Men, Often In Absentia, are Still Ever-present in Barbara Jenkins’ Work Because of Their Influence on Women’s Lives
In recognition of International Women’s History Month, Bookends presents its annual month-long series of conversations between the writer and scholar Jacqueline Bishop and women writers from the region and diaspora. Today’s featured writer is Trinidadian novelist, memoirist, and short story writer Barbara Jenkins.
Barbara Jenkins thanks so much for this interview which will focus on three books — your short story collection, Sic Transit Wagon, your novel De Rightest Place, and your recently published memoir The Stranger
Who Was Myself — all by Peepal Tree Press in the UK. Part 1 of the stories in Sic Transit Wagon is about the displacement of a mother and her child. Where are the male figures in those stories?
Thank you, Jacqueline, for taking time to devote to a close and attentive reading of my three books. Jacqueline, when I write it is without analysis. I don’t plot a story or have character sketches or know where a story is going beforehand. My stories evolve as I write them. In
Sic Transit Wagon the male figures do appear in the first section as supportive characters in “Curtains”, as a major player mostly in absentia in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, and the subject of an entire story in “I Never Heard Pappy Play the Hawaiian Guitar”. In a sense the father is not often physically there but he’s there in the effect he has on the entire family’s life – he controls where they go, whom they meet, even what/whether they can eat by controlling whether he chooses to send money for child support. In “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, the father is like a monotheistic god, mostly invisible, but with rules for behaviour that you must figure out for yourself, or have interpreted for you by society, and woe betide you if you overstep the boundaries he has set.
In the second section men are present too, for example in “Ghost Story” the vagrant ‘fruit thief/gardener’ by his choice of lifestyle subtly controls the conversations and lives of nice middle-class women, challenging their assumptions about crime and criminal behaviour. The third section also features male figures, sometimes present as in “To-may-to/to-mah-to”, “Making Pastelles in Dickensland” and “Perfect Stranger”; sometimes vanishing in “Erasures”. I suppose it might be true to say that these stories of women, told by women are also obliquely stories of men and the influence they had/have on the lives of women.
What do you make of the reading that in effect the stories in section I of Sic Transit Wagon are all one st ory?
I didn’t realise it at the time, of course, but the writing of those stories, the memories they stirred up, the emotions they aroused in me, would linger. So yes, I’d agree with your reading them as one story and the kernel of a longer story.
My two favourite stories in that collection are “Gold Bracelets” and “Ghost Story”. Does jewellery still function for Indian women in the way it does in Gold Bracelets? Can you unpack the inception for us of the truly brilliant Ghost Story?
I sometimes think that “Ghost Story” is my best short story. I re-read it and I am struck by the shifting balance of power in the relationships, by the changes in moral high ground positions. I’m unsure of its inception. For women of my acquaintance precious jewellery is an heirloom. An asset almost as fixed as property. Women pass jewellery on to daughters and importantly to daughters-in-law with the birth of grandchildren, especially a grandson. I don’t think pawning is still as significant as a source of immediate cash for anyone of any ethnicity or class anymore. In the past, banks could be sniffy about who they lent money, but the rapid and widespread production of consumer goods, and the merchants’ desire to increase their customer base and profits, brought about a democratization of access to goods without the need for ready cash. Many legitimate financial institutions, and some not so much, offer loans, credit cards, etc and there’s also hire purchase. Usury is now offered by a variety of providers, so jewellery is now safe from the pawnshop.
Now turning to De Rightest Place. I truly enjoyed this story. Can you explain to us whether De Rightest Place is a collection of stories or a novel and what makes it the genre you deem? Whose story/stories is being told in De Rightest Place?
I think of De Rightest Place as a novel. But I’m not good at the lit crit genredefining thing. I’d prefer to leave that to academics who have standards and boundaries and definitions and examples and rules and exceptions. I think I wrote one story about a place, a time, a cast of people – does that make it a novel? I hope so. But then again, I wrote it in chunks, chapter-long chunks, non-sequentially… does that make it a collection of short stories? There’s a bar. There’s a woman who by default owns the bar. There’s a barman with an emotional stake in the bar. People come and go, but there are regulars, hardcore bar family. So, it’s as much about the bar, the period in Trinidad and Tobago’s political and social history, as it is about the main character and the patrons. On balance I’d say the bar owns the story.
Like “Ghost Story” I wondered where you found the character Indira Gabriel. Is she wholly of your imagination? A composite? What relationship do you have with this character?
Indira Gabriel came to me obliquely. I wrote a short story “A Good Friday” to enter for the Bocas Lit Fest Hollick Arvon Prize – Fiction. In it Karllee, a male patron, was the main character. When I was awarded the prize, I wanted to turn the short story into a novel but felt that to make Karllee the protagonist would take the story away from the bar, a setting I particularly like, so I turned to the bar owner. In any case I’m happier writing about women’s lives, particularly their inner lives. Women’s outer lives are so much more owned by others. They have a great deal of responsibility for making sure the world runs for the maximum benefit for the maximum number yet often have little agency or power. How they manage responsibility and relative outward powerlessness makes for rich, complex inner lives. As to the main character, Indira, a foreign-born, nay, an Indian-born white woman running a bar in Belmont, Trinidad, is such an unusual person that she is unique. That’s all I needed to take from a real person, and there is such a person, a white woman, born in India, who owns a bar in Belmont, and she is a friend. But this is most definitely not my friend’s life. The story is completely made up. I really love and admire Indira. Wish I had some of her gumption. I’d like to follow her story some more. I want to know what she does next. She’s ambitious and takes risks.
While the first two sections of De Rightest Place gripped me, the third section raised questions. In the earlier sections, for example, Karllee states that had he known better, he would have left Sunity (his soon-to-be girlfriend) alone the day she wanders into De Rightest Place. Yet we never come to understand why this is so. Indeed, Sunity seems to just disappear from the novel.
Karllee is a player. Yet he falls for Sunity. That has created complications. He must juggle Sunity with Sandy his off-and-on visiting American girlfriend who is also his
financier/patron. Sunity went to Canada for Christmas. She came back with photos that took the story in another direction – back to Bostic’s old friendship with Solo and what that precipitated. I guess she faded as other people took centre stage in the story. Bars have entrances and exits for characters and for events. Could she be waiting in the wings for another Act?
How do you explain that while there seems to be a big age difference between Indira Gabriel and her young lover, for the most part it goes unremarked and indeed accepted?
True, not unremarked, except by Cynthia the village maco who has taken the ‘moral high ground’ about the relationship. Bostic too isn’t happy about it, but his reasons are more personal. The patrons respect Indira, also I think the male patrons take pride in the fact that one of their own is bedding the boss lady though they may also see him as a confused fatherless child who is trying to find his way. Fritzie’s own mysterious past relationships makes her non-judgemental but sympathetic. Many ordinary people like those in De Rightest Place are spectators in life’s unfolding mysteries.
Needlework appears as a leitmotif throughout De Rightest Place, and I wonder if you could talk about the types of needlework you saw being done around you in Trinidad.
No one I knew in my childhood and early adulthood had ready-made clothes.
All clothes were made by a seamstress
– a woman with a sewing machine in the front room, usually her bedroom, of her house. Fabric stores abounded. You could get every kind of fabric manufactured in England. From school uniform material – plain cotton for blouses, skirts, overalls, khaki pants, boy’s shirts — through printed cottons for every day — to silks, satins, georgettes, organdie, and organza, peaude-soie, silk jersey, lace for ladies’ special dresses. There were bespoke tailors, some at home, usually operating from the front gallery, but more in a shopfront on a main road, or some in proper tailoring establishments for men’s suits – jackets, waistcoats, trousers, everyday workaday pants and again specialist men’s fabric stores with bolts of worsted, corduroy, khaki. My mother embroidered on her Singer sewing machine, other women knitted and crocheted babies’ clothes. People made hats for women; men’s hats came ready-made imported. Bridal dresses, bridesmaids’ dresses, mother-of-the bride outfits, their hats, veils, crowns …. Lord, the drama surrounding a wedding then cannot ever be matched in a shop setting which is the lot of the modern bride.
And Carnival costumes…heavens! Whole households were overturned to create hundreds of costumes for masqueraders. Mas Camps was the name given to those homes then. I remember Miss Gibbings who sewed costumes for Harold “Sally” Saldenah’s band every year. Each masquerader measured and measurements recorded, and the costume made to fit the individual. The satins, the velvets, the silks, the taffeta, the braids, the sequins. And Carnival Queen evening gowns for the competitions. My Uncle Vene, an artist, would be called upon to hand-paint birds, flowers etc on those gowns. Jacqueline, there were shoemakers! And Christmas tree makers! People made things all around me in my then world.
Now would be a good time for you to tell us a little bit about yourself and your road to becoming a writer.
I was born on Upper Belmont Valley
Road, Port of Spain, Trinidad and attended Tranquillity Girls’ Intermediate School and St Joseph’s Convent before going off to University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where I obtained a BSC Hons Geography, and University College, Cardiff Wales where I obtained a Diploma in Education. Very recently, 2010-2012, I obtained an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus. I was always a reader, a voracious, avid, indiscriminate reader, all throughout childhood, marriage, child-rearing, teaching. Then suddenly empty nest set in – a very empty nest when I became widowed at 53, and all my children were away. I continued teaching a bit, lost the taste for it, idled a bit, pottered a bit, co-authored some textbooks on Health and Family Life Education and then, in my late sixties, encouraged by friends, applied for a place on Cropper Foundation Residential Writing Workshop in Trinidad, and submitted short stories to the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, where I met with success. More short story prizes followed. The biggest influence on my writing has been the Bocas Lit Fest and I often say, if there was ever a more powerful catalyst for creating, fostering, nurturing, guiding a writing boom in the Caribbean and the diaspora… please let me know. Bocas did it for so many of us. There’s where, at the first Bocas, I was the first lunchtime reader and Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press was in the audience. A gift from heaven. I would go on to publish my books with Peepal Tree Press.
Why was it important for you to write a memoir and what differences and commonalities did you observe in writing both fiction and non-fiction?
A fear of one’s imminent demise is a powerful goad to focus on one’s life. Not only does one’s life ‘flash before one’s eyes’ but there is this sense of Judgement awaiting and you’d better make a full confession or else… COVID was that for me. Jacqueline, it was around the time of my 78th birthday in December 2019, when we were hearing about a brand-new mystery killer virus spreading from China. We of the three score-plus-ten-plus-plus were the most likely to fall victim. Fatally. Then COVID itself as a national and global concern was a two-year suspension of reality. It gave me time, quiet, space, no distractions, safety through our own enforced public health measures, and vaccines to lift some of the anxiety and grant a sense of security in which writing could happen. In fiction the story must make sense to the reader. Memoir doesn’t have that responsibility.
I see memoir as an exploration of an aspect or period of one’s life that the writer is trying to understand and make sense of. It requires an honesty and integrity and courage that’s not asked of fiction. Fiction must be true to its own world. Memoir must be true to itself.