Mixed Race Studies

Daphne Grace in Conversation with Keith A. Russell

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 8, Issue 1 – Bahamian Literature (2011-04-22)
Article 14

Daphne Grace

Keith A. Russell, Adjunct Professor
The College of The Bahamas, Northern Campus

Daphne Grace in Conversation with Keith A. Russell, Freeport, Grand Bahama (27 August 2008)

DG: 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: In your earlier novels, in J.D. Sinclair especially, much of the tension and many of the problems arise from the colonial past and the lingering aftermath of colonization. Do you see yourself also as a postcolonial writer in terms of dealing with this past?

KR: In a sense. Postcolonialism is an interesting term, especially for those of us who live in these colonial aftermaths, so to speak. Whether or not postcolonialism is a reality is another matter, and I don’t know how we get beyond the colonial idea. Especially for us living in The Bahamas, and our relationship with Britain, it is to extricate ourselves from that to say that we are ‘post-colonial’ in any sense. The British are no longer here ruling on land, but our encounter with them is deeply engrained and we are also British. We are British and Bahamians and also Africans, however that hybrid comes together. So we cannot extricate ourselves from being British and become postcolonial, because it is engrained in our psyche that we are also British—and that encounter with the British has sometimes been harsh.

DG: And how does that inform or impact your novels?

KR: To date in my novels, I have been writing more or less about the harsh encounter and the aftermath of that, but the encounter has not always been harsh. Even in my moments when I am quite clear in depicting the harshness of the encounter, I hope that there is no bitterness in that regard. It is just a matter of: this is who we are, we have encountered the British and this is how  it has affected us, and this is what it has done to our abilities, and so on. But beyond that, how do we accept our British selves? How do we recognize both the good and the bad, but yet move on from that without having to dismantle our British identity, but also carry that with us in a positive way and appreciate the good encounter of it?

DG: You mention hybridity and the concept of asking are we British, are we African, or some hybrid mix. In Hezekiah’s Independence (where both the father and the son are given the same name) the younger of the Hezekiah’s is half white, and is called a ‘pale nigger’ at one point. Is it intentional that the protagonist of the novel is a result of the colonial encounter?

KR: Yes, very much so.

DG: And in this case, that encounter has disastrous consequences for the white woman, his mother.

KR: I think they are a forward looking couple, in that they are able to rise above that whole conflict between the British and African Bahamians, and the distinction of “are we British, are we African?”—and find love. And even that is fraught with all sorts of dangers, because even though they have moved on, their society hasn’t moved on yet. The society isn’t ready to see this as something legitimate that ought to happen in the world. So the whole concept of colour that happens in our society, that long spectrum of colours we have, is beyond that black/white issue, because in the long journey of our encounter with Britain we have produced individuals of all shades of skin. So how do we determine who is black and who is white in this mix? Really? In our society, very often the more pale your skin the more privileges you have, so how do we reconcile this problem? How do we deal with the long spectrum of colour that has come out of this union, this encounter, of the Europeans and the Africans? And that mix is the exploration that is going on here. So I think the younger of the Hezekiah’s is wrestling with the notion of ‘how and where do I fit in?’

DG: And for many people, this is really one of the key questions of the new millennium.

KR: In America there is the long tradition of the tragic mulatto, this individual who doesn’t fit in anywhere. She doesn’t fit in with the traditionally white folks, or the traditionally black folks. Here is a lost individual sitting in limbo someplace trying to find her identity; and finding out that identity involves not only working out how do I accept my black self, but how do I accept my white self also. This is part of Hezekiah’s dilemma: how do I come to a sense of myself? By endorsing, legitimizing, accepting all of who I am, both my father’s side and my mother’s side. So how do we as Bahamians come to a place where we accept both our African heritage and our European heritage? How do we put that all together and find a whole sense of self?

DG: I think that’s true of anyone who is not just racially mixed but culturally mixed in any way, as the whole concept of identity and belongingness takes on a new dimension. Also, with the massive migrancy today, it’s also the situation that dislocated or diasporic peoples feel they no longer have a place in either world: they don’t fit in anymore in the homeland and they don’t feel at home in the new place either. It’s a sense of what’s been called living in “nowhere-ville”. So I think it’s larger than just a color question.

KR: That’s right…

Read the entire interview here.