Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: You have written several short stories and three published novels that are full of social realism, brutality, violence, and the harsh realities of life.Is that a sense of anger coming out?KR: Well, I think you are certainly correct that there is brutality in the novels and a great amount of social realism, there's no question about it.Whether or not the anger is something in the author himself, I'm not sure; maybe it's unconscious if it's coming across.But I'm sure the language and the tone sometimes could be interpreted as anger.It's more me trying to be very forceful and clear about some of the situations of life and those we encounter.Even if I think I'm writing a love story, love doesn't happen in a vacuum, sometimes love situations can be brutal.So I guess anger is something that comes out of that type of brutality.DG: I'd like to come back to your ideas about love later.But based on what you have just said, do you see yourself as part of the tradition of social protest in the works of Caribbean writers?KR: There is a sense of that; although I see myself not so much as a writer engaged in social protest.Rather, I see myself as a writer engaged with social accuracy, and as a writer engaged with trying to provide an alternative vision of what the world could be like.If that is protest, then I am very much in the line of writers who are writing protest, as I am looking at our society from a particular angle and asking questions.How did we get here and how do we move from this place?Is this the best we can do?This is a slice of life, this is our experience.Can we do better?DG: There is definitely a great sense of Bahamian history-both national and local-in all your novels and what I would call a bitter nostalgia for the past: a sense of pride and loss, as well as horror.There are references, for example, to the logging industry on Grand Bahama, and to men going away on the contract to Florida.In J.D. Sinclair we have the evocative image of the wife obsessively looking down the road for her husband returning (which of course he never does) and in Hezekiah's Independence you make the situation even clearer by calling the contract "a prison", like latter-day slavery.Especially in this latest novel, you portray three or four 1 Grace: Daphne Grace in Conversation with
DOI: 10.33596/anth.169
Author: Daphne Grace
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W1522537855