{"id":8501,"date":"2013-01-14T15:38:13","date_gmt":"2013-01-14T15:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/?p=8501"},"modified":"2013-01-21T16:43:11","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T16:43:11","slug":"in-the-trinidad-of-my-childhood-there-was-a-respect-for-and-delight-in-language-well-used","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/2013\/01\/in-the-trinidad-of-my-childhood-there-was-a-respect-for-and-delight-in-language-well-used\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIn the Trinidad of my childhood, there was a delight in language well used\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vahni Capildeo, based in Oxford, was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1973. After reading English at Oxford University, she took up a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, and published her first poetry collection, No Traveller Returns<\/em>, in 2003. Four further books of poetry and prose followed, and her next collection, Utter<\/em>, will be published with Peepal Tree Press later this year. She currently teaches at Glasgow University.<\/strong><\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

The daughter of a politician and cosmopolitan mother, Capildeo comes from a large extended family that includes author V S Naipaul. Here, she talks to Global <\/em>about her earliest childhood memories, her undergraduate life in Oxford, her love of language – from Old English to Chinese – and which authors’ work have inspired her. Though a great admirer of contemporary Caribbean writers, with their activist stance and ability to connect with real issues, Capildeo shuns the idea that her poetry and prose have been shaped by her Caribbean background. This becomes clear as she offers us an insight into her own unique works, as diverse in their form as in their themes.<\/span> <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Global: What are your most vivid early memories and images of Trinidad?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Vahni Capildeo: <\/strong>My parents moved to what is still my mother’s house two years before I was born. This house is in Port of Spain. There was always a feeling that the island was a cosmopolitan, travellers’ place. <\/span>A great strength of the island mentality is that ability to cross cultures, cross space. My great-grandfather once came stalking up the driveway, and he was Indian, an upright Rajput in white, incomprehensibly ancient, bringing a young banana tree as a gift and helping us plant it. He had not met my brother and me before, but blessed us kindly on the head.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

How did you get to study English at Oxford? What were the best things about Oxford undergraduate life for you?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I never seriously considered studying anywhere except at Oxford, because I wanted to learn Old English, to get to the roots of my language and its literature. I knew that that might involve hard labour. It has paid off, as the Anglo-Saxon metre and way of writing about the sea and exile can pierce me with heat and cold, untranslated, as true poetry does. We didn’t own any cold-weather clothing, so in those pre-Internet days, determined to settle things better than provisioning myself and flying expensively near Christmas time to a winter Oxford interview, I wrote letters to various colleges, asking if tutors in Modern Languages, Music or English would give me a serious pre-interview interview in the summer. The Christ Church English tutors gave me a thorough grilling, which I enjoyed.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Something, too, about the openness of Christ Church Meadow and the college’s great uncloistered quadrangle appealed as somewhere to live, where the sense of mere personality could be eased and quietened. <\/span>The best things about Oxford life were the workload, the tutorial system and the friendships.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

When, and why, did you decide to become a writer? Were you writing poetry from your teens, or earlier?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I always intended to become a writer. By the time I was six I was very serious about doing ‘poems’ in pencil in copybooks. In the Trinidad of my childhood, there was a respect for and delight in language well used; also, an awareness of sunken languages, still spoken by some of Trinidad’s people: Romance languages, African languages, North and South Indian languages, Chinese.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

As a writer, are you to a greater or lesser extent influenced by your Caribbean background? Does this sense of ‘influence’ matter? What about politics?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The greatest influence on my writing life is less my Caribbean childhood than my relationships with contemporary Caribbean writers, especially those based in the region, such as Nicholas Laughlin, Andre Bagoo and Vladimir Lucien. Talented writers in Trinidad are less likely to be beached in the academy than they are in the UK. Trinidad’s a small place.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Nicholas Laughlin, for example, codirects Alice Yard, a public art space, is programme director for the [Trinidad and Tobago’s annual] Bocas Lit Fest and edits two significant magazines. Andre Bagoo is an investigative journalist, trained as a lawyer. They are in touch with live issues more directly than at the level of protest: <\/span>organising responses to floods exacerbated by climate change or dedicating hours to understanding government process.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Which classic writers do you love, and why?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

‘Love’ is perhaps not quite the word. From childhood, I love E Nesbit for her way of not talking down to the reader and sense of social comedy; Paul Keens-Douglas for his wit and perfect ear for monologue; and Robert Louis Stevenson, who writes the childhood feelings children can’t articulate. Later, sometimes it was the writers I didn’t love who stuck with me. For example, I am not sure that I love Henry James, yet I return to the astonishing vividness of some of his descriptions of objects and of wildflowers in Portrait of a Lady<\/em>.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Your five books are No Traveller Returns <\/em>(2003), One Scattered Skeleton, Person Animal Figure <\/em>(2005), Undraining Sea <\/em>(2009) and Dark & Unaccustomed Words <\/em>(2012). Can you say something about each?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

No Traveller Returns <\/em>was conceived as a book, beginning in the Caribbean and ranging outwards via England and Iceland into the country of death. There are dialogues, lyrics, imaginary drama, some prose poems, even short fiction.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

One Scattered Skeleton <\/em>is a prose memoir, dealing with topics such as attitudes to mental illness, femininity and homosexuality in Trinidad. Each chapter explores a different form, a different way of exploring truth – personal letters, a diary, a commentary on others’ texts. Excerpts have been published in anthologies and journals and on websites, but not the whole book. The Guardian <\/em>journalist Ann Morgan picked it up as her Trinidad choice in her ‘Year of Reading the World’ project.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Person Animal Figure <\/em>is a series of dramatic monologues. Undraining Sea <\/em>and Dark & Unaccustomed Words <\/em>are the second and third parts of the project begun with No Traveller Returns<\/em>, moving through the endless play of cities and situations reflecting one another to the exploration of the possibilities of form.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

My fourth full poetry collection, Utter<\/em>, due out shortly, is my favourite book to date, and the end of that style of dramatic monologues and palimpsestic poetry, at least for now.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

I have also co-authored All Your Houses <\/em>with Andre Bagoo. The prose poems and photographs show abandoned or decaying urban spaces in Port of Spain still exploding with life: greenery, clutter, staircases into the sky.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

You have worked in academia in Britain. What views do you have about the UK system as compared to (say) the system in Trinidad?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I have no direct professional experience of the academic system in Trinidad, other than giving the occasional talk or workshop. There seems to be very good uptake of the Trinidad government’s free tertiary education, with a number of mature students qualifying or requalifying in areas that would otherwise be too costly, such as law. If Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom <\/em>is right, this investment in education might well pay off in a generation or so.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Quality of student life there is characterised by closeness of Trinidadian youngsters to their parents and families, similar to that in Latin countries. University life in Trinidad is not as much part of a rite of breaking with origins as it is in the UK. There continues to be at least something of the interweaving of generations. The older generation truly values education, remembering a time when it was less accessible. They know first hand that education, like health, is not a profit-making business, unless it is run at a loss in terms of human capital. As for the UK, since my Fellowship in Cambridge, I have spent very little time working in academia per se, and always in fixed-term creative writing posts rather than in, say, manuscript research.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

How do you think Trinidad faces, culturally, the rest of the world?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The rest of the world is already in, or passing through, Trinidad. The island is at a strategic point, a flight path for humans as well as many species of bird. People are very much hooked into new communications technologies; and the population is multi-ethnic and migratory to a degree that makes London look simple. It is time for the rest of the world to come to terms with this archipelagic sensibility, where crisscrossing and fluidity are not jargon terms but a way of life.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vahni Capildeo, based in Oxford, was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1973. After reading English at Oxford University, she took up a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, and published her first poetry collection, No Traveller Returns, in 2003. Four further books of poetry and prose followed, and her next collection, Utter, will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10673,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[131,9,41,140],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8501"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10673"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}