Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:06 You're listening to writing home American voices from the Caribbean we've Kiama Glover and Tammy Navarro
Speaker 1 00:00:22 Owen. Arthur is right. All these shoes will outlive him though. He cannot bear the thought of his women going on. He knows his daughter will live forever in the way all parents do simply because parents generally die first, but Owen will not die of old age. Owen will die of love. The Danish west Indies will become the United States, Virgin islands, and then this patriarch will die. And perhaps these things are the same thing. Behold, the American is saying in his strange accent, he hands the girl, a glass BOLO, and then whispers to her, do not drop it, or I will punish you. She does not make a move to suggest she has heard. She only takes the glass ball and both her hands. And then the first miracle happens. Her hair begins to rise. The storm outside begins to how,
Speaker 2 00:01:21 What you just heard was it clip of Tiffany, any greeting from her work at an earlier pre COVID event we had at Barnard college.
Speaker 3 00:01:28 And that was a fabulous event. Tiffany was in conversation with Jamaica, Kincaid, who she named her hero if I recall correctly. And that was back in 2015, and we've got her here with us, uh, at least virtually this, uh, this morning.
Speaker 2 00:01:42 I'm so excited. Let's get started.
Speaker 4 00:01:44 I'm Tammy Navarro
Speaker 3 00:01:46 And I'm Kiama Glover. And you are listening to writing home American voices from the Caribbean. So yes, we are here in the, uh, not studio with Tiffany unique. She's the author of the poetry collection wife, which won the 2016 focus prize and Caribbean poetry and the United kingdom's 2016 forward Felix Dennis prize for a first collection. Tiffany is also the author of the novel land of love and drowning, which we were able to talk about just back then and which you just heard her read from. And she's also the author of the short story collection. How to escape from a leper colony Tiffany's writing has won the focus award for Caribbean fiction. The Boston review prize in fiction, a Rona Jeff foundation writers award, a pushcart prize, a Fulbright scholarship, and an academy of American poets prize. Tiffany is from the Virgin islands and she's an associate professor at Emory university. Her novel monster in the middle will be published in October, 2021. Welcome Tiffany.
Speaker 4 00:02:46 Thank you. I'm so excited to be here with you guys. I'm thrilled. I'm giddy.
Speaker 3 00:02:53 We are all a little bit
Speaker 4 00:02:55 At this point.
Speaker 2 00:02:57 Thank you for making time to talk with us. It's great to have you here. I'm really interested to talk with you about form in your writing and how you think about place, uh, specifically the Virgin islands in your work. So in the poetry collection, wife, you have a poem that you've entitled traditional Virgin ons, wedding verse, and you've also explored this model of the hurricane related to the haiku coming out of the Virgin islands experience of hurricanes Irma and Maria. So if you could, I'd just like to hear how you think about place. And I know for you, it's maybe more like home in your writing.
Speaker 4 00:03:28 Thank you, Tommy, for that question. And you Lincoln, the idea of form and space together makes a lot of sense to me. And I I'll answer the questions a little bit separately, but I'll link them together if I can, which is to say that first, I think that the purpose of form and poetry, at least in my opinion, is actually to create a physical representation of some idea or feeling. And I think that part of why humans have created poetic forms is to capture a feeling of the current historical moment of that place. For example, when I think about the sonnet, which I used to hate the sonnet, cause I used to feel like it was just colonialist nonsense. I was about to curse my lots of curse on this.
Speaker 3 00:04:17 Yes. Go for it. He has a spirit
Speaker 4 00:04:20 Moves. Yeah. So I, I feel like I used to be really anti the sonnet cause I felt like it was just colonial nonsense, but as I've matured and maybe get less vex about the world, I have sort of thought through that the sonnet has its purposes. And actually people, you know, were first sanitizing where, you know, the average folk and you use the sonnet. Cause it was easy to remember the rhyme scheme made it easy. So you could sing it. Sonnet means a little song, but it could also, you use it to make an argument, to convince people of something. So the sonnet moves. You make a statement, you make them into statements. And at the end you like restate your thing. Kind of like how we were all taught to write essays, but you restate it with a little bit of a turn to like complicate your argument at the end.
Speaker 4 00:05:04 So it has this purpose in the culture that it arose from. And I was thinking for myself, like, what are the forms that are important in the region, in the Caribbean region? What are the forms that are vital for us? And the <inaudible> comes out. At least the Haroku, as it is created in the Virgin islands comes out of the two storms and two category, five storms that hit us in 2017. And Alesis Louis Brown, who is the current editor of the Caribbean writer. She either created the form, invented the form or just made it accessible and um, popularized it in the Virgin islands. I'm not sure which one, but we can give her the credit for getting it on the radio and making sure that Virgin Islanders who didn't have lots of access to pen and paper had a way to, uh, present their creativity and present their anxieties.
Speaker 4 00:05:51 Also. So the hurricanes had just hit people didn't have access to resources, but her a haiku is three lines. You could even memorize it in your head if you didn't have access to paper and pen. But if you had a little paper and pen, you could still write it. You didn't have to have pages and pages, but not writing novels. So resources were limited. And the high, the high coup turned into the hurricane was a useful form just because of its tidiness and its its way of moving that allow people to memorize. It stayed on the radio. The radio was the way that people can work communicating for a long time after the hurricane. So it, it came out of a necessity, which is one might imagine how the sonnet, our rose also for the form that I have in my collection wife, the traditional Virgin islands wedding verse, what I was trying to think through, what were the ways in which Virgin Islanders understand our version of tenderness?
Speaker 4 00:06:46 When did we become Virgin Islanders? When did we become Caribbean people? And I wanted us to think through, you know, our identity, our sense of belonging, which seems to me that belonging is a thing that Virgin Islanders are most questioning. Most anxious about most invested in is the thing that we always quarreling about when we want the Carlisle, but each other. And I think that's been our question since we were the Danish west Indies. And it's our question now that we are the Virgin islands of the United States, just what does it mean to be who we are? And I think a lot of Virgin Islanders, even if we are a native version, Islanders have to still find ways to embrace that belonging, to learn it, to take it into ourselves. And those of us who are Virgin Islanders by choice also still have to think through like, how do we claim that belonging?
Speaker 4 00:07:35 So for me it always seems like belonging is our question as Virgin Islanders. So I wanted to create a poetic form that would reference that. And I used marriage because it seems like marriage is a metaphor for belonging of choice, whereas you might not be able to choose your family. Marriage itself is, is a way that we choose family. That is the one way that we can say, I may choose you. Right? And so I, I liked the idea of marriage being a metaphor for what it might be to choose the version Islander ness, to do that radically and bravely. So that poem uses the marriage, but it's actually a poem. That's about what it means to choose identity and choose a version of selfhood. So for me, that's why I chose that particular form. However, your question Tommy was also about space and I really believe that while the poem or even all literature is trying to create a space on the page of physicality, of ideas and emotions that Caribbean writers have always been writers who are invested in the natural space around us.
Speaker 4 00:08:39 We've always been environmental literary people. We've always been concerned with how we get here in this island who join us on this boat and dump us hair. Who, what kind of colonialism makes it so that we have to leave here? What does it mean that there's a hurricane every other year or every other decade, depending on which time period we are in, what does it mean that there's an earthquake? What does it mean are their tidal waves? What does it mean that we need the sea to eat, that we need the land to survive? I mean, I think we've always been invested in the natural world in our culture, but, and so therefore in our literature, so for me, Virgin islands, but Caribbean writ large literature has always been about the natural environment and about the space of what it means to be part of the archipelago. What does it mean to be part of a collection of people who live on a collection of islands? What does that mean? And I think we've always been questioned in that. So our understanding of our place physical place, I think is always a question for us and our literature reflects that.
Speaker 2 00:09:44 Thank you. That's really useful. That is
Speaker 3 00:09:47 Just such an insightful and, and, and really beautifully thought through. It's like you had the questions in advance, which you,
Speaker 4 00:09:55 Which she did
Speaker 3 00:09:56 Not for our listeners, but no, but thank you. Um, the way you tied all of that together was really quite moving. And I was struck mostly or, or among out's essay by your attentiveness to sort of usefulness and materiality. When it comes to literature, this sort of pragmatism that you identified around form, which quickly made me think you must be an amazing teacher, which warning I'm going to ask you about teaching later. Um, but yes, so your, your, your, your, the way you articulated pragmatism of form, that there are ways in which things must be said or told or related for reasons that are tied to the material in the spatial. And so I'm just going to tag onto that and ask. So if there's a pragmatism of form, is there a pragmatism of content as well? Are there things that you say to yourself as a writer stories that must be told, and maybe just add to that stories that must be told by me, like, who am I to tell this story that must be told and why it's fairly vague, but I'm hoping you can, you can dip in there.
Speaker 4 00:10:57 I want to answer the question by first giving a disclaimer to say that beauty matters, like things that are just beautiful matter. I think beauty is part of, I mean, it's, it's maybe the, all of why we're all here on earth is to find beauty, leave beauty behind, make opportunities for beauty, just for delight. I mean, I, I really believe that delight beauty joy is why we're here.
Speaker 3 00:11:28 Can you clarify something for me? Because you said this is a disclaimer. So are you responding to like, were saying that like you're hearing pragmatism as the, as not invested in beauty? Well,
Speaker 4 00:11:38 I'm hearing pragmatism as being I'm hearing pragmatism. I was like functional or maybe being usefulness might not, might undermine okay. Usefulness or pragmatism. Sounds like let's make sure this building that we all live in just keeps us warm. Let's not make sure that the building that we live in is also beautiful and brings us just extra delight. Right. Okay. Um, and so, I mean, I think about the, the easiest thing for me to think about is like, you know, we think about like communist Germany and the, I could text her,
Speaker 3 00:12:25 Like just sorry to all of our German listeners and communist listeners.
Speaker 4 00:12:29 I mean, I can't be beautiful. Well, me, myself. So, um, and you know, to be honest, communists out, do say like the arts have their purpose. If we're really doing real socialism, the arts aren't important part for all of us, for the commoners, for, for the, for everybody, for the masses, art is vital to just being fully human, but we sometimes think about like, you know, we can talk about Protestantism in America, just make it walk, make sure I go walk, it'll have to be pretty right. And the beauty is extra and unnecessary. We can look at the way that we think about our education system. Like, let's make sure you can get a job. The fact that you maybe don't know how to really appreciate a poem or a painting or a song for that matter, or even the, what we might call art.
Speaker 4 00:13:18 The, when you walk around in your world, how do you actually learn how to read advertisements on the walls of the subway or whatever, even those kinds of things might be also not just about, do I read the subway ad so I could buy the thing which usefulness, or do I see the subway ad as this more complex conversation between humans, which might allow for beauty? And I'm saying that I think I want to, I give the disclaimer because artists in training are often taught to screw usefulness, forget about that, and only think about beauty. And so I want to make sure that when I answered your question, Kiama, that I am, that I, I, I am pushing against the way that artists are trained to say, we also must think about usefulness. And we also must think about con that we are in conversation with actual human beings as writers, that there are people on the other side of my book, someone else is of bond yet who I am talking to.
Speaker 4 00:14:27 And I need to make sure that I'm saying things that I want them to hear, that I'm seeing things with authority. I teach my students that they need to know what they intend and they can't just leave it up to the critic. Then not just leaving it up to like the future literary scholars to, to read their work and see what was the intention that you, the author is the authority. And you are communicating with other people. You are entering into a tradition. You're communicating with people who dead and the people who ain't reached yet. And I do think like you want to be conscious of that communication. You want to be careful. You want to be aware that when people sit to read 300 pages, that they're handing over parts of their life to you, I mean, they're literally like not sleeping at night so they could finish a chapter.
Speaker 4 00:15:20 You know, they're literally like, you know, not kissing their husband or wife so they could finish one line. I mean, they're handing over parts of their life to you. So I feel like that comes with some respect for the reader. I think we need to honor the reader's time and make sure that we are being useful. So I wanted to disclaim by saying that beauty is important and anybody I hope who reads my books would say, like, I pay attention to the lyric, to the metaphor. I want people to hold my sentences in their mouth and eat it tastefully, like, think about it like fine chocolate. I want them to take their time with my sentences and appreciate the work of S the aesthetic work that I've put into the sentences. And to just feel that sort of tingling feeling when you appreciate something gorgeous.
Speaker 4 00:16:11 And I want to seduce my readers with the beauty, which is, I think what beauty is for beauty, so that we can fall in love. And I definitely want my readers to just like fall in love. Um, I, so I want them to just like submit to the, the beauty. I want that. Um, but I also want there to be some substance underneath that, that I'm in intellectual back and forth with them too. And so understanding that my readers are going to have this sort of context for my writing, some of my readers are going to understand this sort of historical reference in some of my readers want. That means I have to think, well, who are my ideal readers? Who are the people who I imagine first and foremost, on the other side of these books, how am I communicating with Dem specifically, and also who are the readers who I can potentially imagine?
Speaker 4 00:17:03 You know, if I am so lucky to have readers in 50, 60, a hundred years, I've done, I'm dead. What do I want them to know about our current historical moment? What do I want them to know about the Virgin islands about me? And I, I think realizing that literature is an artifact, literature is something that always is going to hopefully enter into the archive and that you are communicating is important. So yes, beauty, yes. Fall in love for no rhyme or reason fall in love. You know, when you fall in love, you're like, this will make no sense. I want my readers to feel that too. I don't even know why I find this. So I just fell in love with this book, but I also want at the end of the book to be like, and I also learned, and I also, and I also have new questions and I also go forth and relate to other human beings differently. Now.
Speaker 3 00:17:57 I mean, we got, we got delightfully sidetrack, cause I wanted you to explain that one word, disclaimer. I know, but I'm going to still, I want to come back to that. The second half of the question, which was, you had talked so richly about form, and now you just in sort of some of your rhetorical questions alluded to that real question that I had for you about content. What are those stories that you, Tiffany unique feel compelled to tell, to tell in your voice? And as you just added to my own question, want to have be known about this moment, many years into the future, maybe after you're not even here to, to keep telling that story.
Speaker 4 00:18:32 I think I probably was evading your question because, um, fair enough. Yeah, I think the truth is that I don't know concrete, the, what the stories are that I want to tell in part, because I do follow the beauty first. I mean, I do first, then I am first and foremost an artist before I'm a teacher before I'm even before I'm an intellectual. I am an artist. So I first and foremost follow, like what feels compelling and exciting in this particular moment, which might have very little to do with what's happening in the historical moment and might have more to do with what's happening just inside of my soul. I mean, I just happened to really love mermaids and nuns. So if I could get a mermaid or a nun into a book, I'm going to just do it. Even if it don't make no sense. I just think that some of them, well, thanks. Like I think there's really nothing more beautiful than I'm not in a mermaid. So I feel like I, if I could put it together, oh my gosh, next short story, a mermaid mermaid sister, somebody going to steal that, Hey, listeners to the podcast.
Speaker 4 00:19:55 Um, but you know, for me, I'm just like, so I'm following what is compelling and what those most beautiful to me. But because I am also a person who is an actor and a politically minded person, I'm a black woman in the world. I own a vagina. Like these things are going to make me also have political intent. I hope, right. I mean, I'm going to think about what it means to be a woman in the world. I'm gonna think of what it means to be a person of African descent in the world and that's going to make its way into my work. Um, so I would say that the only thing, the only real answer I have to your question Kiama, is that I always write about the Virgin islands. And that is as far as I can tell that is important because there's just, we haven't, there's not enough of that.
Speaker 4 00:20:39 And that's, that's the usefulness. I don't feel like that has been worn out and I don't think it would get worn out in my lifetime. And so I imagine that I will just always write about that because we just need those stories versus founders just need those stories. The region needs to hear it from the Virgin islands. America needs the Hare about its colonialism from the Virgin islands. And so I just feel like that need is not going to get itself worn out, but how I go about doing that? Content-wise what characters, what stories specifically. I mean, I don't, I have no idea. You said
Speaker 3 00:21:15 You, weren't going to answer my question and you just delivered like the answers to the question. All right. I'm glad you're satisfied. If you don't evaluate, if like she's not evading, like what would that look like if that's evading, but okay. All your ostomy. Um,
Speaker 2 00:21:35 So Tiffany, that's actually a really great segue because you talked about your various positionings as a woman, as a black person in the world, your political kind of engagements. And one thing I wanted to follow up with you about is how you look at race and privilege in your work. So we're clearly in this moment of reckoning with anti-blackness and movement for black lives. And as you know, I've often taught your short story, killer rabbits, which in part revolves around a white tourist couple and their behavior and expectations on vacation in the Caribbean. But you are also the author of a wonderfully titled poem. Everybody needs a white husband, right? Where you take up some of the privileges of maleness and whiteness and you kind of play with play with that. So I guess I just want to hear how you think about that relationship of race and privilege in your writings. Since you brought that to us, when you talked about your subjectivities,
Speaker 4 00:22:26 The poem, and the story come from really different kinds of places. In part, at least for me as the author of them, the story comes from a very Caribbean idea of whiteness, which is as a sort of outsider that has financial privilege, but not cultural privilege. And that that version of whiteness is all in the region is always trying to find its way in. I think sometimes in insidious kinds of ways sometimes uses its financial power to make it stamp on various parts of the culture, but always in ways in which the greater culture finds alienating or finds alien period. So in that story, the, the young white guy is trying to find his way in. He uses ends up using religion as his way to find his way in, but he understands himself to be an outsider, even though his family is incredibly financially privileged in the poem, I'm really coming from what we might call a more American centered space, where we understand, even though we sometimes talk about blackness as like cultural cachet.
Speaker 4 00:23:38 And I do think that's true. And I think it is still the case in America that whiteness has the cultural power. I think it's still that case and that white maleness in particular, your access to cultural power often has to go through white maleness. I mean, I even think about something as that might seem in germane as like literature, which is w we often say it's run mostly by white women because the agents are mostly white women and the editors are mostly white women, but the publishers are the dudes. I mean, the dude at the top, the person at the top is almost always a bunch of white dudes. So there's still like, even within this world that we think of as being, oh, look, here's a place that's woman run. It's still like at the top off most often guys, white men. So I think in the U S the idea of having access to power means having access to white maleness.
Speaker 4 00:24:37 And I, I mean, I see this as someone who has white guy friends, I'm lucky enough that my white dude friends, like, are aware of their privilege and, and, you know, are generous with it. I mean, I'm just being very honest with you guys, right? Like, I mean, generous with their privilege or willing to share their privilege. And I recognize that having, you know, mentors that were male, that weren't just trying to screw me. And I mean, that like in all the ways, or having white people as mentors, who weren't just trying to patronize me, those were useful for me. And I, I could say that on this podcast freely, I don't, I ain't scared to sit up, but I mean, I Breadloaf was a very important part of me becoming a writer and Breadloaf was run by a white, straight white man. When I first entered Burleigh, it's not run by a woman, Jen groats, but when I first became a writer, and for those of you who don't know, Brella has this very important historical writers conference that happens every summer in Vermont, Tony Morrison went there.
Speaker 4 00:25:38 I mean, most many of our, I took away the most, but many of our American writers have gone through Breadloaf in some capacity. And it was always run by a white dude, but what kind of white dude and a white dude, who's more available to sharing his privilege or not. And when I became a red loafer, Michael Collier was the white dude running the show, and he was a white dude and still is a white dude who seems to be one, who's aware that his whiteness is a fucked up privilege. Sorry, I curse again. Um, but as a privilege that he didn't come by fairly and that he has to figure out how to be generous about. And so, I mean, I came up through that, right. And I understand that I, many of my successes of our writer would not have been possible if it wasn't for Michael Collier.
Speaker 4 00:26:28 I mean, and the people who we hired, who were able to identify me as someone who was talented and I never, I did not feel patronized at Breadloaf. Right. I felt like I was honored for my talent. Maybe I was being patronized. I didn't know as many Caribbean people, sometimes we don't know when we're being racialized, but I felt like that was useful for me. Right. So I said that to say that, to pretend like we don't, that people of color are not sometimes having to be close to white power, I think is to undermine the reality of what is going on. And to also let white people off the hook, because what people have to give up some other stuff. I mean, plenty of it, most of it, if we're going to have a fair world, right. And I think to just, I mean, I believe that people of color women should find our own things and our own networks and our own places to access power. Absolutely. But I also believe that we should be very clear and direct with white people and with men about if they want to be free, they also have to lay off some of this power and that if we're all going to be free, they're going to have to give up some of it. So I think to pretend like we could just have our own thing in the corner is not realistic. And also, and I don't feel like it's going to end up with the world that we want,
Speaker 2 00:27:47 Which is also a really different approach than a kind of colorblind or more generic diversity approach. Right. But an actual acknowledgement of the inequity around race and privilege and, and being willing to divest yourself of some of that, which is difficult and painful.
Speaker 4 00:28:02 Yeah. I mean, I'm lucky right now at Emory university, I'm in the English department and part of the creative writing program, our creative writing program is held by Jericho brown, Pulitzer prize, winning poet, black queer poet. But the English department is helmed by, you know, uh, as far as I can tell a straight white dude, and they're both my mentors, right. And, and I obviously lean on Jericho, probably more for reasons having to do with alignment of understanding and empathy around racial and also just gender issues. But it would be a mistake for me to let my chair off the hook because he's white and a dude, I'm not gonna let him off. He could still go, he's still got a mentor me, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna make that. I'm not, I'm going to call on him to do that. And I'm not going to let him off the hook for that.
Speaker 4 00:28:51 And I should say that Ben Reese is an excellent mentor. Um, and he's never shied away from mentorship, but I just think that when white people are in power, we need to be like, you have a job to, you know, and you also have to mentor me, right? You don't get to just mentor the white dudes. You have to mentor me too. Right. Because in my classroom, most of my students are white and I don't get to say to my students, I'm only teaching a black woman. Right. So I just feel like we have to be aware of our power and aware of accessing it and reaching for it wherever it is. Thank you. Great.
Speaker 3 00:29:29 Thank you, Tiffany. I am going to count that as you having preemptively answered my question about pedagogy. Okay. Check. Thank you. That was beautiful. And I love how you circled it, or you, you made it work in both directions, right? So who is responsible to you as a teacher and a mentor and creating space for you, and then what are your responsibilities to do the same, but not in some sort of pay it forward way, but like really circular, like this is happening relationally all the time for you to be able to do the work that you're doing, people have to be doing that work for you. And I appreciate the acknowledgement of your own power in that as well. Right. Um, I have to, to something else. I remember when we talked, you think you only had two children at the time. Now you have 17. Now that you have 17 children. So things have changed.
Speaker 4 00:30:23 I have three children, three
Speaker 3 00:30:26 17, you know, at some point it just becomes us versus them. But anyway, where I was going was that at that time, there was not as suppose as additional human you were raising. There was also not life. There was no wife yet the poetry collection. And we had talked about land in love with drowning. That was what was had just come out, which has a girl at its center. And you would also read a passage that brought together a girl that was in the process of being sort of used to the ends of white men and a white man in the room who was thinking about his own daughter. Right. So all to say, girls and girlhood were a big part of where you were at seemed as an artist in your thinking at the time. And now in those, in these intervening years, you're, there's been a perspectival shift, at least we're an expansion outward. And so I'm just wondering, because at some point I want to talk about where you're headed with this new novel, but, um, but maybe just to close that gap for us, 20 15, 20, 21 shifts in your own life, how they may or may not have affected your focus in your writing and thinking about girl to womanhood, to some extent,
Speaker 4 00:31:32 My agent used to say that every time I had a book, I would get pregnant. Wow. Let's just hope that's not the case. Yes. Wow. Wow. And it seems to be the case. I would be on book tour. I've had three adult books anyway, and I've been on book tour for each of them pregnant. So a book tour for the next book starts in October, but I'm getting old. Yes. So let me say that I have to stop maybe not old enough. So watch it, let me sit on that, that tradition has to, um, and maybe I stop writing, um, I'll bake a cake for you or something, and then see if the spirits allow something else, put something else in the oven. Metaphoric, metaphorically. Yeah. Well, I live in Atlanta now, which is really different. And I don't know when people are listening to this podcast, but you know, we are all in a pandemic right now where we're all in different places in our own homes, in part, because we're in a viral pandemic, the whole, the globe is in various of lockdown and response to the novel coronavirus, which we're calling COVID-19 and which most of us have not been vaccinated for as yet.
Speaker 4 00:32:47 So I moved to Atlanta just before that happened and I moved just me and my kids. And so I'm a single mom in Atlanta and the COVID hit. And I have to say, this is the, been the best place to be in a quarantine that I could have imagined in part, because there's a lot of natural environments around, which is really a blessing. We have complete access to it. It's very easy to get to. I can just walk out and go in any direction for a mile on my bike or just walking with my kids. And there's a park or number radium, a leak, a pond. I didn't realize Atlanta was that, but it's been really incredible. Don't you watch the real Housewives? No, go. How do you think at a right book? I don't watch them kind of thing. Fair enough. If I watched them kind of thing. I wouldn't read books. I mean, I really don't know anything that's happening in popular culture, but I do seem to produce writing. So I think that's my balance.
Speaker 4 00:33:46 Okay. And then also, you know, black lives matter. I mean, that's been to say that black lives matter hit doesn't really make any sense, but we've had, you know, the, the community of black lives matter has been active since after the killing of Trayvon Martin and perhaps before in other forms, but really became a national issue also during the pandemic. And it, Atlanta was, um, as Atlanta has often been around civil rights issues that especially racialized civil rights issues was one of the centers of the black lives matter response to, uh, killings of young black people, particularly young black men, also a very useful place to be in doing that time. Right. My children and I protested, we went down to the square where we live in Decatur is one of the only places in Georgia that was able to actually take down our Confederate monuments.
Speaker 4 00:34:38 It's a, it's a very blue, progressive leaning part of Georgia. The part of Georgia that I live in is a part of Georgia that elected Warnock and Ossoff. So it's also, we were able to skirt some of the laws, uh, Georgia law that was put down. I don't know when, I don't know if you guys know this, but Georgia was a place where, and I'm just so digressing, Kiama, but Georgia was a place where this is how we do to Confederate get there. You'll get there. The parts of the Confederate flag were originally part of the Georgia, the Georgia flag, and that was removed. But, but the way that that was allowed to be removed was that the compromise was that no Confederate monuments, no monuments could ever be removed from anywhere in Georgia. And that was the compromise. It sounds
Speaker 3 00:35:23 More like blackmail than compromised, but okay,
Speaker 4 00:35:25 Well, you know, so it's actually very hard in Georgia to get Confederate monuments taken down, but the Kater managed to figure out how to do it basically enough, will we able to skirt the rules? So it's been a really good place for my children to actually see, like we protested and look, some we actually walked, you know, that was kind of amazing. And I can say that that actually happened everywhere. So I say all that to say that moving to Atlanta has created a really different kind of been for me. It's also the first place I've lived in, in the United States where when I start speaking, nobody ever says, are you from Jamaica? Every people first and foremost will say which VIU from this is, I've never experienced that before where people actually know I'm a Virgin Islander, that's their default, if anything, and they want to know if I'm from St.
Speaker 4 00:36:22 Croix, St. Thomas or St. John there, that's new. It's also so ubiquitous, Virgin Islanders are everywhere. The one of the assistant commissioners of the kid I might be using the wrong term. It may that commissioner, the assistant director's assistant people who help organize the cities as assistant city managers of Decatur was someone who was my student when I taught high school back in St. Thomas. So it's also the first place where I felt really at home in the states. And it's not like it's majority Virgin Islander. It's mostly, you know, white southerners here and in Atlanta and still there's enough diversity where I'm not foreign, nothing about me feels foreign. And I still have a place that's incredibly cosmopolitan. And then, and here's the real kicker. It's also affordable place to live. So two days ago I closed on a house. I'm gonna go have a nice big house, this to be the first time in my life, actually that I'm going to have an office like ever.
Speaker 4 00:37:20 I'm 42 years old. And this was the first time in my life. Then I actually have Virginia. Woolf's bullshit thing of our room of my own to write in. And so I think to go back to your question is that one of the things that's changed for me is the circumstance under which I actually am, are radically different. My, my, my being ness is so different than it has than it was three, four years ago. It's, I'm a, I'm a new version of myself in many ways. And we shall see how that impacts the work I'm in the novel that I'm finishing. Now, the one that will be out in October, 2021, it's called monster in the middle. It will be the first novel. The first thing I've written in which none of the material in this book was written before my children were born. So everything.
Speaker 4 00:38:11 So to clarify everything I've written, that's in print, but in book form was in draft before my first child was born. Right. It feels monumental, right? So I've written us a collection of poems, a collection of stories and a novel. And all three of those things were in draft 10 years ago. All of that before I had child one. So my eldest child is 10, and this will be the, the forthcoming book will be the first book that I have written in which it was drafted since I've had children. Okay. That feels really different. Right. And those of us who are parents, I would say in particular, mothers drafting, something from scratch is hard to do a children and I have multiple children. And so I've, it's an app 17 children. Exactly. I have three just for the podcast, um, just for, just for archival purposes.
Speaker 4 00:39:13 But like, you know, to say that that's also a new way of being a writer. I'm going to be from here, going forward. Everything I write will be things I have always written as a mother. Everything I write well, things I have always written with a room of my own. Like, this will be, this is going to be radical, right? I mean, it's to be the, I grew up poor. I grew up with Mo I grew up in a house where there were tons of us, cousins, aunties, uncles, grandparents, my mother. I mean just, and now I'm going to be in a house where it's like me and my Tren. This is crazy. Like, I think that's, I don't know what that will do to my writing. I don't know what that will do to myself, but it will change. It will certainly change.
Speaker 2 00:39:56 I don't know if we have time for this, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Cause I have to cause you brought us to the new novel monster in the middle. And you said earlier that you're writing as far as you can imagine, it is always going to be based on the Virgin islands. So I'm assuming that this is set in or otherwise involves the Virgin islands. Is that right? Tell us a little bit
Speaker 4 00:40:15 About, so monster in the middle, like land of love and joining begins with a map. So in my book, land of love and John in the first page is of a map. It's a map of the Virgin islands. And I wanted in that book to really center the Virgin islands as a place where narratives can grow from, be from, and everybody else was made secondary on purpose. Not that everybody else is secondary, but for this narrative, everybody else is going to be secondary in the way that we might privilege European literature or American literature. I wanted to say, I privileged in Virgin Allan stories, retinols characters, vaginas voices, period, done complete in this book monster in the middle, wanting to examine the role of the Virgin islands as a colony of the United States. And so the map is of the United States. That's on the opening pages.
Speaker 4 00:41:10 And I, the map has characters who are moving around the United States and they go to the Virgin islands. They go to Puerto Rico. They go to places that we often don't think of as being part of the United States. In fact, when I told my, the marketing people, I want to map, they were like, but why you want to map most of the places that people are, are not in the U S and I say, well, wait, a man is not in the U S you're thinking that the Virgin islands and Puerto Rico are part of the United States. Once I wanted to think through, like, what does it mean to actually be from the Caribbean? And also at the exact same time, not a hyphenated version, Caribbean American Virgin Islanders are always on hyphenated, both Americans and Caribbean people, right? So what does that mean? And I wanted to have a map that might consider the American part of that identity.
Speaker 4 00:41:59 What does it mean to be an American person and also a Caribbean person within the American context? So that the map is there, the book is doing that. So there are two families that the book follows. One is a family. The family of fly and fly is actually a black American. African-American his roots go back to as, as one of my friends says, you know, slave stock African-Americans and then the other character is Stella. And she is born in the Virgin islands of various Virgin islands type parentage. Her mother is a Virgin Islander, but was raised in Puerto Rico and various kinds of ways that Virgin Islanders become Virgin Islanders. So her story comes through the Virgin islands, but they both find themselves in New York and are having to negotiate what it means to maybe be a couple. So they are metaphorically bringing together this idea of Americanness and Caribbean ness in their coupling together, but they're also bringing their families together in a way.
Speaker 4 00:42:58 So the book is traces, both families and the narratives that both families have passed down to each individual fly and Stella, and then makes the argument that none of us are. I hope the book makes the argument that none of us are our only ourselves and skin and DNA walking around. We're also a collection of all the stories that have been passed down to us. And then when you meet somebody, you don't just meet Tommy Navarro. You don't just meet Kiama Glover, you meet you, don't just meet Tiffany. You know, you meet who all we come from all the time. That's always inside of us. And maybe it's inside of us DNA wise also, but it's just always there. And you're meeting all of that legacy too. And so the book is trying to make that argument that you don't, you think you doesn't meet this one, but actually you meet a hundred others and they're going to come to bear it, you know, as you get to know people better, and you, you make intimacies with people, you meet those other people slowly but surely. So the book is also making that argument, but also I hope making the political argument. What does it mean to meet? If you want to meet America, you have to also meet the Virgin islands. If you want to meet America, you have to meet Puerto Rico. You know, if you wanna meet America, you have to also consider the truth of our American colonial reality. That's great. Thank you.
Speaker 3 00:44:19 So, Tiffany, thank you so much for your generous answers for all the time you spent with us and for being just such a delightful interlocutor in whatever form we've been able to have the opportunity to be with you. So thank you.
Speaker 4 00:44:30 I look forward to being with you guys again and again. It's been so fun. Thank you.
Speaker 0 00:44:44 Writing home is produced by Kiama Glover, Tammy Navarro, Rachel James and Miriam Neptune support for this podcast comes from the digital humanities center, the center for research on women, the media center and the library at Barnard college. Our music is by <inaudible> from their album D Jones. And the track is three B last year. Yeah.
