Miguel Street

"Yes. Miguel Street is one of my favourite short story collections, though it’s a complicated admiration. Can we separate the author from the person? This is an ongoing conversation in literary circles. But I can’t deny that Miguel Street was one of the books I was thinking about—again, given to me by the all-knowing Stephen Narain—when I started writing my own collection. “Like many Caribbean people, I have a complicated relationship with V S Naipaul” I appreciated the intimacy and humour of the book; it feels so true to the Caribbean. It captures our idiosyncrasies and the experiences of living in a small place. And it represents my favourite kind of collection: stories that all together bloom and bloom, revealing a larger world. But like many Caribbean people, I have a complicated relationship with V S Naipaul. A bizarre and deeply offensive thing to say. When I first read Miguel Street , though, before I knew anything about Naipaul’s later thoughts about the Caribbean, I felt that the characters had been treated tenderly. I have to wonder if, to a degree, I projected my own feelings; either way, it can’t but make you re-think lines like this, from when the narrator is explaining his heavy drinking and overall bad behaviour: ‘‘I said to my mother, ‘Is not my fault really. Is just Trinidad. What else anybody can do here except drink?’’’ I haven’t read that book, so can’t speak to it, but I do explore perhaps a similar thing in my own writing. Although I wouldn’t use the word ‘mimicking’, of course—it’s condescending (as Naipaul presumably intended). It’s more complicated than that. For people from postcolonial countries, it can be an intricate thing to separate their identity from the colonial past and the cultural undoing forced on them. It was a brutal undoing. Many of my characters struggle with that. Personally, I struggle with it, too—for example, my family is very religious. A significant missionary effort was a part of the colonial agenda. With my own Christian upbringing, I got to a point where I realized that my ancestors had a different way of thinking about spirituality. I felt that I had been lied to, but it was a lie that everyone I knew was in on. When I was growing up in Jamaica, there was always a sense of what people in the US had, how they lived, their wealth, their options. There was a sense that everything they had was better than what we had: in big ways—like their fashion and standards of beauty, for example, that fair skin was more beautiful—but also in really small ways. I’d be watching American television and the brands they had—food brands, for example—seemed superior to what we had. A part of this is a function of foreignness: it was better because it wasn’t from where I was from. “I was sure that the United States was better because everyone said so. As a child, where did this indoctrination come from?” In a larger way, I was sure that the United States was better because everyone said so. As a child, where did this indoctrination come from? From everywhere—the way adults would talk about the US, as though money and opportunity grew on trees, how the foreigners we knew were adored and envied, and how the shows I watched on television didn’t reflect my life or anyone I knew, but the lives of American children. Miguel Street is made up of interlinked stories about a community in Trinidad—each story focuses on a different character—all narrated by a young boy. As the book progresses, he grows up, so the collection is interested in his childlike intelligence and how it matures over time. A lot of his observations are really funny. Vanity fair? Were they suggesting frivolity? I don’t think that’s fair. Sure, there’s humour here to delight in, but it’s balanced by darker realities. My favourite story in the collection is ‘The Maternal Instinct,’ which is about a woman who lives next door to the narrator, and who has several children by several different men, and the narrator is very interested in the fact that she lives an unconventional life compared to his mother or the other people in the community who have more traditional relationships. That story gives us a lot to think about in terms of gender roles in the Caribbean—I appreciated that Naipaul wrote this female character who is in such ownership of her body and her decisions. There’s a moment in the story where it’s implied that she’s the victim, but it very quickly becomes apparent that the man who fathers her next child is the victim in the relationship. The roles are reversed. One of the things I love about Miguel Street is that it feels so Caribbean, in the smallness of the place and the malleability of values: everything is constantly being reframed, and people don’t always behave how you expect them to. In the Caribbean, moral codes, in my experience, are set in stone—except when they’re not. This tension fascinates me. Again, one of the delights of Miguel Street is that what we’re seeing is through this young boy’s eyes, so everything is framed by the innocence and curiosity through which he engages with the world. As beautiful as Jamaican culture is, and as diverse as Jamaicans are, I do think that for many Jamaicans, there is a sense of how a decent person should be. When you step outside of that, especially if you’re a woman, there’s a lot of social shaming. There’s a price to pay. I did want to explore that because as much as I love my background, I struggle with a lot of the expectations that have been put on me by my culture. I was raised to be a good Jamaican wife—a role that doesn’t really interest me."