The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it’s the wrong thing. It’s not a profession.
It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.
What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.
If I describe a person’s physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is “black” or “white.” I may describe the color of their skin – black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I’m not talking about race.
Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say “Oh, she’s so angry.” If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes “Oh, she’s autobiographical.”
I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn’t know that it was possible.
It’s too easy to say this or that is “race,” and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.
The people who invented race, who grouped us together as “black,” were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.
Love and hatred don’t take turns; they exist side by side at the same time. And one’s duty, one’s obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one.
Life has a truth to it, and it’s complicated – it’s love and it’s hatred.
The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself – but gave up.
I’ve written a book about my mother, and I don’t remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.
Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in – and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.
I wouldn’t mind being labeled as “angry,” if it wasn’t used once again to denigrate and belittle.
I don’t feel I’m angry. I feel as though I’m describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called “angry.” If I had an affair with my husband’s best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I’m not doing that.
People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you’re writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone’s brown skin.
I’ve come to see that I’m saying something that people generally do not want to hear.
The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.
You know how they say a man’s house is his castle? I think for a woman, it’s her body. I feel so strongly about a woman’s right to choose. This is my Zionism. It’s not a “right” any more than it’s a right to breathe, to take in oxygen.
It’s very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it’s interpreted in some way.