All Memory Is Fiction

Many years ago, while embarked on the ambitious task of defining myself as a writer, I actually came up with a motto—a kind of coda that I crafted into a carefully designed logo and plastered all over what I planned to be stationery. I was ambitious, but the truth is that I was inventing a narrative for myself as a writer. I felt the need to do so having published three books of poems without seeing articles about me doing that work for me. I had imagined it would have been quite different. To comfort myself, I blamed the fact that my books were published in Canada and the UK and I was living, at the time, in a tiny southern town called Sumter, South Carolina, and teaching at a two-year college.
I had done something of the sort years before when I was primarily and comfortably a playwright. Then I began by trying to collect all the plays that I had written and staged and pulling them together into an attractive binder—a pseudo manuscript, if you will. My plan at the time was to collect these plays—nicely typed out and decently bound, to give as a gift to my father, with whom, until that time, I had never had a discussion about my writing, my ambitions as a writer or anything of the sort. In retrospect, the reason was complicated. At the time, though, I just felt that it would be an act of vanity to talk about myself to him, and I also felt that I really was not a good enough writer to engage in conversation with my father—an established author in his own right. But mostly, it was because I was Christian, and all my plays were Christian plays. I mean, I worked on these plays as part of my commitment to evangelism and as a way to work through the meaning of my faith in Jamaican society. I knew I was making art. To reassure myself that art is what I was making, I studied the work of the 17th century poets—Donne, Herbert, and Marvell—as a way of understanding the nature of faith in art. I read Shakespeare’s plays as morality plays. I studied all the Morality cycle plays, paying attention to the way in which they evolved from the liturgy of the church and moved out into the market place. I read with some fascination and a hint of affirmation, all I could about T.S Eliot’s conversion, and I found some gratification in The Four Quartets, even though I knew that I was closer in spirit to the faith of C.S. Lewis than to the more philosophical ideas of T.S. Eliot. Still, the idea of Christian literature had value for me. But I was still working it out, and when I looked closer to home, namely to my father and his friends George Lamming and John Hearne, I knew that I would find no useful models of faith and literature that I could embrace.

So I was a little embarrassed at my art. I was. My father was a generous man, a kind man, and I knew that he would be kind to me, but that was not the issue. I just did not think he would find my work valuable. He was a Marxist, and we had argued in the past about the issue of my faith. It was not a philosophical discussion, at all. It was actually quite intimately and almost petty. He accused me of listening to my Christian friend’s advice over his. He was wrong, of course I was not listening to anyone’s advise, but it may have been worse than he thought. I was actually listening to God’s advise on things. I could not explain what my process was like. I would pray, put questions to God, and then wait for direction. I would concentrate hard, and wait. Eventually, I would “hear” a coherent response—a direction. I accepted that I could be quite wrong about what I thought I heard, but I also had the faith to know that that kind of error was one that was done in good faith, and that God would somehow protect me from myself. Ad so, in my writing, I was wrestling with what it means to be a Christian and a writer. Since I was a playwright, working with actors who were all Christians, I knew that what I wrote had an immediate impact on someone other than myself. It was a rich and complicated period in my life. I was reading a great deal of literature, I was reading works on aesthetics and ideology, and I was trying to formulate a poetics for my work as a playwright—a poetics that reflected by beliefs. My father, I was convinced, would not have any real interest in this stuff.
Interestingly, I had had two conversations that seemed to confirm this concern of mine. These conversations were not with my father, but with two of his good friends, and two men who had formidable reputations as writers. The first was with my uncle Kofi, the Ghanaian novelist and poet Kofi Awoonor. He was visiting Jamaica on one occasion and one day took me aside to talk to me about life. He asked about my Christianity, checking to see if the story was true that I had become a Christian. I have always liked uncle Kofi, his joie de vivre, his wonderful ability to draw you into a conspiracy of jokes and schemes that made you feel important and understand. He always had a twinkle in his eyes, and he loved my father and loved my mother and loved us, his nieces and nephews. It was something we all knew. He was laughing when he asked me if I was serious about this Christianity thing. Then he asked me if I didn’t like girls. Of course I did, I said. And he then pointed out that short of being a hypocrite, this path I was taking was going to curtail my girl-loving ways (in ways, of course, that mattered most). He had so effectively touched a nerve in me, reached into my weakest point as a young Christian, that I knew for a fact that he had been sent by Satan to test me. It is the way of the believer—persecution can actually strengthen one’s faith—effective persecution can steel the self in remarkable ways. The important thing is that I knew that he had been told about my faith by my father, ad I knew that this meant that my father was a little concerned.
When I spoke to George Lamming some years later, I was faced with the second temptation. By then I had enough literary ambition to know that a conversation with George Lamming about my art was an important thing and his approval was quite valuable. We met under a grape arbor on the porch of one of the bungalows in College Common where university lecturers lived. I had some of my work in hand. I think he had read a play or two of mine, but the conversation was nerve wracking, as I recall. He asked me about the Christian content, and I spoke directly about what I was trying to do. It felt like a betrayal of art. I was talking about writing for the sake of the kingdom, not for the sake of the revolution, nor for the sake of art for its own sake. George Lamming skeptical. He encouraged me to expand my themes and to ease off the Christianity thing. He may have said god things about my writing, but the general tone I recall was that of concern and uncertainty about what I was trying to do. In a sense, I expected that a conversation with my father about my writing would end up in a similar place.
To be a Christian author of the born again ilk can be quite complicated. One is faced with the combination of a personal need to evangelize—to be caught up in the basic question, “How des this advance the kingdom of God”, while struggling with the day-to-day details of righteousness and purity. At the same time, one is faced with the larger question of nes art, the influences and the ambitions of being a good artist and daring to fantasize about being a great artist. Being a writer is a deeply hubristic and vain pursuit at some level. The sin of pride can gradually become the central source of ambition and drive for the writer—a sin of course, that the Christian must resist at all turns. At twenty-three, I was struggling to work through all of these issues, while embarking on an exciting and ambitious project of working to be a part of the larger and impressive tradition of West Indian literature. It was unsettling, challenging and confusing. And this was why I did not know what my conversation with my father would be like. But I decided to share my work with him. I decided to bite the bullet and share my art with him, and in a sense, I knew that I would be sharing my faith with him in the most direct and visceral way I knew how. Which is why I was nervous.
Well, it never happened. As I have written here in the past, he died suddenly a month or so before his birthday and the birthday gift of my plays. So after is passing, I continued to compile the plays. I wanted to look at my life as a playwright to count the plays, to test whether I was starting to form a body of work and to se if this was what a playwright looked like. Vanity, yes, but exactly what writers will do if no one else will do this for them.
So in 1995, I was doing the same thing. I piled up the unpublished manuscripts, tried to list the published work in some sensible order, and went a step further: I imagined new titles, future books and future creative projects—somehow trying to imagine a career for myself. It was then that I arrived at my coda: “All Memory is Fiction”. I am not quite convinced that I even understood what it meant when I conjured the phrase I liked the rhythm of it, the authority of it, and the slight intellectual mystery of it. I liked the dare of it. Surely it could be a wrong-minded notion, but it might well be a profound articulation. It seemed odd, also, that I would engage the idea of fiction when, at the time, I had no intentions to write fiction. Still, it was the invention that appealed to me, the idea of the imagination and its relationship to memory. In some ways, it may have been something of a preemptive assertion to ward off those who sought to find some autobiographical “truths” in my work. Mostly, however I think I was celebrating the very idea that my art was a product of experience, a product of a life lived and experienced. Memory, I wanted to propose, was unreliable as fact, but all memory was fit subject for art, for the project of the imagination.
That was more than ten years ago and eighteen books ago. Much has happened since. I did develop a career and it would be hard for me to not describe myself as a writer, today. I have not fully resolved the contradictions of being a Christian and a writer at the same time. In October, my new collection of poetry, Gomer’s Song will be published, and it will reflect that strange conflict that arises within me about the liberties I have as a writer, about the matter of taboo in subject matter, about one’s “testimony” as an artist and Christian. The poems are at once about a biblical figure as they are about topics that could cause the “righteous” to blanch. I do know this much, however, where my father alive today, I would have no hesitation about having that conversation with him about my art. I am more certain about my faith and more certain about my art than I have ever been. Most of all, however I am most certain that I will always struggle with these two elements of my existence even as I try to find a way to allow one to submit to the other. Uncle George and Uncle Kofi are proud of me these days, and they have both told me that they know my father would have been proud. Still, I am planning to sit down and review my work soon. I will ask the kinds of questions that middle aged folks ask themselves on the verge of a middle-life crisis. I will play that game of listing my works, and then weighing their value and finally inventing a new list of titles for projects still to come. I never use these titles, but for a while, I actually believe them to be my future—a kind of memory of the future, a kind of fiction, I suppose.