high art, so I really don't have those filters and I don't try to filter myself as to what I read. I was obviously educated in England, so at school, we kind of read the English poets and things like that, but I didn't go into poetry until much later on in life. So, growing up, I love Stephen King, I loved Zora Neale Heston, I love Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, so really just a wide range. I don't filter. And again, my computing head, I'm really interested in themes like quantum entanglement, quantum theory, you know, things like that. When it comes to actually parting with money, I seek out my Caribbean writers first and foremost, so, and I have so much catching up to do on my poetry, so I don't necessarily, people might say, oh, you're not a serious writer because you haven't, you know, you haven't read these typical poets or whatever, the canon poets, but they come and find me. Like, for instance, I'm a big fan of Jared Manley Hopkins and I love his work, but I might not know some of the other canon poets, so my Caribbean poets for sure, when I'm actually parting with money and reading, but I don't try to filter. I really believe in going with intuition and resonance and time after time, the things that I needed to read has just landed in my lap, so that's kind of how I treat my reading material. Thank you, that's a great answer, thank you. And Jacob, same question to you. Yeah. I was just sort of thinking. Well, okay, Derek Walker taught me the possibilities of the Caribbean Creole language, some of his poems, especially a play called Dream on Monkey Mountain. That was the first time I saw how beautiful, how beautifully we as Caribbean people speak Caribbean nation language, Caribbean Creole. And I always say that, I know I'm the Jamaican and St. Lucia and Dominica and we all have a Creole. And he mixes them, those English and French Creole and so on. And I find also that Eastern Caribbean speak very, very similarly. You know, Trinidadians sometimes mistake me for Trinidadian if I say, you know, if I say the boy rather than the boy. Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that we do have a, I try to learn the beauty, the musicality, the potential of it through reading war courts, not his poetry so much as his plays, all right? Tijon, his brothers. I think I learned how to explore a different way of understanding beauty from Toni Morrison. Because Toni Morrison, if you look at Song of Solomon, a book interests me deeply. She has a character in there called Pilate of Pilate, depending on how you want to pronounce it. Pilate is a black woman, very dark, beautiful, yeah? And she describes her lips, for example, as wine dark. And it's one of the few times I see blackness. On the page, you know, that was such an adoration of the skin, you know? And you know, a lot of black British writers, the women in particular, set a great deal of value on Toni Morrison's writing, especially the bluest eye and books like that. And that's because Toni Morrison is doing something quite subversive in her writing. She doesn't show it off, right? But she just quietly redefines people's idea of beauty, yeah? And some very quiet subversions are part of her book and I learned that from her. And also, like reading contemporary writers, you know, like, as I just mentioned, Celeste Mohammed, I really gobbled up her book, right? I haven't read your poetry yet, but I've probably got, you know, it's absolutely, trust me, read the book. Read the book, read the book. Those of you who are very religious, it might convert you. You can get a lot of sexual things in there, which I think is very good in your face. We didn't actually... I did want to ask a question about the sex. It's an absolutely... What I love about this book is it's modern, it's frank, it's in your face, it's truthful, it's raw, it's refined. Read the book. I would not endorse a book unless that book is good. Thank you, oh, here, here. Read all the books, read all the books. Thank you. Okay, it is three o'clock, so I think we're stealing a bit of time here, but we probably have time... If anybody has a burning question, your hand could shoot up now, and my... Okay, yes, hand is over here. If whoever has them, I could run quickly and we'll just squeeze in a question before we have to go, because I know you all want to talk, so we have questions. Hi, thank you very much. My question is for Celeste. I'm interested in your career transition from law. I'm also a lawyer, I'm also from Trinidad. I'm just wondering the extent to which your past career is impacting on your current writing. Are you inspired by your past work? Do you find yourself running away from the impulse to draw from your legal practice? Is it too easy, or is it in fact something you embrace? Thanks. Thank you, that's a great question. Congratulations on being from Trinidad. And accept my sympathies about being a lawyer. Yes, so I get asked that frequently, and I would say that my career as a lawyer, 10 years practicing, five years studying it, I feel like it develops certain skills in me, precision at a word level, sentence level, that sort of thing. But also, it exposed me to such a wide variety of people. And as a lawyer, you get insight into people's actual motivations versus their ostensible ones, yeah? And that was helpful to me to know that what we say and what we have going on inside might be very different. I also want to say that I feel like being a lawyer, was necessary, that is the view I take of my career. People say, what if you had become a writer earlier? You would have been so much more successful quicker. But I feel like it is a layer cake. It has been for me, and all of that time has fed into being able to create characters that seem real, you know? And yeah, so at the end, is it that you're interested in becoming a writer too, or are you just, yeah? The only thing I would say, the negative, is that the type of writing that I would have done in law is not like creative writing, it isn't creative writing, yeah? And so I always have to, one of my early teachers said to me, she said, Celeste, I sense so much feeling and emotion around your writing, but you have to let it out, because it was my natural bent at the time to be very, to use very big words and to say a lot of things and say nothing and to be very guarded, and that is something I always have to work to overcome in this second career. Thank you so much, Celeste. I'm afraid we're out of time, so I would have loved to take more questions, but we're all here, so I'm sure people will gravitate over towards the books. Join me in thanking these wonderful authors. They've given us such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.