Guilty as charged, though she had not charged me, though she had not known of that incident with my grandmother when my grandmother’s age was all the evidence I needed to judge her, to determine what she could do and could not do. How she should live.
I was twenty-two, recently returned to my island home with my newly minted bachelor’s degree from college in America, a Miss Know-It-All brimming with the confidence, the hubris of youth. My grandfather had died just weeks before, and I had come to visit my grandmother, to commiserate with her, to console her. How will she manage now that her partner in life for more than seventy years is not here to help her? There was a scattering of people across her front yard, all men—workmen, I could see as I came closer, in work clothes, rumpled shirts, stained and frayed work pants. Had they come to clear out my grandparents’ house, sent by scavengers imagining my grandmother helpless, left to the mercy of charities?
Hearing one of the men announce my arrival, my grandmother popped her head out of the second-floor window. “Oh, it’s you, Elizabeth,” she called out gaily. “Come, come up!” And before I could answer, the cushions from her morris chairs came sailing to the ground, barely missing me. I could hear her chastising the workmen who had thrown them down. “Idiots! You almost hit my granddaughter on her head.”
I joined in. “Wait!” I yelled at them. “Stop! I’m coming up. Granny, don’t let them do this.”
It took my grandmother seconds to understand we were speaking at cross-purposes. She wanted the men to throw out the cushions; they were old, smelly, she explained to me. She was having new ones made; she was refurbishing her house.
“You think because I’m eighty-two I don’t want to live like you want to live? I have life in front of me, just like you.”
She was starting over. She was interested in new things as I was interested in new things. I had judged her by her outsides; I had done as my mother had feared the world would do.
But by her outsides, my mother fit perfectly in the company of the women in her club. Most of them dyed their hair to cover the gray. For years my mother dyed her hair too, but after the chemo made her bald, she was afraid of putting chemicals on her head. Yet even gray, snow-white in fact, she still looked younger than her ninety years. Her hips had spread, her arms were fleshy, the left arm perpetually swollen from the aftereffects of the surgery to remove her cancerous left breast. The varicose veins on her legs, the result of fourteen pregnancies, were blue and knotted, but her face was as smooth and as wrinkle-free as that of a woman thirty years her junior.
The mortician at the funeral parlor found it hard to believe she was ninety. “Not a wrinkle,” she remarked. It was true. Except for the gutters that ran down the sides of her nose and her mouth, gutters I have inherited, there was little on my mother’s face to mark her age.
“A woman who would tell her age would tell you everything,” my mother once said. “Beware of that woman. She is a gossip; she cannot be trusted.”
I am a writer. My business is to tell everything. My siblings are wary; they say I cannot be trusted with the family’s secrets. They watch me carefully when I am in the company of others and the conversation turns to our family. I get a swift kick under the table, an elbow jabbed into my sides, if I embark on what they think should be a private family matter. Keep skeletons in the closet. Don’t wash your dirty linen in public. Aphorisms they live by, but here I am, telling all, writing the all I think is all.
I do not share my sisters’ obsession with privacy. Obsession is probably too strong a word; conviction would be more accurate. I do not share my sisters’ conviction that it is foolhardy to expose oneself to the world. My sisters will allow the world to see only what they want people to see. This attitude, some say, is the legacy of slavery. They point to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask.”
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
Perhaps there is some validity to this position, but the colonial experience suggests an alternative. In the colonies we were taught to love and admire the Mother Country. Even Caliban grudgingly admits to Prospero: Thou . . . madest much of me / . . . and then I loved thee. So perhaps this compulsion to dissimulate is the legacy of Victorian mores we willingly and enthusiastically mimicked—though the colonial officials we imitated were themselves mimics, sycophantic aspirants to the class of their superiors in England.
My sisters speak to me, however, of discretion. It is, they say, citing Shakespeare, the better part of valor. Yet I think it takes no little courage to open oneself to the world, to suffer the slings and arrows, so to speak, in the quest of knowing and being one’s true self.
The professions I have chosen, or have chosen me, suit me perfectly. I am a professor; I am a fiction writer. Both require me to speak the truth, to make clear what I think, what I believe, what I know. I think omission is as dishonest as commission. The thing deliberately unsaid is as much a distortion of the truth as a falsehood deliberately uttered.
Some of my colleagues in academia say that my role as a professor is to help students discover what they, the students, think. They object to a classroom arrangement where the professor stands at a lectern or sits at a desk, with students in a row in front of her. They find the circle more democratic, more conducive to learning. Put students in a circle, some of my colleagues say, and they begin to talk to each other; they begin to learn that their views are not the only ones; they begin to see alternatives.
I do not disagree, but I think there is merit in the etymology of my title. I am a professor. Profiteri: to lay claim to, to declare openly. I am supposed to profess something, and the something I am supposed to profess is a result of years of study and analysis. I have tried the circle; it works sometimes, but not always. Of the various insights attributed to Steve Jobs, the one I most connect to is his position regarding focus groups. Walter Isaacson ends his biography of the man in Jobs’s own words:
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
I’m not so unbending. I believe that my role as an educator is to lead out as well as to lead in: ex, the Latin for out; ducere, meaning to lead. I want to bring out the talents my students are capable of realizing, but I do so by teaching them what I know and why I have come to the conclusions I profess. I talk, I reveal, I empty myself; I share with them my knowledge, my convictions, my doubts. I want them to take the baton I pass on to them—my years of study and reflection—and run with it into the future. I want them to surpass me, to add their own thoughts, their own analyses to mine, and arrive at conclusions I have not yet conceived. I want them to challenge me. I admit I am impatient with some educators who seem to put methods before subject matter. In a recent respectable journal focused on pedagogy, a professor advised teachers to take a class in theater, as he had done. His acting skills improved his teaching performance, the professor gushed. But I have seen too many teachers use the classroom as a theater where their students are a captive audience and the instructors get to perform on stage, telling jokes, relating stories from their experiences, commenting on current news or popular TV shows their students watch. These teachers claim they are simply using a method to engage bored students, but too often the bell rings for the end of class and little content has filtered through.
Perhaps learning a craft can improve one’s skills, but I don’t believe it can make you an artist, no more than I believe that imparting theories and practices can make you a master teacher. I don’t promise my students in my creative writing workshops that I can turn them i
nto talented writers. I promise to teach them the craft; I promise to teach them all I know; I promise to show them styles and techniques of our most successful writers. I tell them the talent will come from them, from their unique way of seeing the world. I share the view of Martin, a colleague of the fictive writer and teacher John Coetzee (is he really fictive?) in J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical novel Summertime. In response to a question about John Coetzee’s aptitude for teaching, Martin comments: “I would say that one teaches best what one knows best and feels most strongly about.” He goes on to be critical of John Coetzee, who, he says, “knew a fair amount about a range of things, but not a great deal about anything in particular,” and whose “depth of his involvement [in his subjects] did not come out in his teaching.” This, I take it, is J.M. Coetzee’s reflection on his effectiveness as a teacher, and the importance he places on both knowledge and passion.
I think teacher education programs will be best served by grounding prospective teachers in the subjects they intend to teach. I think a thorough knowledge of their subjects will serve them a million times better than all the strategies of delivery. I think teachers are effective when they view themselves as students of their subjects, motivated by a continuous desire to learn more. The passion a teacher has for her subject shines through and students get infected by her enthusiasm in much the same way as one catches a cold when one’s neighbor sneezes and you have the misfortune of droplets of the virus spraying on you. I fell in love with T.S. Eliot because I got infected by my literature professor’s passion for his poetry. She sat at her desk the entire semester, never standing, never moving from her place even once. The notion of forming a circle with us would never have entered her head, nor would the idea of engaging us with juicy stories about contemporary events. She was a nun, more or less cloistered in her convent. She rarely watched TV, and never read the tabloids. Yet she infected me so thoroughly I continue to read Eliot to this day.
It is my passion to discover who I am, and why I am here in this world, that drives me to write fiction. And I am convinced that discovering the who and the why can happen only if I tell all.
One of my most influential mentors was the African American writer John Oliver Killens. I didn’t always agree with his theories about fiction writing, but this one stuck with me. He said to me: “You will not be a writer, Elizabeth, until you are willing to take off your clothes at high noon in the middle of the town square.” That admonition hovered over me as I tried to write my first novel.
I was in my late thirties at the time, one of the many beneficiaries of the hard-won victories of the women’s movement. Much had changed for women but so rapidly that I found myself buffeted by waves that pushed me out to the wide-open sea before dashing me back onshore, my skin scraping against the coarse sand. I wanted to be a free and independent woman, earning my own livelihood, charting my own life, and yet my sense of self, my identity as a woman, was inextricably tied to my ability to fulfill the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker that had defined success for my mother and for so many women before her.
The women of my generation were in unchartered waters. We were pioneers, crossing seas and landscapes our mothers had never traveled. I had gone to university and then on to graduate school. I had earned a PhD in English at New York University’s School of Arts and Science, at that time a rarity for women, especially black women. In fact, I was one of only two women of color in my graduating class, the other an immigrant like me, but from a privileged caste in India. My mother, on the other hand, had barely finished secondary school. Then, too, I was working full time as an assistant professor at Medgar Evers College, a unit of the City University of New York.
With the exception of one year, my mother had not worked outside of the home. It was not her choice: she was terminated—fired—when she got pregnant with her second child. She would have been fired when she got pregnant with me, her first biological child, but her boss liked her and found a loophole to keep her as his assistant. When the swelling in her stomach began to show the second time, his hands were tied. There was a rule in the colonial government that married women should not be permitted to work, particularly married women with children. On the face of it, the ruling appeared to be protective of women: men, the logic went, should assume responsibility for taking care of their wives and children. But in fact the prohibition against married women in the workforce ensured that men would continue to hold the reins of power.
Raising eleven children probably would have made working outside the home difficult, if not impossible, for my mother. Still, she did not have to raise us by herself. There were neighbors in our town who looked out for us, who had permission to reprimand us, to set us straight in her absence. There were relatives who lived nearby, next door or a bicycle ride, a bus ride away. I had no such assistance raising two boys, my son and my ex-husband’s five-year-old son. I was an immigrant living in a strange land among strange people. With the exception of my friend Mary Taylor, it would be years before I would find American friends I could count on to help me from the kindness of their hearts.
So there were fundamental differences between my mother’s life and mine. I resented the obstacles in my way as I tried to climb the ladder in a university system still dominated by men, and yet I was hounded by my failure to measure up to the standards my mother had set as a homemaker, wife, and mother. When I first found the courage to dare to conceive I could write a novel, my immediate thought was that I would write about a woman facing my dilemma, a woman trying to straddle the demands of work and home. But each time I began to write this novel, I found myself stalled. I couldn’t write about this woman, not because I had not experienced her life, but because I didn’t know the woman who was narrating the story; I didn’t know who I was.
I had been taught in school to love all things British. Everything I knew about the geography of my island had been taught to me by my father and grandfather, both hunters and lovers of nature. But I had studied the geography of the British Empire, the other places the British had colonized, lessons intended to reinforce the myths of British superiority. “The sun never sets” on British soil, Churchill had boasted. Then, too, I knew next to nothing about writers from the Caribbean region. V.S. Naipaul was just being published when I was entering high school and his early works did little to counter the prevailing view the colonizer had of us: we were a buffoonish people, mimic men, the butt of jokes, the stuff of farce and satire.
Incredibly, I was nineteen, in college, in the US, before I truly understood the extent to which slavery had existed on my island. Those were the heady days of the civil rights movement. African Americans were digging into their past and they retrieved mine. I was horrified to learn about the cruelty of the British, for what I knew about our island’s history was what they had taught me: they had come to our island and blessed us with their culture and largesse. Like Caliban, we were expected to be grateful.
I remember cringing when my high school teacher in Trinidad, a white European, read to the class those lines by Prospero chastising Caliban for his ingratitude:
I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.
Could it be true? Was it possible that before the British came, my people were savages who had no discernible language of their own, no words to make their meaning known? Should I be grateful to the British for teaching me? I was a student in a school the British had founded; they had sent their teachers to educate me. But I had not yet read George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile. I had yet to fully understand the influence of perspective, of point of view. Years later I would tell Caliban’s side of the story. In my novel Prospero’s Daughter, which I purposely set the year before our independence from England, Carlos allows me to
say how I felt to be torn between gratitude and resentment, at one moment admiring the achievements of the British people and full of appreciation for their contributions to my island—the systems of government, education, and law they established—and at the next burning with anger for the power they wielded over our lives, leaving us unsure of our identity, doubting the value of our culture, the relevance of our history.
Still, I fell in love with British literature, my attachment having roots similar to the Roman adulation of the cultural achievements of the Greeks. The Romans had conquered Greece with their mighty physical prowess, but ironically it was the Greeks with their philosophical tracts, scientific experiments, artistic achievements, and great works of literature who were the real colonizers, shaping the ideas and creative arts of the ancient Roman world.1
I was raised with the literature of the English colonizers. I was familiar of course with our folktales, but my exposure was limited to the times when my family went to the countryside on holiday and I had occasion to hear our storytellers recount them. We lived on the outskirts of our capital, the hub of the colonial government ministries, not far from where the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul lived. I went to the girls equivalent of his boys school in the city. We both had a British education in the tradition of the best British public schools.
Today, the English poet John Keats consoles me when a melancholy fit falls upon me and I am buffeted by the illogic of the transience of this life. Wordsworth reminds me of the beauties of nature; I laugh with Chaucer as he pokes fun at the follies of the church. Shakespeare never ceases to teach me about our human condition, our triumphs and our flaws. I revel in the music of his poetry, the magic of his imagery. Because of Jane Austen, I can count on one hand the people who still call me by my childhood name Betty. I was eleven when I first read Pride and Prejudice. Until then, my family and friends addressed me as Betty, the diminutive of my real name. But I had identified with Elizabeth Bennet. She was no diminutive, neither a diminutive Bennet nor a diminutive woman. She stood up to her father who was easily able to belittle her mother and sisters with his witty, sarcastic tongue. I admired Elizabeth’s spunk and independence and wanted to be just like her, so I forbade my parents and siblings from calling me Betty. I was to be Elizabeth from then on.
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