From This Place

Geography. What does it mean to write from a place? Are we obligated, as writers, to constantly look back to those who came before us in order to validate what we are writing now? These questions felt like a persistent hum in the classrooms of the 2014 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop in Barbados and the UK. They were both intriguing inquiries and subtle challenges. How far could we walk away from origin, from identity, from family, in our writing? What would we then be walking towards? In May in Barbados, then again in October in London, two separate groups of Callaloo students found themselves grappling with similar questions. Together, we asked each other what it meant to write from the place where we stood, and questioned the distances imagination could travel.

It was difficult to ignore what it might mean to write while in the United Kingdom. The Brixton Cultural Archives in London, where the UK workshop met, houses the long and forgotten history of black people in Britain. It is the only institution of its kind in the country. Daily, the London workshop and I held class just above an exhibition on the first floor called “Re-imagine: Black Women in Britain.” Every day for a week, my students and I walked past a black-and-white image of a solemn, proud black woman caught in sepia tone. Each time I passed her, I couldn’t help imagining the image we made: two kinds of women, two kinds of histories, two kinds of lives crossing paths in a building that was the culmination of a thirty-three-year-struggle for its existence.

We build to stake permanent claim on a segment of land, to affix into dirt the physical evidence of who we are, and who we aim to become. I am of this place, and I will spring from this place. Look and acknowledge that I exist, this place is proof.

On the way to the campus of the University of the West Indies, where the Barbados workshop was held, I passed a collection of quaint, brightly colored boutique shops called Chattel Village. It was easy to ignore the name, to pivot into the trap door of forgetfulness and marvel instead at the loveliness of the manicured grounds, the neatly painted verandas, the welcoming signs that beckoned customers to step inside, to sit down, to make themselves at home. But in the classroom, it became more difficult to look away. Chattel: an item of personal property that is not real estate; definition two: a slave.

In both Barbados and London, I asked my students the same question: What is at stake in your writing? Passing that faded black-and-white photograph in London and walking past Chattel Village, the question echoed. What is at stake in what we write? How much does where we come from matter to the prose we construct? Are writers bound by a loyalty to the past and to the forgotten? Can we climb out of history’s hold, move away from geography, and simply write—untethered? The stories I read, gathered around a table with those talented, diligent students, grappled with the implications of history, the weighted imaginative space that geography created, the freedom that sprang from knowing the past, and the freedom that felt stunted from that same knowledge. No two responses were the same. The answers were bound up in so many other things: home, family, identity, sense of belonging, and personal interest.

The following short stories were written by gifted fiction writers who not only heard my questions, but also asked their own. In the next pages, you will find writing that contends with both national history and personal truth. The writers, no matter the subject, have been unafraid to give their imagination free reign to roam across a vast territory of their own making.

As you read, be aware of the community that gathered around these published writers and encouraged and suggested and questioned all in the name of strengthening the writing you read. In closing, I extend a “Thank you!” to all the participants of...