Spiral
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 Posted: Sun 12 Jul 2009 17:49 Post subject: Black Rock in her soul |
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Amanda Smyth PHOTOS: STEVE McPHIE
People come of age everywhere. Celia's turn starts on sloping river rocks, in an eerie verandah and under a stilted house in Black Rock, Tobago.
Her black mother died immediately after childbirth. Her white father never answered the letter that was sent to him in Southampton with the news. She is raised by her aunt with twin cousins from whom she feels distant, an uncle she detests and the weight of an obeah woman's prophesy: "Men will want you like they want a glass of rum. Drink you up and pee you out. One man will love you. But you won't love him. You will harm him. You will destroy his life."
Isolation, violation, love and loss can happen anywhere. But when Amanda Smyth chose those themes for her debut novel she decided to set her tale in the 1950s in Trinidad and Tobago.
She knows some people will have a hard time reconciling her aquamarine eyes, billowy blonde hair and Irish accent with sprinkling salt on toads, setting bake dough to rise, the threat of soucouyants and bleaching whites in the sun. But these are among some of her most vivid memories, culled from sunshine and story-filled summer vacations in her mother's native T&T.
"I've been coming here since I was six months old," she shares. "My family has lived here for some generations. During the holidays I went to Tobago to visit my grandmother and I ended up living in Trinidad for different chunks of time during my late teens and twenties. There was a very rich story telling vein in my family and I used to hear stories about the old days, particularly the one about my grandmother's father's murder in Tamana in 1958."
In fact, that family legend was the seed for her novel. A harried personal assistant six days a week, on Sundays Smyth channeled the spirit of the islands. She played old calypsos and surrounded herself with photographs of summer vacations past and prints from UK-born, Trinidad-bred painter, Peter Doig. (One of Doig's images, a painting of Grand Riviere, adorns the novel's cover.) But Celia came out of the green and Smyth embraced telling her story along with her memories of the smells, sounds and sensations of the T&T she knew.
"I think I'm quite observant and I do remember details well. I have a strong memory for senses and textures. Summers here must have been in very strong contrast to the world I lived in in cold, damp Yorkshire. That's probably why it left an impression."
T&T had always provided something of a creative spark. She was spending lonely days writing in Point a Pierre in the late 1990s when Reginald Pollard suggested that they transform one of her short stories into a film. Andre Tanker did the soundtrack, Nigel Scott performed the voice over and the short wound up being bought by BWIA, shown at a Toronto Film Festival and earning honours for its editing locally.
She once dreamed of being an actress but the possibility of writing as a career became real when she enrolled in the Normadie Creative Writing workshop under the tutelage of Wayne Brown.
"He was a very brilliant teacher. I couldn't believe I found him in Trinidad right there on my doorstep. I told him to give me triple the assignments he gave everyone else. I worked hard on those stories," Smyth remembers. So hard, in fact, that her body of work earned her automatic entry into the prestigious creative writing masters programme at University of East Anglia, notwithstanding the absence of a first degree.
She completed the intense year-long course in 2000 with distinction and quickly chose an agent from the five or six who courted her. Published by Serpent's Tail, Black Rock has all the trappings of a charmed debut. Its Random House, American release Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange made it onto Oprah's 25 Books You Can't Put Down list, must-read recommendations for this summer. A review in Elle likened Smyth's style to no less a writer than Alice Walker of Colour Purple fame.
But the truth is that for ten years Smyth had been shopping around her short stories and finding it impossible to have them published as a collection. Some of her work made it to magazines and anthologies and broadcasts on BBC Radio 4. In more ways than one the 41-year-old newly wed's first novel is a relief.
"Carry this with you always," the soothsayer tells Celia. "It come from the rock, right here. It will keep bad luck at bay and save you from the hard life you will make for yourself."
If Celia's got her black rock, Smyth has had her share of Cascadura.
Black Rock is available at bookstores nationwide, including Reader's Bookshop.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_woman_mag?id=161502901 |
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