Arts for the 21st Century

Hazel Simmons-McDonald

Hazel Simmons-McDonald

Hazel Simmons-McDonald is the former Pro-Vice Chancellor and Principal of The University of the West Indies Open Campus. She retired in 2014 and is a UWI Professor Emerita. Her research interests and publications include articles and book chapters on second language acquisition, vernacular literacy, language education policy, language and culture, open and distance learning and co-edited books on Creole influenced vernaculars in education. She has collaborated on writing French Creole instructional texts for use by native speakers of Antillean French Creole at Primary level. She has also published English language texts for use at secondary and tertiary levels. She writes creatively as a hobby and has published poems in journals and selected anthologies. Her short fiction has been published in BIM and Poui and she won second prize for her collection of fiction in the 2019 Frank Collymore Literary Awards.

Imogene

Moise sat on the rock, his fishing line trailing beneath the surface of the water. The sea was calm this morning but he had caught nothing, although he had been sitting out since four thirty. This was his favourite time to fish because the beach was usually empty.

Tapestry

Felice sat hunched over her embroidery hoop, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose.  She looked up occasionally over the rim to check a paper pattern that was spread on the table in front of her.  A stretch of aida cloth with colourful images hung from one side of the hoop.  Every once in a while she set the hoop on the table, spread the cloth out, her head tilted to one side as she surveyed the work.   Then she picked up the hoop again and continued to work.  Her hands moved quickly as she thrust the needle through one hole of a square of the aida cloth, pulled it up through the top part of the hoop and thrust it down diagonally through another hole to make a series of crosses and shape the stitches into the pattern she was creating.  It was the image of a young woman, smiling, in graduation robes, the mortar board askew on her head and her arm raised, holding a scroll.  Her feet and shoes were hidden by a flowering shrub which Felice was now working on quickly.  She wanted to complete that section of the cloth before her granddaughter arrived later.   It was her way of showing her that she was proud of her. When she began working the cloth she had intended it to be a runner for her dining table but she realised from the scenes and characters she had included it was inappropriate for that purpose.  It was more like a tapestry, depicting scenes from her environment and events from her life.  She had included them on a whim based on whatever her memory had tossed up as she worked.  Now that she looked at them she realised that they were in some sort of chronological order with events from her childhood first.  She looked up over the rim of her glasses as Adele, her caregiver, entered the room.  She shook her head and gave Felice a disapproving look.
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