Out Of Many, One Voice:

An Interview with Paulette Ramsay

— Carrie J. Walker

Paulette Ramsay is the author of two poetry collections October

Afternoon (2012) and Under Basil Leaves (2010) and the novel Aunt Jen (2005).
She is the Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
and Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of the West Indies Mona.
Dr. Ramsay grew up in the parish of Hanover in Jamaica, where she
attended Rusea’s High School in Lucea. She did her undergraduate and
graduate work at the University of the West Indies Mona campus. She
has also done graduate work at the University of Florida and studied
Spanish in Venezuela, Spain, and the Dominican Republic. Dr. Ramsay
describes her role as a mother to her two sons, Marc and Zach, as her
proudest achievement. This interview took place on July 25, 2012 at
the University of the West Indies Mona and was followed up via Skype
correspondence on February 8, 2013.
CW: How do you view the state of Jamaican literature at the nation’s 50th year of
independence? Are there any particular trends that you observe as a writer, lecturer, and/
or literary scholar?
PR: From the perspective of the Caribbean reader, I would say there
is a much wider variety of literary works published by Jamaican writers,
both in Jamaica and by Jamaicans living abroad. It is a striking contrast
from when I was growing up. Most of the literature that students were
taught was literature that was produced by British writers, mainly men.
We read a lot of Wordsworth, Keats, and Blake. Of course Shakespeare.
We knew all those English poems. They were great writers. But I also
remember reading Andrew Salkey. Andrew Salkey was my Jamaican
writer. He had a series: one called Hurricane, one called Drought, and one
called Earthquake. And C. Everard Palmer. I remember books like A Cow
Called Boy by him. Those books were precious books. I also remember
Jean D’Costa’s Sprat Morrison. You just hung onto them to them because

42 Journal of West Indian Literature

they were so few and far between.
Now it has changed a lot because there are far more Jamaican writers
writing. People who are not afraid to not fit into a kind of a prescriptive
kind of writing, where you have to sound like everybody else, where
you have to write about the beautiful trees or the nice green river like
everybody else. However, I hope we do not get to a stage where we
become too free with our writing where anything goes and everything
is accepted. I am still one of the more conservative persons who believe
we should go through the scrutiny or process of getting independent
reactions, independent opinions, and judgments on our writing before
we take it to the public. I do not want to self-publish, for instance, where
I just decide that I am the process: I am writer, I am editor, I am reviewer,
I am publisher. I still want my work to be vetted by different persons.
CW: What is the primary role of literature in contemporary Jamaica? How does
literature impact Jamaica’s national identity (especially if approximately ninety-five
percent of the books bought in Jamaica are textbooks)?
PR: I do not think we have begun a lot of reading just for entertainment,
just for the sake of reading. Children in school are reading books that they
have to read. They are reading textbooks because they need them for
their various exams, their various coursework and so on. That is part of
the problem.
Teachers in school and parents probably share the responsibility for
this situation in that perhaps when children are younger they are not
sufficiently exposed to reading. Instead of reading, people are watching a
lot of television, playing Internet games, playing with all kinds of gadgets.
It is very different from when I was growing up. Then, books were
our main means of escape, of getting away from the immediate drudgery
of reality, escaping into somebody’s adventure, and learning about the
outside world. We loved libraries, many of us. We had school libraries,
and we had libraries in our districts and parishes.We went to the libraries
and so we had a constant system of borrowing the book, taking it back,
reading it and so on. Television was not so prevalent. There are very
few persons who had television and there were just so many things that
Vol. 22, No. 2 43
teachers did for us to inspire us to read.
As much as we Jamaicans are happy that we have much of our own
writing now, the exposure that we had to a lot of English and American
writing really opened our minds to the wonder of literature so we wanted
to read more. Because, in spite of the geography that was presented,
in spite of the cultural biases, in spite of how difficult it was for us to
relate to the daffodils, and so on, these writers presented good writing
to us. Writing that was imaginative and stimulating, writing that used
and organized words well. We enjoyed that so I think a lot of the love
we had for the word then and for reading was encouraged by that love.
It was also encouraged by teachers who believed in the importance of
reading for opening our minds, entertaining us, helping us to build our
vocabulary, expand our linguistic capacities, and so on. I do not think the
purpose has changed.
Literature is still important for taking us to many places, taking us
across all parts of the world, helping us to cross disciplinary borders. We
learn so much about other cultures through literature; learn about other
disciplines and other places. Literature is still important for that. I am just
sorry that many schools do not even do literature at the CSEC (CXC). In
many schools it is compulsory. In some schools it is not. We really need
to make literature compulsory in all our schools. That is something that
our Ministry of Education needs to do, to take Jamaican writing—not
just Jamaican writing but Caribbean writing—to our students so as to
help them discover themselves in books.
I studied Walcott at university. I did books like Green Days By the River,
we did a lot of V.S. Naipaul, I read Louise Bennett, Samuel Selvon, George
Lamming, Geoffrey Drayton, Jean Rhys, Vic Reid, Mervyn Morris and
many other writers. But now teachers need to look around for some of
the newer writers and take them to our Jamaican students. I think there
is a reluctance or fear—I do not know what it is—of being adventurous,
of embracing new writers, and of looking at the product, looking at their
literary production and thinking I want my students to be exposed to
this. It is now time for teachers to expand the repertoire of Jamaican

44 Journal of West Indian Literature

writing that they are taking to the students in the schools. And, while I
make the assertion that not enough Jamaican teachers in high schools are
willing to include new books on their reading lists, I really want to thank
those who do use my books especially Aunt Jen.1 Since Aunt Jen is one of
the books on the general reading list for CSEC (CXC), there are several
schools across Jamaica that use it.2
There is also a kind of misguided idea of what Jamaican culture is.
Literature helps to correct this problem. There is this idea that if people
are not writing about dancehall or writing about life in a particular space
in Jamaica then that is not Jamaican. But our Jamaican reality is really
multifaceted. There is the reality of growing up in rural Jamaica. And that
comes with a whole range of experiences that the child growing up in an
inner city area in Kingston may not know, but it is very much a part of the
Jamaican cultural landscape. We need administrators, we need teachers,
we need readers—Jamaican readers and Caribbean readers—who are
more open-minded readers and who do not delimit their interpretation
of Caribbean and, more specifically, Jamaican culture.
Jamaican writers must help to preserve a sense of who we are. We
must capture and present the true Jamaican, present our reality. We are
not a monolith; we are a composite of different persons. All Jamaicans
are not people who smoke and lie in hammocks on the beach. We have a
responsibility to tell multifaceted Jamaican stories, to create an authentic
Jamaica.
CW:You are a creative writer, lecturer, and a literary scholar. How do these multiple
identities overlap and influence one another?
PR: Where do I start? My studies in literature, of course, help me
with my own creative work. I draw on my understanding of how to read
and write about literature in my own writing. I have a sharper sense of
what happens in the development of a novel, for instance, and poetry
because of my formal studies in literature. My training in understanding
language from a linguistic point of view and understanding how language
functions helps this process. And, my facility for understanding languages

Vol. 22, No. 2 45

also tends to inform my sensibility for using language in a creative way.
They all go together in that way.
CW: At the start of Under Basil Leaves, you discuss your childhood experiences as
a writer. What were your experiences with writing in school?
PR: High school was different then because most of our teachers were
brought in from England. My high school had an English headmaster in
the 1970’s even though that was more prevalent in the 1960’s. We were
encouraged if we were doing well but we never really got close to our
teachers. As a child, I wrote stories for everybody, even boys who didn’t
want to do homework. I never talked; I was a taciturn child and young
adult. Writing recorded my thoughts. I mean, I wrote a lot so I did not
need to talk. I was extremely taciturn. Those who remember me as an
undergraduate said I never spoke. Now, I always carry a child’s voice in
my head. Maybe it is because my best memories are of childhood.
CW:You have already mentioned a few writers you read as a student, but who do you
consider your main influences as a storyteller? What other writers have impacted the way
you tell stories?What writers impress you most?
PR: As a young girl growing up in the 1970’s, I enjoyed Everard
Palmer, who is also from Hanover. Salkey. Bennett. Claude McKay. I
have never forgotten “If We Must Die” because of how powerful it was.
How forceful the poem was. How resolute. I loved the Trinidadian writer
Michael Anthony’s Green Days by the River. More recently, I enjoyed Olive
Senior, especially her prose. Also, Jean Goulborne and Earl McKenzie’s
poetry. His work is unassuming but rich and textured. Curdella Forbes—
even though she is complex her writing is rich, bold and really in a class
by itself. Mervyn Morris. Jean Breeze, who was the Head Girl at my
school. Edward Baugh.
The writer I like most is Jamaica Kincaid. She is one of the
greatest writers, and I do not understand why she has not gotten more
recognition. She has a way of just speaking things clearly in a way that
shocks and humours at the same time. Her writing can seem barefaced,
even annoying at times, but she just speaks exactly what she is saying.

46 Journal of West Indian Literature

When I say Caribbean, I must be careful. I am taking about Anglophone
writers but there are also others in Spanish, such as the Cuban writer
Nicholas Guillén. His work, I like a lot. Also Nancy Morejón. Gabriel
García Márquez. Also, there is Edwidge Danticat, the Haitian writer.
She has a simple, different story to tell, one of history, turmoil, and
disappointment. These writers have to tell their story.
CW: In other conversations you have described your grandmother’s skillfulness as a
storyteller.Would you say more about how she influenced you as a writer? What kind of
stories did she tell?
PR: My [paternal] grandmother just enjoyed recounting things and
retelling everything that happened in the district. Things that happened
to her as a young woman, a young mother. Growing up in a time during
war years when things were very difficult. Growing up as a girl with
many siblings. Marrying our grandfather who was a tailor and a farmer
and had his own idiosyncrasies.
My grandmother would find points of departure for every event in
the present to share something about her past. She would just talk. She
never told one story at a time. She always told several stories in one.
She would get to a point and stop at a crossroads, branch off, and tell
you another thing. At every juncture in any one story, something would
remind her of something else. She would branch off, tell you about that
branch, and then come back to the main story. My cousins and I talk about
that all the time, about how skillful she was in telling us several stories in
one. And, she would never forget the point at which she stopped in the
main story. She would finish this branch and then go back. I learned that
I admired that art from her. She had a way with words, with the creole,
so I learned a lot of expressions from her.
But also, again, when I was growing up, one of our pastimes at night
was to gather around adults—there were always willing adults—who
would tell us stories. They would sit and tell us Anansi stories, Big Boy
stories, and duppy stories.
That was my grandmother always telling stories. In fact, there is a
part in Aunt Jen that really is true. The last time—but of course that was
Vol. 22, No. 2 47
something that happened later in life—the last time I spoke with my
grandmother was when I went home and she took out a basket of funeral
programs. We used to say she was obsessed with funerals. She had to go
to every funeral in the district and neighboring villages. But she took out
this basket of funeral programs and she sat with me. She went through
them just to update me on who had died in the village, how they died, and
so on. I have always remembered that. And that was my last face-to-face
encounter with my grandmother. It is almost as if she had a premonition
that her funeral program would be next. She was well. She had just come
from a funeral and so she was adding this one to the collection. She was
going through and explaining them to me. But she fell ill suddenly and
we never expected she was going to die. I always thought that that was
such a significant experience that I had to include it in the book. I was
writing Aunt Jen at the time she died.
CW: It seems that some elements in your life parallel your character Sunshine’s. Like
you, she grows up in Hanover, her parents migrate to England, and she was an avid writer
as a child. How much of your writing is autobiographical?
PR: Mine is an interesting family. I am the child of parents who were
part of the migration to England so I was raised first by my maternal
grandmother and then a little bit by my paternal grandparents. But
when my father came back to Jamaica, I went to live with my father and
stepmother. My mother remained in England with a new family. I have
siblings in England and siblings in Jamaica.
So there are some aspects of Aunt Jen that are autobiographical. The
fact of my mother going abroad, living in England, my writing to her. I
wrote to her a lot. She wrote to me a lot. We had a different relationship
from the one Sunshine has with her mother. We exchanged letters a lot.
She is one of my very good friends now. I see her at least once every
year in England. I look forward to going to England and just sitting and
chatting. She chats a lot about old time Jamaica.
The whole silence that so characterizes Aunt Jen does not typify the
relationship between my mother and me. The Ma [character] in it, in some
ways, is based on my maternal grandmother, which is different from the
48 Journal of West Indian Literature
other grandmother I was talking about earlier. The other grandmother
was my paternal grandmother. But in some ways my grandmother is not
that feisty, strong-willed person that Ma is. But in some ways, because I
spent some of my early years with her, Ma is a depiction of my maternal
grandmother.
But, for the most part, Aunt Jen is a really a sort of composite of
different experiences I know that many Jamaican children go through. In
some cases, it is both parents who have gone off abroad and never looked
back at their children. That England migration period is known for that.
Many people who are in their forties, fifties, and some of them even in
their early sixties whose parents went were forgotten.
I met a man in Barbados who told me he was six when his mother
went—he is now in his seventies—and he met her when he was in his
forties. It is a Caribbean thing that goes hand in hand with migration
when parents go off and they leave their children. Some of them, for
whatever reasons, refuse to acknowledge, to admit to the people in their
new space, that they left a child in Jamaica. Some [women] do it because
they want to marry another man and they do not want the man to know
they have a child. And they never, ever look back at that child. Many
women did that. But there are also stories of couples together who did
that: left the child and never looked back at them. It is real. But that is
not my story. There are several incidents that I have just stitched together
that are taken from different people’s lives.
CW: Aunt Jen unfolds through the epistolary format.What is the role of letter writing
in your life? How does it reflect the social practice of letter writing throughout Jamaica
and the Caribbean?
PR: I grew up in an age when letter writing was what we had. Few
persons had telephones; there were no cell phones. Letter writing is very
much a part of what happens in Jamaica, particularly in rural Jamaica. I
grew up in rural Jamaica so I wrote a lot of letters to pen pals in different
parts of the country. In school we were encouraged to do that. I wrote
letters to all of my friends who lived in other parts of the island, my
aunts, and relatives; I love letter writing. I wrote many letters as a child.
Vol. 22, No. 2 49
It is sad; we are losing that. We said more when we wrote letters; I love
that part. We are no longer so expressive.
Maybe in some of the urban areas, where people have more access to
email, Skype, and various means of electronic communication, it probably
is not as predominant as it used to be. But certainly in rural Jamaica
people still rely very heavily on letter writing to communicate with their
relatives in other parts of Jamaica and there is still a large section of
this society that has relatives abroad and that is how they communicate.
People who have their relatives in the United States, in Canada, and in
England. It is the way news gets across the seas to these relatives. Family
news and news about the country. Letter writing is very important.
CW: Many of your writing deals with grief, violence, and death. At the same time,
your writing is also very funny, which differs from much of Caribbean women’s writing.
Do you make a special effort to write humorous pieces or do they happen naturally?
PR: Humour is important. I surprise myself sometimes in that I am
probably funnier than even I know. I am able to laugh about things that I
know are serious. I do not set out to make others think I am funny… it
just turns out that way. Sometimes I think I am funny yet I am seen as a
serious person. A lot of women write about tragedy, about the tragedy
of an unfaithful husband or abuser. I have not had that kind of drama and
trauma. I have no need to imagine that yet.
Death is another thing. Sometimes I think I write too much about
death. I saw it at a young age and have always been mystified by death.
It seems the older we get, the better we should understand, but I do
not. I find it extremely bothersome and unnerving. And unfair. In the
last couple of years, I have written about death a lot. Many of my poems
eulogize people. When I write a tribute, it is my way of immortalizing
them through words. It is a way of thinking through the pain of loss and
recording reasons why that person was special. Death continues to be
very painful for me.
CW:Your writing—Aunt Jen and poems like “Identity Crisis,” “Real Flowers,” and
“True Globalization” —critiques the effects of globalization.What are the major impacts

50 Journal of West Indian Literature

of globalization on Jamaican culture that you observe?
PR: The way in which it is so easy for many persons to simply do
whatever it is that they have seen on television. They dress a particular
way because this is what they have seen on television shows—for example,
the hair is coloured a particular way because this is the new fad—without
thinking of the space they occupy. Is this the way we dress? So because
we see people walking around in long boots, do we walk around in long
boots in Jamaica, too? Also, the appetite some people have for certain
foods I find to be a bit disconcerting because we have so much here. We
have such a wide variety of Jamaican fruits and vegetables, for instance.
Everything is in the grocery stores—the apples, the grapes, the plums—I
buy them sometimes, too, for variety, but I love when the vendor is there
with all those Jamaican foods. I just love them!
The world is getting so much smaller and people are exposed to
so much of what is out there because of the Internet and because so
many more people are coming from abroad and more of us are going. I
get the feeling that in Jamaica, there is a lot of “I want to be something
else other than who I am” and “I would prefer this place to look like
what other places look like.” Outside of that, the whole engineering
of this idea of globalization by the superpowers, the large metropoles,
whatever, is unfair because they make the argument that it is better for
little places like us. We get all of this talk of development all of the time,
but I do not see it. It really has nothing to do with us. They are doing
what is politically, economically—especially economically—expedient
for them, and they are the ones who are benefitting. I see them coming,
and I see them taking. It is just another name for what has been happening
for a long time.
When we had our bauxite, for instance. The people who came
and bought our bauxite at low cost would have said this is all part of
globalization, we are getting to know each other, we are supporting each
other. But Jamaica was once the world’s largest producer of bauxite so
we should be a far wealthier country than we are from such a valuable
resource that we had. There is too much underdevelopment in Jamaica

Vol. 22, No. 2 51

still for a country that once produced so much in such a valuable resource,
for a country that has so much in bananas, a country that has the most
expensive coffee. Wherever you go in the world, everybody knows that
the Blue Mountains have the finest coffee, the most sought-after coffee.
Who is it that is making money from our coffee? And we say in this
wonderful global exchange, people come from all over the world and
they get to know Jamaica and Jamaica is closer to the rest of the world,
but who is really making money from it?
This idea is pushed by the people who are in a position to push it. In a
real sense it is true we cannot avoid globalization, which is why we need
to equip ourselves to deal with this constant interfacing with people of
other cultures. We need to teach foreign languages even though, if our
students really know English well, that is perhaps what they really need
because everybody else is learning English. But, we need to respond to
globalization in terms of the language and technology that we have, in
terms of how our people are trained, from a linguistic point of view, and
all the other skills that they need to need to cope. We are being washed
by a tide, and, yes, I do have a problem with it.
CW:The natural world is a focal point for much of your poetry and your characters
are often impacted by place. Poems such as “Agent of Degeneration” and “I Remember
When” suggest you are concerned about a healthy environment. How important are these
kinds of issues to you?
PR: When I go home to the country everything is green, lush, and
nice. In Kingston, I love the University Campus. The trees are beautiful;
it has lovely grass, there is lush green shrubbery around us and so on. It
is so much of what Jamaica can be! Jamaica is so naturally beautiful, yet I
am very aware of decay happening rapidly around us. As much as possible,
government and citizens must do something to keep the infrastructure
intact and add to the beauty of this place.
“Agent of Degeneration” is about one of the specific places I have seen
in decline in beauty. It is about the aesthetic decline in Liguanea because
of a specific operation, the newly-built U.S. Embassy. It is environmental
degradation. It has attracted unnecessary, unpleasant activities. Since it
52 Journal of West Indian Literature
has been built, there is a new subculture that has come up in Liguanea,
and it really upsets me. Now, there are people who are hustling to make
money from people coming to get visas. They are selling parking space,
they are now out there selling their little wares. That is what happened
in New Kingston in the area around the previous U.S. Embassy. There
was a whole new form of social decay that just crept in along with it and
it bothers me. There was a ghetto near there but it stayed there. Now it
is coming right across the street and in your face. You never had people
coming out and hustling in Liguanea, and it bothers me. It is a kind of
sacrifice that we have to make. So you want a U.S. visa? Then be prepared
that all of this is what is going to come into your space. You take a visa
paired with the ghettoizing of this place. You take a visa paired with the
pollution of this place. The line is awful. It is disgusting. They have lots of
space in there. And it goes on Monroe Road so they could have at least
put the line on Monroe Road to the side so it is not in the mainstream
traffic and the heat. If you go in that place, there is an open beautiful
grass space in there so they could put in there somewhere for people to
sit instead of having people lined up on the side of the road. It is awful,
it is degrading. Liguanea used to be a quiet, sleepy little place, which is
evolving in this way.
CW: In “Children of the MountainWoman” and “Aunt Jen” you feature maroon voices
and voices of their descendants. Do you consider maroon heritage to be an important
aspect of your work and contemporary Jamaican culture in general?
PR: I believe that my grandmother on my mother’s side was a
maroon. This idea is based on my impression of her just from the physical
point of view. The memories I have of her are of a woman who was
not very far down the line as an African woman. I keep trying to get
her birth certificate. My mother’s parents were much older than my
father’s parents. If my grandparents were born in the 1880’s or 1890’s,
then it means, or so I think, that their parents were slaves, my great
grandparents. That is something I have always believed. And, when I look
at how thoroughbred black my grandmother was, she was close to slaves
somehow, maybe to runways slaves. Because of that physical aspect of
Vol. 22, No. 2 53
things, I think I have a maroon heritage somewhere.
I love the concept or theory of maroonage so I speak to maroonage
a lot. Cultural maroonage, I like very much. I think so much of who we
are as a people, after 50 years of independence is the result of one form
or another, is of maroonage. There are so many African-derived cultural
forms—food, dances, religion—that we have preserved from our
ancestors. Many aspects of African cultural heritage have been preserved
through maroonage, whether from literary maroonage from writers who
have embraced various aspects of African heritage in their writing or
from people who have preserved aspects of the African religious heritage
in the broadest sense in their everyday lives. I believe firmly in maroon
heritage, not just in terms of people who are still settled in various parts
of maroon settlements but also in the philosophic, cultural sense of
maroonage.
CW: Some of your most powerful work often depicts the lives of everyday, working
people, particularly characters in Aunt Jen, the “Peanut Vendor,” and “Monologue of a
Papine MarketVendor.”Why do you portray characters such as these?
PR: Many persons love “Monologue of a Papine Market Vendor,”
which is the reason that when I did October Afternoon, one of the reviewers
who was very familiar with Under Basil Leaves said, “please put it back
in October Afternoon.” So, now, you notice it is there. I got an email, just
yesterday, from somebody who said thank you for that Papine Market
vendor poem. She is an archeologist and she says she has done a lot of
work on the Gibraltar Camp lands right here on the Mona campus.3
Apparently, through her research she discovered that the soldiers and the
people who came to that camp developed strong relationships with the
Papine vendors. So, she thought, oh this is a wonderful poem in praise of
the Papine market vendors.
I gravitate toward these characters because I grew up in the country.
I grew up in rural Jamaica, and I think that the finest people I know are
those old people I would meet on the way to school, at church, just
walking around in the village. They had so much wisdom. They had so
much warmth.They just seemed to know everything about life, you know.
54 Journal of West Indian Literature
You could go to any one of your neighbors, say “I have a headache,” and
they could tell you what to do for it. Those were the people who talked
to you about making sure you got a good education and making sure you
ate right. Eating right for them was—they knew—that you had to have
your starches and your meats and so on. They were just warm people!
All the women were mothers and grandmothers, not in the biological
sense only. A grandmother was everybody’s grandmother. A mother was
everybody’s mother and so on. I carry them. I carry all sorts of people
from years of growing up in rural Jamaica in my head. When I think of
Jamaicans, those are some of the first people that come to mind. I do
not think of the violence and of those people who are less representative
of us because they have gone off the path for some reason. When I go
to the country now, people are warm, people are friendly, people are
kind, people are helpful. They give you their breadfruit, their guineps,
their naseberries. That is the Jamaica I know. I have a real heart for those
people, so many of them. Maybe that is why.Those are the real Jamaicans.
My poem, “Memories of My Childhood Village” in October Afternoon
is about working class women. It reads, “overindulgent grandmothers,
boisterous washerwomen by the river….tenders of vines and callaloo
shrubs, patient multi-tasking mothers….” All those women…and I
could write a counterpart of that to men. Different kinds of men. Those
people worked, they worked hard. They earned their living, they kept
their families together, they fed their families, and they sent their children
to school. So many of our successful Jamaican men and women now are
people who grew up in rural Jamaica with these kinds of women around
them who took care of the village.
CW: Several of your poems depict women who have been exploited, abused, or betrayed
by men while other privilege women’s voices and celebrate female achievements. Why do
you think these patterns emerge in your writing?
PR: As someone who teaches literature and someone who teaches
a lot of different feminist theories, post-colonial theories, I am very
conscious of the ways in which women’s voices need to be heard and
need to be privileged. Some of that is keeping with the academic ideas—
Vol. 22, No. 2 55
the intellectual ideas—that I carry in my head. I find ways of giving them
expression through poetry. Some of it comes from the lived experience
in which I have seen, have encountered, have met women who have
some of those experiences in which I know that they are really being
oppressed, whether emotionally, psychologically, financially, that they
are experiencing the effects of male dominance and oppression. It is all
in keeping with all of that.
CW: Do you consider your work to be feminist? Do you feel there is a kind of feminism
that is distinctly Caribbean? Jamaican?
PR: Feminism comprises a range of useful branches of theories for
understanding thinking through male/female relationships and theories,
as depicted in literature, for instance.
Yes, I think there is a strong feminist aspect to my work. Even in
Sunshine. The way that Sunshine develops to become this independent
strong woman. Ma is a strong black woman. A strong Caribbean woman.
I deliberately want my work to be read through the lens of whatever
branch of feminism you want to use but, typically, black feminism and
maybe pulling from Caribbean feminism. Sunshine is conscious of who
she is, very proud of who she is. She believes in asserting herself, in
charting her own course regardless of how difficult it may be to do that,
in expressing her own subjectivity, exercising agency. That is the kind
of Caribbean woman I know for the most part, but it is a feminism that
spans—or draws on—black feminism as espoused by someone like
Patricia Hill Collins, who talks about feminism among black American
women. It includes ideas of pronatalism, ideas of the family—the
strength of the family. I am not looking at a kind of North American,
radical feminism which rejects and minimizes the importance of family,
giving birth, nurturing children, and so on. The Caribbean feminism
that I assert is one which respects some traditional values that we derived
from our African heritage, which is similar to much of what Collins and
Barbara Christian, to some extent, espoused in their understanding of
black feminism.

56 Journal of West Indian Literature

 CW: In Jamaica, women now generally have more education than men, and, yet,
Jamaica remains very patriarchal and women are often victims of extreme violence. How
to female writers shape and influence Jamaican culture in regards to gender roles?
PR: It is important to recognize at the core, men and women are
different. We are similar in our need for each other and need to build
each other up. We must understand that any attempt to redeem men in a
more positive light must also include women. Any kind of nation building
or success of region is dependent on that idea. We, as women, cannot
embrace forms of feminism that reject men, in the score way that we do
not want men to devalue us.
I believe in the idea that we should dispense of stereotypical gender
roles, and that women and men can do the same things. It is time to move
across traditional borders. I believe in strengthening, not in destroying.
It is the responsibility of writers to speak to the ability of women to rise
above circumstances. Women can triumph over any disappointments,
any tragedy. I really believe in the strength of women to rise above any
circumstances, failures, and disappointment, with or without help from
a man.
Women need to heal our hurts, chart our courses, and depend on
ourselves. If that includes men, fine. If not, that is fine, too. And I do not
know if admitting that we need each other means that we are submitting
to patriarchy. It is unfortunate that many women still suffer abuse at
the hands of their men, but we do not embrace good behaviours, and
Caribbean people must continue to condemn these things when they
happen.

Notes
1 Dr. Ramsay also thanks “a number of persons in Universities in North America,
Italy and Germany who have embraced the book and teach it as part of their
Caribbean Literature Courses, as well as some who are currently including it as
part of their scholarly research project.” She continues,“Sometimes the academy
can exclude writers but I thank those persons who see value in my work. I thank
those persons who have translated Aunt Jen to different languages—German,
Italian and Spanish is in progress-- and taken it to non-English speaking readers.

Vol. 22, No. 2 57

That is an honour.”
2 The acronym CSEC stands for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate,
which is used to document post-secondary students’ academic achievement. To
earn the certificate, students take a series of exams in academic and/or vocational
subjects. The CXC is the Caribbean Examinations Council, the governing body that
administers testing and award certificates to qualifying students.
3 The Gibraltar Camp was an evacuation camp set up by the British for
approximately 1,500 Gibraltarian civilians during World War II. Evacuees
from Gibraltar were sent to Jamaica beginning in 1940 to seek refuge from
the Nazis, and they were later joined by about 250 Jewish refugees and others
from Europe. The Gibraltarians returned home in 1944. As indicated above,
the camp was located on the Mona Estate, which bordered the Papine Market
and now houses the University of the West Indies Mona. For more on the
Gibraltar Camps, see Rebecca Tortello’s Pieces of the Past and S. F. Brown’s The
History and Heritage of the Mona Campus.

58 Journal of West Indian Literature

MILT MOISE is currently pursuing an M.Phil in English at the UWI
Cave Hill campus. His research interests include epistolary fiction and
metafiction, diasporic fiction, the Caribbean short story, the novel, and
dramatic television as a narrative medium. His research project is an
exploration of self-referentiality and voice in Anglophone Caribbean
fiction.

KIM ROBINSON-WALCOTT is currently the editor of Caribbean

Quarterly and Jamaica Journal. Her Ph.D thesis was published as
the award-winning Out of Order! Anthony Winkler and White West
Indian Writing , and her work has appeared in Sargasso, Smallaxe and
JWIL. She also writes poetry and short stories and was the winner of
the Commonwealth Short Story competition in 2005, and published a
children’s book, Dale’s Mango Tree in 1992.

LOMARSH ROOPNARINE is an Associate Professor of Latin

American and Caribbean Studies at Jackson State University, U.S.A.
He has authored Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Resistance and Accommodation
(University of the West Indies Press 2007) as well as over three dozen
articles in peer-reviewed regional and international journals.

CARRIE J. WALKER is an Associate Professor of English at Concordia

University in Portland, Oregon. Her Ph.D examined the resurgence
of the epistolary novel among women writers across the Black Atlantic,
and focused on Sindiwe Magona, Nozipo Maraire, and Paulette Ramsay,
arguing that these authors use the epistolary genre both to intervene in
public debates on women’s human rights and to challenge the universalist
principles that underpin human rights laws and assumptions regarding
citizenship. She held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of
Nevada-Reno and a Fulbright award in Jamaica 2011-2012, and has
taught at Bucknell University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and
Nebraska Wesleyan University.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.