NER: Were you self-conscious about being a creative writer by the time you started publishing?
EB: Well I didn’t call myself that, no. I only did it. I was around people who were writing. Kamau Brathwaite used to show me stuff that he did; Hazel Campbell was my very good friend and I was very supportive of her writing. So I was around these people who called themselves writers. And I did the reading for them.
So when I discovered this story, which I had written on a questionnaire, I said, "Well let me see whether I’m like my friends." But it didn’t say to me that I was like my friends, it just said to me that I could communicate. That’s how I saw it. I’m not a creative writer, I’m a communicator, that’s how I saw it. Here was another method I could use for communication. I would like to [consider myself a creative writer]. And I’m beginning to take the name writer, but it carries a lot of things which I do not have.
I don’t know what Faber & Faber do. I don’t even know how … just send a manuscript to Faber and Faber? Who else, Third World Press? Where do you get money? Stuff I’m working on now, if you put them in double-space they coming to 300 pages. Where do I get money to photocopy 300 pages of something three times to send to three publishers? And I’m not quite sure it works like that. Because I think that what happens is that you go to conferences …. I’ve been to a conference in Germany and somebody said to me send me a something another, I would like to show it to my something or other. I really must follow up on that.
And that is another thing about being a writer--you have to be in a network of writers. Caryl Phillips sent me a nice note (he saw me in Germany) saying, "Send something to me, I know somebody at Faber," I suppose that’s how it’s done. That is the thing I’m working on there. So I know I would have to work on that.
People are very kind. Like Daryl Dance sent the name of her agent and said, "Get in touch with this person." She very kindly said, "You write too well to be so," something like, "to be so struggling and poor," [laughs] or something like that.
NER: Do you have an uneasy kind of writerly relationship with your audience?
EB: Yes, I have failed as far as the novel is concerned to write for the people I am aiming to write for. But I have come to understand that I am doing something else.
Like, I write a kind of play for the Emancipation Day celebration here. I don’t know what will happen this year, but if you see a video of them performing you’d know that you have communicated, I know I have communicated. I enjoy writing the way I write, but it’s not reaching the "common man."
'We have something to teach the world'
On writing