SUCCESS OVERDUE
On fiction award short list
“I told myself, ‘You gave up a wellpaying job in order to write, so you’d better write.’”
H. Nigel Thomas is recalling his thinking in 2006, when he decided to step down from his position as a professor at Université Laval to devote himself to the literary endeavours that were claiming more of his time. Reminded that plenty of people who clear the calendar still manage not to be productive, he laughed. “I come from a Methodist background, and if there’s one thing Methodists know how to inculcate into their followers, it is guilt.”
We have met in his South Shore condo to talk about his new book, No Safeguards (Guernica Editions, 375 pages, $25). The first instalment in a projected trilogy ( but structured so that it can stand alone), the novel follows the fitful progress of two brothers, the studious Jay and the rebellious Paul, from their Caribbean childhood through their teens and early adulthood as they make the difficult adjustment to life in Montreal. Their path is strewn with the usual challenges of immigration and race, compounded by the dawning realization that both brothers are gay. Thomas has created a work that addresses social and political issues with complete candour while retaining a compelling human drama at its heart.
Born in 1947 in St. Vincent, Thomas was raised largely by his maternal grandfather, an avid reader who encouraged his grandson’s intellectual inclinations in a place where church and social norms often did the opposite. Coming to Canada when he was 21, he made Montreal his first port of call, and with the exception of a stint in Quebec City, it has been his home ever since.
“I was drawn to the bilingual aspect of life here. And it just so happened that in St. Vincent we were closely connected to Canada. Every morning at 9 the government radio station had a one-hour newscast from CBC,” he recalled.
“Zilch” was Thomas’s candid reply when asked how much French he knew when he got here. “I remember once asking somebody for directions. He said to me, ‘Where are you from?’ I said, ‘I’ve just arrived from the Caribbean.’ He said, ‘Well, in that case I will answer your question, but if I had known you had lived here for any length of time, I wouldn’t have.’ That was the sort of hostility you encountered at that time.”
Taking a roundabout route to his Canadian education career partly because he enjoyed being in an atmosphere of learning, Thomas broke off a bachelor’s program at McGill to do a two-year nursing course at Douglas Hospital.
“The (hospital) library was full of books about the human condition,” he said of that time. “At 21 and 22, one is learning a tremendous amount anyway, but I was like a sheep in clover. I absorbed a lot that became valuable, both for the study of literature and in my own writing. Once I finished, I realized I could work part time and go to school full time, so that’s what I did. I became what would have been called a mental health worker.”
Eventually earning a master’s in education, Thomas went on to become an English teacher, starting at the now-defunct LaSalle High. Soon the post-1976 exodus meant a shunting into teaching French as a second language and, finally, to teaching French and English at elementary schools.
Of those years, he said: “I simply wanted to be an excellent teacher. But I was shocked at the attitudes of some of my colleagues. I could not believe that someone who had gone through university and had teacher training could be overtly racist. Then I saw it with my own eyes and had to say, ‘Yes, it’s possible.’”
Equally eye-opening for Thomas were his years living in Quebec City, where even the small consolations of the Montreal Caribbean community were absent.
“I discovered one thing: Your community is your psychic mirror,” he said. “I would never have known that until I lived in a place where I no longer heard Caribbean accents and I no longer saw Caribbean gestures, where I didn’t see myself in the people who surrounded me. I was in a place people truly saw me as exotic. That question, ‘Where are you from?’ — it was unending.”
While writing was always there as an impulse for Thomas, it didn’t become an imperative until 1994, when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer.
“It was not going to be cured; it could only be controlled. If I were lucky, according to the research, I might live up to 13 years. So I said to myself, ‘Well now, Nigel, what would you like to do?’ The answer was clear: Write. Whatever you have left of your time, enjoy it.”
Multiple surgeries notwithstanding, Thomas appears in remarkably good health. “Not bad for eight years past the most optimistic projection, eh?”
A little over a decade later, full-time writing became a reality, and Thomas has been remarkably prolific since; of his long list of fiction and non-fiction, he professes a special fondness for his 2007 novel Return to Arcadia. While that book tackled colonialism head on, the new novel is more intimate in its concerns, particularly with regard to sexuality — a subject that has long been a charged one for Thomas, who didn’t officially come out until he was 47.
“I lived in dread in St. Vincent, and for a time was quite prepared to go the route others like me did, which was to don the heterosexual mask,” he said. “It was part of my motivation for leaving, even though I was engaged to be married in St. Vincent. I found that I could live my life here.”
For Thomas, as for his fictional creations Jay and Paul, coming out is all the more complex for doing it from within a community where social and religious strictures remain strong.
“Homophobia seems to be an essential part of black theology,” he commented. “Many blacks are seeking to prove that they are morally superior to whites, and the proof of moral degeneracy is that homosexuality exists among whites — and if it exists among blacks, it’s because those blacks have been corrupted by whites. So the solution is to expunge them.”
Nearly all writers of fiction face
an uphill battle, but has Thomas noted the position of black writers on the national cultural scene improving in any measurable way since he entered the arena?
“That’s a question I really don’t know how to answer,” he said. “It’s very complex. Writing is such a nebulous thing — you write a book and it goes off into the ether. So how do you get any attention? Agents say that publishers tell them books by black authors don’t sell. And you can’t get your manuscripts to the major publishers without an agent. Hence we are fated to a sort of substratum in the literary world.”
That just might be starting to change for Thomas. No Safeguards is on this year’s short list of three for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. It’s Thomas’s second shortlisting; he was nominated for the novel Spirits in the Dark in 1994, when the prizes were still called the QSPELL Awards. We’ll know on Nov. 18 whether it has won; meanwhile, recognition comes in welcome increments.
Alice Hoffman has achieved the rare feat of establishing loyal followings in three separate categories: children’s, young adult, and mainstream fiction. Her most recent novel in the latter category is the bestselling The Marriage of Opposites, about the life of Caribbean-born Rachel Pomie. The mother of pioneering French impressionist Camille Pissarro, Pomie led a remarkable life in her own right, and Hoffman evokes it with great verve. She will discuss and sign the book Monday at 8 p.m. at the Jewish Public Library, 5151 Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd. For ticket information, contact 514-345-6416.
It just so happened that in St. Vincent we were closely connected to Canada. Every morning at 9 the government radio station had a one-hour newscast from CBC. I lived in dread in St. Vincent, and for a time was quite prepared to go the route others like me did, which was to don the heterosexual mask.