Author gives voice to Grenada

“Crick,” she said.

“Crack,” the audience responded.

This kind of back-and-forth… “Crick,” she said.

“Crack,” the audience responded.

This kind of back-and-forth interplay, while redolent to many of childhood rhymes, ascends to a whole new level of meaning in the mouth of Merle Collins, a celebrated Granadian writer who gave a reading in the William Pitt Union last night.

In some ways it’s a metaphor for Collins’ entire writing career.

Collins is famous for being one of the founders of literary Creole, the form of pidgin English spoken by the people of Grenada. Her decision to write in this language, she said, is a political statement because the language has no power when compared to more marketable and popular languages like English, which she also speaks fluently.

“Because of the relative unimportance of Creole in the world, people ask me why I choose to write in Creole. It’s because this is the language of so many people.”

The theme of language itself supplies Collins’ writing with a dimension outside the conventions of content and context.

“Language is a huge theme for me. Why does one language have more importance than another?” Collins asked. “A lot of the evolution of language is the evolution of society.”

By writing in the Grenadian people’s voice, Collins allows the non-Grenadian reader a window on the experience of watching the island nation’s history happen in front of people’s eyes.

This history is detailed in Co llins’ semi-autobiographical novel, “Angel,” the main character of which grows up in the second half of the 20th century – a period in Grenada that saw the tumultuous rise of mass politics, the end of colonialism, a fiery revolution, followed by U.S. intervention.

Like her character, Collins witnessed these times of change. Her drift into writing did not happen overnight.

“You’re not brought up to think that you can become a writer,” Collins said in a satisfactory voice.

Having received a colonially imbued education in Grenada, Collins went to college at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica with Thomas Hardy on the brain.

But at possibly the first conference on Caribbean literature held in the Caribbean, upon hearing a poem by Kamau Brathwaite in a Caribbean dialect, Collins discovered the possibility of developing a literature of her own people.

She would later travel with a tour of Caribbean authors to Grenada. The group gave readings around the island, and Collins received acclaim from audiences for her single short story.

Still thinking she wanted to study literary criticism, she went to Georgetown where she earned her Masters in Latin American Studies in the late 1970s. When she returned to Grenada, the revolutionary spirit was the driving force in her decision to begin writing. Many artists and writers were holding meetings and making politics a central point of their work.

“From the time I started writing, I thought there were a lot of stories in my head that had not been written about.

“I wanted to tell the story of a generation that was my father’s, mother’s, uncle’s, in the shadow of the wealthier [white] communities.”

Collins began to write those stories that had previously only existed in her head. She also moved to the United Kingdom to earn her doctorate at the London School of Economics. Collins currently teaches at the University of Maryland.

Collins read half a dozen poems, an essay and part of her novel “The Color of Forgetting” at the event held in the Kurtzman room. Her poems contained themes of motherhood, global black politics and memory.

The singsong nature of Collins’s voice adds an encouraging note of wisdom to her work.

In her poem “Shame Bush,” Collins compares the reticence of Grenadians to speak about their past to the shame bush, a plant that closes when you touch it. Her poem begs the listener to understand the silence.

If Collins understands this silence, she hasn’t obeyed it herself. Her work is a conscientious move to bring this story into the open.

She is the “crick” against the world’s “crack.”