a time to heal

8 Jan 2017 news 0 Comments

final cover ghostIt’s Sunday and I’m doing five things at once, which is how things have gone since the new year began. Folks say the way you spend the first day of the year sets the tone for the 364 days to follow, and so far that’s been true for me. I’m preparing Ghosts for publication and got the first printed proofs late last week. They looked good but not good enough to publish, so that meant another hectic round of last-minute revisions…patience isn’t my strong point but at some point you have to surrender and accept that certain things are beyond your control. And some things just aren’t worth stressing over! As my Irish-Canadian grandfather would pronounce after fixing a broken piece of furniture himself, “Good enough!” Maybe the chair wobbles a bit and maybe you can see the duct tape holding it together, but if you can sit comfortably without the chair collapsing beneath you, then it’s fixed. This book has made me think about family quite a bit—and diaspora. Maya Gonzalez often reminds us that children’s literature is really a project of healing, and I’m feeling that quite keenly these days. In the acknowledgments section of Ghosts I talk about my research process and the two trips I took to London in 2015-16. But I also note that in a way, I started writing this book when I was a child in Canada, uncritically consuming British fantasy fiction and unconsciously filling my head with problematic images and ideas that persist to this day. In some ways, Ghosts is for adults more than it’s for children. It’s for everyone who grew up in the Commonwealth grappling with the Screen Shot 2017-01-07 at 11.39.46 AMlegacy of British imperialism. It’s for those of us who learned early on how to lead a double life—how to codeswitch, how to hide the passions for which we were often shamed and/or shunned. A reader on Twitter posted this photo tweet a couple of nights ago, and it reminded me of how hybridity is central to my work—not because I’m a mulatta but because of where I am and how I operate within the African diaspora. I’ve gotten a really positive response to Ghosts from folks in the UK, and more than one Black Brit has said: “We need you.” And I know exactly what they mean—they don’t need me personally, but they need books like mine to feed the imagination of their kids. Because too many of us on both sides of the Atlantic know what it’s like to hunger for mirrors and have to do without. There’s a lot of important writing in the latest issue of Anansesem, an online magazine of Caribbean kid lit founded by Summer Edward. In the introduction she writes:

Publication is a gift and it’s one the writers and illustrators whose work appear in this issue have earned, rather than been given.

They share their gifts with us and as we share them back with you, we hope something comes to life in you the reader. Their words, their art, their stories can, and will, plant something in your imagination, in your consciousness, that will bear fruit later. This is the ancient cycle of sowing and reaping that fuels humanity. If we don’t keep this cycle alive in our communities, in our writing communities in particular, we will lose the gifts our children need to live and live well.

authorsToday I’m applying for a residency in Sweden but yesterday I finished reading Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn, which gives a sobering glimpse into the sex tourism industry in Jamaica. It’s also a story of intergenerational trauma that confirmed for me, once again, why there is so much silence on my father’s side of the family. Whenever I see those t-shirts that proclaim, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dream!” I wonder if that’s really true in my case. I’m pretty sure my grandparents would be proud of me, but my father would likely be ambivalent about my books and my determination to fill the many voids he left behind with my own imaginings. Some of my Caribbean relatives see me as a failure or disappointment because I have no man and no kids (pretty sure my mother feels that way, too). And then there are the ancestors on my mother’s side who felt the penalty for being Black in Canada was simply too severe and so tried to pass into Whiteness. I’m sure they’d be horrified to see me with a shovel in one hand and a pen in the other, communing with ghosts throughout the diaspora…

But this is how we heal. One of my goals for 2017 is to be more emotionally honest with myself. When it comes to my writing for kids, I want to talk more about how writing stories like The Ghosts in the Castle helps me to heal. Writing is empowering and exciting and satisfying, but it also connects me to others who are hurting. And helping them to heal—or even just to acknowledge their pain—is what matters most. Because this is how we heal.