New World Adams: Interviews with West Indian Writers

Written by Stewart Brown for CRNLE Reviews Journal on

The literary interview as a critical resource is an ambiguous and slippery genre. On the one hand it seems as if the reader is getting 'the truth' about an author’s life/work/views etc in a direct and immediate form, for although the author speaks through his/her interviewer it seems as if s/he is speaking directly to us, as reader, without either the artifice of fiction or the formalised structures and vocabularies of an essay or lecture. But of course we also know that the published text of the interview is only part of the story, that a 'conversation' consists of more than the words that are spoken, and that indeed if we were to write down as text even those words as they are spoken we would not end up with the clear, measured and coherent statements that make up most published interviews. The published literary interview is a structured, contained and usually quite significantly edited version of an artificially staged dialogue that is often as revealing of the interviewer’s preoccupations and agendas as it is of the subject author’s. The author is, by definition, responding to the issues and concerns raised by the interviewer’s questioning, although sometimes, as happens just occasionally in New World Adams - who, really, could interview Wilson Harris or contain Sam Selvon? - the subject of the interview subverts that relationship and changes the whole tenor of the text. The effect is as much to remind us, as readers, of the extent to which the other, more passive interviewees are being directed and even 'silenced' by the skilful interviewer. Then, too typical literary interview smacks of the deference to the author - in terms of their ownership of the meanings and effects of 'their' texts that much recent critical theory has been at pains to undermine. The author interview is usually a form of flattery, opportunity for the writer to embroider or embellish on his/her texts and the pain of their creation. Occasionally writers are pushed to explain their motives or justify their techniques, but as a rule the literary interview is a rather bland site of hagiography and self-aggrandizement. Authors are rarely Paxmaned into real analysis of their less worthy motives or drawn into confessions that might later prove embarrassing. So as a source of critical insight or theoretical grist the literary interview must be treated with some suspicion, the more so the more 'natural' the discussion may seem to be.

Not that knowing any of that makes the literary interview less interesting or compulsive for those of us still hooked on the idea of the author as some kind of special individual, gifted with the capacity to work that magic of imagination that entry into a story - whatever its form - as reader, can be. The attraction of the literary interview for such an unreconstructed suspender-of-disbelief is partly the fascination of gossip, partly the sense of eavesdropping and partly the illusion, as I’ve said, of actually entering into a relationship with the writer. From this point of view the skilful invisibility of the interviewer is important, and although the interviews in New World Adams are called ‘conversations’, on the whole Daryl Cumber Dance is self-effacing enough, and knowledgeable enough about her subjects, to allow that illusion to be maintained. I found New World Adams a fascinating and unputdownable book. I was particularly interested in those interviews with less well-known writers, or at least, those who have been off the literary beaten track for one reason or another. Her interviews with Ismith Khan, Jan Carew, Michael Thelwell and Sylvia Wynter, for example, all provided me with straight-forward biographical information I’d found nowhere else, as well as giving me a sense of where those writers were coming from in terms of their very different approaches to the business of writing.

Most of the interviews were documented some time ago, late 70s or early 80s in most cases, and there is a rather dated feel to much of the discussion of critical issues, but that in itself is very interesting, to be made aware of just how much has been written in the last decade or so, and how different the Caribbean literary scene looks now… a discussion in the Sylvia Wynter interview about female characters 'projected by Caribbean writers, who are by and large male writers…' Other unusual pieces are two joint conversations/interviews with Dennis Williams and Martin Carter and with Pam Mordecai and Velma Pollard. Here, again, the conventions of the literary interview are somewhat subverted and we have a sense of entering into a real dialogue - the writers seem less subject to the direction of the interviewer and able to take the discussion where they want it to go. Carter and Williams debating the direction of Guyanese literature and art is invaluable and truly fascinating.

The interviews with more familiar writers - Derek Walcott, George Lamming, John Hearne, C.L.R. James, Louise Bennett, Austin Clarke, Earl Lovelace and Michael Anthony are all well done and interesting, but there is a certain weariness about some of them, a kind of unspoken 'how many times will I have to answer that question…' I was particularly engaged by the three interviews with the Jamaican poets Mervyn Morris, Dennis Scott and Anthony McNeill, each of them bringing very different notions of craft and making to their discussion of their art, each casting an oblique glance towards aspects of Jamaican life which emerge again as subjects of their own and each other’s later verse.

New World Adams goes on to my shelf of essential background reading for Caribbean Literature, a slippery and ambiguous resource maybe, but fascinating and essential all the same.