Q & A with Mercy Cried No: An interview With The Author Carol Sammy

The novel attempts the treatment of a young teenaged underprivileged male of African descent within modern Trinidad where, despite the modern structures and life on the island, the colonial past remains trapped in pockets, a shadow hand that charts the course of the characters’ lives. The young African-Trinidadian male navigates mind and body to break through notions of that colonial past that is both abstract and real.

He simultaneously begins to grow aware of a wider Trinidadian society that lies outside his little enclave of poverty. This is a coming-of-age novel that brings us up to date with some of the social, economic and political concerns in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago.

Q Can you tell me a bit about your personal and educational background? How did you enter into writing? Carol Sammy: I developed a love for the English Language at an early age. My father read to us from Jane Eyre and other books. That played its part in fostering an appreciation for English as it was perpetuated in the then mother country of England. At the age of seven, the first book I read was Martin Rattler by R M Ballantyne (a children’s classic published in 1858).

The text was so complex that when I look back now, it’s a wonder that I understood and enjoyed the book so well, yet I did. Reading was…a form of escape for me and so, eventually, was writing. I started my first novel at 16 and finished it at 22 – it was good for practice, if nothing else.

I did ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels in Trinidad, then came up to England to do a Higher National Diploma in Printing and Publishing. I never went to university. My family couldn’t afford it. But, as life has been my greatest teachers, I didn’t think I missed much.

Q How does your relocation to England inform your work? How profound has that been for you? CS: I have lived in the UK for nearly 30 years overall and the time and distance have indeed allowed me to look at Trinidad as both a Trinidadian and (almost) a foreigner. Had I never left Trinidad, there is every chance I would have taken for granted those things that have become dear and precious to me.

Many people who have left their homeland to live elsewhere in the world can become pretty sentimental about it; others become critical, and some may develop a tense combination of the two.

As a writer I sometimes fall into this last category.

This business of living abroad is a unique position to be in for my writing, as it helps me to make practical comparisons about issues affecting society. It also forces me to be objective and nonjudgemental.

Q Can you speak a bit about the first book and then the movement into the second? How many years were there between them? CS: The book Dilemmas of Deokie was published first, but it was actually written second.

I returned to Trinidad for five years in 2004, and started writing Mercy Cried No within four months of my arrival, under the quite unoriginal name of Land of the Hummingbird.

I got started on Dilemmas of Deokie as soon as I had finished that manuscript and sent if off to the publisher. It took time, effort and sleepless nights pulling that story together, but it also gave me such a continuous buzz that I worked at it with real energy.

At the end of 2006, Heinemann gently rejected the first version of Land of the Hummingbird. I told the editor that I had another manuscript that they might be interested in. She was willing to look at it, so I sent Dilemmas of Deokie to her around March 2007.

After it had been with them for many months, they informed me that the manuscript had potential.

Editing that novel took me on another mental and emotional rollercoaster because even after all that hard work there was no guarantee that it would be accepted. In March 2009 the manuscript was officially accepted as the In the meantime I had completely revamped Land of the Hummingbird, gave it the name Mercy Cried No, and sent it off to about three or four publishers. It was eventually published by Hansib Publications in 2015, _ ve years after Dilemmas of Deokie.

Q You deal with a young man of African descent coming of age. Did you have a model for the character? CS: In my _ rst book the protagonist is a young Indo-Caribbean girl.

In true Trini style I didn’t see why my second shouldn’t feature a young African-Caribbean boy. I believe in mixing it up a little, and the beauty of being Trinidadian is that we have access to the machinations of the two major races of the island in a way some in other parts of the region don’t. Some of my funniest, cleverest and closest friends dating back to my school life are people of African descent, and Quintel is in part a combination of some of them, or at least some of their attributes. And, if truth be told, he has shades of a few of my Indian friends as well. He embodies a little of what I have seen in young men today. But mostly he comes out of my own head, a credible _ gure invented from years of experience, observation and interaction with others, a solid device in human form used vicariously to birth a story I was longing to tell.

Q I’m always curious about the writer as performer. Maybe you can speak about that? CS: I’m not sure how to answer the _ rst part of this question myself! Do writers perform? Maybe our writing is a performance in itself. Maybe I’m a kind of stage actor who’s too shy to open my mouth and speak, so I let my pen do the talking for me.

I can only say that getting into character involves the vividness of my imagination. A writer has the gift of harnessing their powers of imagination, rather in the way a body builder builds up the muscles he already has. We all have muscles, but we’re not all body builders. We all have an imagination, we don’t all use it to tell a tale that intrigues others.

I think I see my characters as individuals in their own right; although I create them, sometimes drawing them from a variety of people and qualities merging together, it’s not me acting them out.

I make them do what I want them to do, and often there’s a distance between me and them. The reader sees things through the eyes of the characters, especially that of the protagonist, and I usually keep out of the way or stay behind the proverbial screen. I’m not sure how good I am at analysing my own style, but that’s the way I feel when I write.

Q The book is very current and also highlights the white/black race issue that we don’t usually see in our day-today politics in Trinidad. What was your motivation? CS: Whether I like it or not, I’m a product of colonialism. There’s no turning back the clock and doing it differently. And so I write about those issues that affected my development as a person, and indeed the development of many generations of West Indians. The white race, in the form of the British both past and present, the Americans and now other white nations in this global village we’ve become, have had an astounding impact on the overall fate of the Caribbean peoples. It is perhaps not classed as a direct issue nowadays in Trinidad; interaction with the tiny minority of whites on the island is negligible.

Any racism between whites and non-whites currently within Trinidad itself is not the theme that I handle in the book. It’s more so the far reaching effects of slavery and indentureship that are handed down from generation to generation, that muted awareness of our history and where we came from, the power that was exercised over us so that we ourselves were powerless – those unsavoury dregs are still there as evidenced by the huge stir caused by the MacFarlane Cazabon mas.

The pain and shame of being so massively ill used may be lying dormant, but it will erupt when shaken by a psychological earthquake.

I do believe young Trinbagonians today, unlike preceding generations, are so caught up in their own modern little world that they can’t be bothered with what happened in the past, and it’s perhaps just as well. It may still come with age and exposure. But I’m convinced there are the odd few young ones who currently give it thought, and this is where Quintel’s character pays homage to them for their ability to look their history squarely in the face, and where his journey to a deeper level of understanding can bring some comfort and, if it were even possible, a little closure.

There is so much more that can be said on this topic. It’s a very complex one…however, a basic and noteworthy point could be that although we are still connected to our past we don’t have to be governed by it, bearing in mind that that is easier said than done.

Mercy Cried No, is available at Nigel R Khan and Mohammed’s Book Stores.