Thoughts on Writing from Exile

“You realize you live in Paradise?” “Only because you’ve told me a hundred times.” “But it’s sad. Sad as Ireland.” He looked battered; his shoulders were hunched over as if he carried all the unredeemable sins of his race. We are not so different, she thought. Ghosts stood in his way; she could see that. “Is it Paradise you’re looking for?” she asked. “Some unspoiled place to start all over from scratch?” “I used to.” “What happened?” “The usual. I got shipwrecked.” “I thought you had to be shipwrecked to find paradise, that only castaways got that kind of chance.” “You’re very wise. And cynical.”

—The True History of Paradise

The Caribbean’s perennial quest for rescue from the many shipwrecks that created our diaspora is wistfully and elegantly articulated in an extending circle of tribal flotsam that shifts through the tides of Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s first novel, The True History of Paradise. Although a variety of migrations have contributed to what we know as the Caribbean, catastrophe is common to each. Though never a cynical book, its repeated theme of cruel dislocation reminds us that it is as fanciful to believe that broken threads of human stories will rearrange themselves into a weave of comfortable social harmony as to presume that sailors lost at sea will wash up on the shores of paradise.

The True History of Paradise begins with a quote from V. S. Naipaul: “The history of these islands can never satisfactorily be told.” And so I found myself at times digressing to consider the relevance of these words to this new work, and the possible influence of Naipaul on other younger writers. If Naipaul’s observations, sometimes pessimistic, are often uncomfortably acerbic, maybe Margaret Cezair-Thompson accepts this as characteristic of her region, one she describes as “not a place of subtle light or subtle reckoning.”

When I was nineteen I was assigned A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul as required reading for my undergraduate course in the English department of the University of the West Indies. Before that I had studied only Shakespeare, the Romantics, Jane Austen and the Brontës, and then my favorite book, Wuthering Heights. Though I knew every nuance of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains by heart and had been brought up at home on a diet of the works of our local literary journal Focus, which featured our early Jamaican pioneer writers, in school I was taught only the voices of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Moors. My school days had already created a disjunction in which my formal training reflected one culture and my private recreation another—an ambiguity that would set many a writer on a path of literary schizophrenia.

Although I was not from Naipaul’s island, Trinidad, as a Jamaican I recognized the people in Mr. Biswas’s world, and the characters on Miguel Street. They were familiar because they were Caribbean. I knew the small-fisted clutch of social meanness that British colonial snobbery engenders in us. I was familiar with the despair of lost cultures that hunker down in secret and with the vanity of trying to compete in a world that will never belong to us. I understood the interminable hours and parts that were offered up by the mechanic as he sought to stop the tappets from knocking, to make a smoother ride, a better car, by assembling and reassembling the second-hand, third-hand, mashed-up and obsolete transport—the gift that was his karma. I knew the vanity of thinking, the futility of serious conversation, the narrowness of social verandahs, and the inaccessibility of far horizons. I felt the fragility of hope and the imitative instinct of insecurity, the self-treachery of religion, and so I understood Biswas having flabby calves.

But for the first time I felt that knowing these things, formally studying a Caribbean book in which I recognized characters from my own culture, now actually gave me authority. And for the first...