Nadia Ellis Russell: In her write-up on you in Daryl Dance’s Fifty Caribbean Writers, Evelyn O’Callaghan spoke of your homecoming from brief studies at the University of Washington. Can you comment on what made it difficult for you to return?
Erna Brodber: I was in America at a time in 1968 when it was right to be in America. Black Power, black notions, dealing with a whole range of people from the African diaspora where I was in Seattle. I was meeting all kinds of black people from Jamaica, all these African-American people, Africans. And a lot of things to think about. Martin Luther King died the year I was there. Yeah, very vibrant.
And coming back here with an afro. Jamaica couldn’t deal with that at all. Jamaica couldn’t deal with that at all. And I was just shocked. Just plain shocked, because I hadn’t seriously worked or dealt with Jamaica. And I was coming back to being Jamaican and I just didn’t know, and I know now what I should have done--I should have been in high-heeled shoes, I should have been wearing mascara and my hair definitely should have been straightened. But I wasn’t doing those things, because it just wasn’t me.
And they buffeted me, they insulted me. In the Jamaican community I just was laughed at--like, I remember walking on the street in Highgate and people just sort of looking at your head and kind of laughing.
I remembering doing a piece of work on abandonment of children, going into an office, a childcare office, and the ladies could hardly let me sit in there. I mean they were so unkind. And one of them said to me, "Missis me ‘ear she you come from university. Mi never know seh a so them carry head a university." But I lived to sit on a panel that interviewed her to come into the university, and she had an afro, because by then it was fashionable.
NER: All three of your novels so far have been concerned with healing. In Jane and Louisa, Nellie slowly reintegrates psychically as she reintegrates with her rural community. In Myal and Louisiana, there are similar scenarios. What do you think Jamaica needs healing from?
EB: I’m not talking about Jamaica, I’m talking about black people in Jamaica and the diaspora.
One of the most important conferences I went to (I don’t know what has come of it, it must have been too emotional for all of us) was a conference I went to in Zanzibar in November. It was a conference of people who are involved in grassroots work, and it drew from all over Africa and the diaspora.
And my position, what we came up with, again, is that we need to talk. And we can’t keep skirting the issue of who sold whom--it just has to be discussed. And we have to learn to say we’re hurt and, "You have to listen to me, you’ve hurt me, you’ve got to listen to me, and now we have to sit down and find out where do we go from here." So yes, I didn’t even know [the healing theme] was so clear, but yes.
There are things that black people have, I believe, for instance, and I’m not being original, there is a Dutch West Indian, Edward Blyden, (you have to look at Blyden if you are doing the Caribbean), who talked about what we of black color, coming out of Africa, have to offer. And it could be a spirituality--you’ve found this in the Négritude people, it’s a kind of spirituality. Let them go (he’s writing in 1878), let them go, let them come into Africa, let them settle, let them set up this and that. They are good at that. They can build the material world. But let us spend some time working on the spiritual because the spiritual is necessary and they will come to us for that.
So following on from that I believe that there is something that black people have to offer the world--something coming out of their experience. I don’t believe that we were sent here in the Caribbean, that millions of us were taken from our place just for nothing; it has a reason. We have something to teach the world. Something that is our own experience, something that others don’t have. For me the business is to find what that is.
NER: And you think this is important particularly for Caribbean intellectuals to acknowledge?
EB: No, I don’t deal with, I don’t deal with the word "Caribbean." I was talking to them but it’s not a concept I work with. I am "diaspora;" I’m "African diaspora." And I can see the point of Indian diaspora, too, and I’m very capable of dealing with Indians from the point of view of diaspora. And I would like to. They have so much to teach me. And I hope they think I have something to teach them, too.
NER: But why not Caribbean?
EB: It’s personal, I suppose. "Caribbean" is nice and creole and mixed and all that, but I’m just not there. Probably I’ll be there one day, but I don’t believe the point is reached yet, where what it is that we have of Africa has been honed and has been given to the world. The particular experience of capture, transportation, the auction block, working in the fields, the emancipation, I don’t believe that that experience has been looked at, has been worked through, and we have learned what we’re supposed to learn from it yet. So I’m not jumping to Caribbean nor "Out of Many One People." There’s just so much more to give that we haven’t given as yet.
'We have something to teach the world'