John Robert Lee (JRL): You were born in Trinidad with its rich literary tradition. You grew up in the British Virgin Islands with not as rich a tradition. What have been the influences that led you into writing, and poetry at that? And related to that, given a certain distinctive style in your published work, who have been your literary influences?
Richard Georges (RG): What I would say is that there is actually a longstanding tradition of writing here in the BVI, but not one that has often entered the Caribbean conversation, much less its canon. I have been able to discover Virgin Islander poets from almost every post-Depression era decade, but perhaps I have been privileged to be able to access greater opportunities than my Virgin Islander forbears.
That being said, I came to writing quite early in my development, thanks in part to my grandfather’s habit of pressing books into my hands and the value of reading being reinforced regularly by my parents. I started in primary school writing my own stories and was blessed with a succession of supportive teachers into secondary school and college.
As for my literary influences, those run as widely as I have read. From the usual names that come to the fore in the region, the Romantics to the Imagists, modern Americans, and of course the range of contemporary poets writing now. More specifically, if I had to list the poets who had the most impact on the way I think about writing, I would look towards Hayden, Brand, Brathwaite, Lorde, Walcott, Boland, Heaney, Lowell, Sexton etc etc.
JRL: Make us all islands, your first book, published with Shearsman Books in 2017, made the short list of the Forward prize. It seems in so many poems a memorial-meditation on the African ancestors who arrived in the Virgin Islands, those lost at sea in the slave trade, slave ships and shipwrecks, middle passage trauma, burial grounds, and always the sea, its beaches and surf with its fishermen; inland, the farmers and cane cutters. Small island epiphanies really, traditional ways, domesticities. Island history and life closely observed, yet with a kind of nuanced distance. What brought you to this kind of focus, this probing into that history at its most personal and beached (as it were)? What encouraged the mandate you seem to set yourself in Griot: “Every story needs a teller to kindle it, /to keep it burning through light and dark, smouldering…”?
RG: My impulse was really borne out of a desire to amplify the quieter registers of the Caribbean experience exemplified by the fraught history and memories located here in the British Virgin Islands. Those stories occupy a fragile and precarious space, and my work in my estimation was to buttress them, to root them somehow by writing them down. I have a distinct fear of those sort of things getting washed away or buried by everything else that competes for our attentions these days. I guess that poem spoke both to the voice in the collection and to me personally, an admonishment to take up that mantle – that responsibility.
This is something I find at the heart of my writing practice, an aching obligation to write of, about, from, and into this space that is so often forgotten. It was largely ignored by the British during the plantocracy, and is largely ignored now. So this is a story of a people in a small place who have had to build themselves up without the infrastructure or the institutions they should have had. It is largely a story of resilience, at times one of joy, at times one of deep grief. But it is a story deserving of being told.
JRL: In 2017, you published Giant with Platypus Press. There you have extended your observations to the mythological, contemplations of the nature and purpose of poetry – “what else is poetry/except a drunken faltering through the darkness/ - domesticities even under the threat of storms, always near “the echoing surf and a nameless ocean”, the presence still of the colonial enterprise in the British Virgin Islands. I think Ishion Hutchinson put his finger on something when he wrote that your poems here were “at once elusive and grounded.” That quality is certainly there. By the time of Giant, are you searching further for forms and themes, interested in more experimentation? The epigraphs and their authors seem to point to a wide reading of (unexpected) sources. How have these – Rimbaud, Mary Oliver, Shelley, Robert Lowell – helped to shape your own poetic visioning? As a Caribbean poet?
RG: I spent the better part of five years working on my debut, and that book was utterly immersed in histories and the role of the sea in those histories. Even the last, more personal section of that book really focused on connecting me back through the sea to the histories explored in the earlier sections. Giant, on the other hand, was either a departure or a progression in both form and subject. The sea still lingers as a force, but the art of poetry itself is a character as evidenced by the wide range of epigraphs of dead poets and tributes to living ones.
At the time, I was devouring books and collections and reading very widely. The premise of the collection I should say is the elevation of the mundane and the ordinary to the platform of the grandiose. So while those poets all had something to say about giants or ‘bigness’ – the three sections follow epigraphs from Shakespeare, Shelley, and Rimbaud. Those men are not there blind or unchallenged, I wanted to place them there to juxtapose them against ideas and images that are often considered small or insignificant. The poem that follows the Shakespeare epigraph begins by imagining the passage of the Moko from West Africa to the archipelago. Elsewhere I elevate the various figures from history or my personal life, mythologies, the natural world, the often unspoken and uncounted histories of small places.
Shakespeare and Shelley were inescapable as a student of literature. Shakespeare especially is a looming figure who we, Caribbean writers, often are compelled to respond to – I’m thinking here especially of Brathwaite and the many ways he spars with The Tempest. As I think of it, its not just a Caribbean compulsion, as my friend Preti Taneja picks up the baton via Lear in her novel We That Are Young. So, as far as my own visioning or construction as a poet, aside from the inherited forms and outside of the Caribbean context, I owe more to the Olivers and Lowells than to the Elizabethans and the Romantics. I think of contemporary poets who have a similar commitment to forms like the sonnet and pantoum – Evie Shockley, Natasha Trethewey, Tyehimba Jess and others – while imbuing them with the language and landscapes of their own experiences and histories as having more substantive influence on my work.
JRL: Epiphaneia (Outspoken Press, 2019) beat out some strong competition, in all categories, to win the OCM Bocas overall award in 2020. You want to venture an opinion as to why this slim volume had such an effect? Was it speaking to the particular historical moment, filled with so much catastrophe, in which we all find ourselves? Even while it does not speak with flaming, revolutionary rhetoric?
RG: I honestly don’t know the answer to this question and I’m hesitant to guess. I can tell you that it was an immense honour on my part to have been listed with so many, not just talented, but objectively important writers to Caribbean letters.
For Epiphaneia, I was more concerned about capturing the images of the landscape and the stories of the people here after the storm. It was very important to me that whatever I wrote captured not just despair and horror but the little delights and wonders as well. As elemental an experience as surviving the storm was, the language could not be competing on a similar register, it had to be contemplative I think, in order to be an effective portrait.
JRL: By Epiphaneia, close readers of your work can say there is a Richard Georges’ voice and style. “Elusive and grounded” to reference Ishion Hutchinson again. Allusive also. I think the poems that respond directly to the effects of Hurricane Irma are among the strongest, in a deep, profound way, among the poems. “An inventory for survival” indeed. The poems seem a literary calligraphy, fine-line sketches, soft-tender without maudling sentimentality. The epiphanic, revelatory quality is the guiding thematic line in the midst of the after storm horror: “I’ve begun to learn that devastated does not mean dead/that ruin can be resplendent.” The shorter poems bear a certain aphoristic quality. And is there a pendulum swinging through faith and prayer to a fierce agnosticism? – from “What are poems but prayers?” to
“I know there are no such things as endings or beginnings.
No cycles to measure. No useful predictions. The prophets
are all mealy-mouthed and impotent. There is only this ball,
madly spiralling through space – and that is the most reassuring thing.”?
What kind of space, in terms of voice, theme, form do you think you are clearing for yourself, not only among your contemporaries at home and abroad (among whom there are so many talented and fine poets), but in the line of Caribbean literary tradition? Either consciously or sub-consciously?
RG: Another challenging question. I think I am going to be stepping away from poetry for a bit. The poems in these three books were very much written with the final collection in mind, so I am usually driven by an idea or a theme or an image that I then centre at least a year’s worth of writing around. Right now then, I can’t think of claiming a space per se, but I am happy with the way those three collections turned out.
I have been working, labouring even, in prose for the past year or so – I have been writing and publishing essays for a while, but the emphasis has been short fiction as I attempt to wrestle with a novel. From that perspective, I think of myself as joining the several contemporary Caribbean writers who do not restrict themselves to a single medium or form. I hope I can produce work that has merit and is of a level of craft worthy of inclusion in that tradition.
JRL: All your major publications have been with small, independent presses: Shearsman, Platypus, Outspoken. Your Moko online journal is one of the newer art and literary journals with a growing reputation for bringing new talented voices and artists, as well as the new work of older writers, to our attention. Small independent presses are growing in stature (these and houses like Peepal Tree, Papillote, Carcanet) even as they operate in a lean way, searching out and finding new, strong voices. And their writers are moving under the radar to garner significant and important prizes. Like the OCM Bocas award. As one of those voices of a new Caribbean and international literary community, rooted but not bound in some narrow, limiting nationalism to home-home, how do you see the value, importance and indeed necessity of these new small presses and publishing houses? And while many of these still, necessarily, are based in the metropolis, what is your hope for indigenous, Caribbean-based publishing presses?
RG: I think some of the most vibrant poetry is coming from small presses. If we look at some of the major awards given out for poetry in the UK, independent presses like Carcanet, Peepal Tree, and Penned in the Margins have been pretty competitive with Faber, Cape, and Penguin. There’s also a recent trend of the major publishers in the UK picking up big American poets for the UK editions of their books. The smaller labels seem to be more invested in actively searching out new voices and allowing a certain degree of experimentation that may not be palatable to bigger presses.
I think a similar approach is beginning to take root at home in the Caribbean. I think of a poet like Sonia Farmer and how she’s grown up a press and created an infrastructure for her work. Similarly, Papillote has been publishing some significant works and etching out a space for themselves as an outlet for burgeoning talent. House of Nehesi has been doing all of this as well for years. These regional presses create a different dynamic than the traditional publishing routes and open up new avenues to readers and fresh new opportunities for writers to consider. I think overall this can only be a positive thing. I do not think that the metropolitan houses will go away, but the multiplication of markets means that more work can find its way into print.
JRL: Richard, any final thoughts for us, writers, readers, reviewers, editors, publishers, booksellers, directors of traditional and social media? At home and abroad?
RG: I think that now is an exciting time to be a writer and a reader of Caribbean literature. There are probably more writers writing and many more books accessible to us thanks to the numerous ways we can acquire them. More importantly, I think I am more aware than ever before of writers throughout the diaspora as well as the generations of writers born of Caribbean immigrants writing out of that experience as well. This knowledge and access is no longer the dominion of academia as it were, as I can follow the exploits of folks like Canisia Lubrin and Kaie Kellough working in Canada just as easily as I can follow the careers of those writing out of Caribbean spaces like Celia Sorhaindo and Alicia Valasse-Polius. To me, that points at an exciting democratization of the word.
JRL: Thank you Richard Georges.