A tale of being told...

Derek Walcott’s passing, in the weeks leading up to the Bocas Lit Fest, had reminded me of a story I had written, where I described how I had been befriended by Mother Earth and the Earth People who lived in the Madamas forests during the 1970s. Mother Earth had given me instructions on how to survive the apocalypse which she prophesied was coming.

I was to take my family and go to join the Earth People, survive there, and help to “start civilization anew”.

Her message stayed with me through the following years, years during which terrorism and wars were increasing everywhere (we had our own terror in 1990), and the strength and power of the male of our species was waning into mental impotence.

I would look out for leadership, anywhere in the world and I could find none.

As the western world lunged headlong into “advancement”, we were discarding ages-old tenets of civilisation—family, loyalty, empathy and societal structure — but developing nothing of value in return.

As world leaders lurched ever closer to conflagration, time and time again, then withdrawing temporarily, nations like stickfighters circling, feinting and dodging in a dance of danger, we could do nothing but watch. We in this land watched without understanding, and continued to do what we do best: Lime and fete.

It was in this period and setting that the story of the consequences of going too far began to form in my mind. And I remembered the words of Mother Earth, and started to think that when the rockets began to fly, the peoples who might survive would be the peoples who could live in deep forests with “nothing”—nothing to own, nothing to lose. A story began to form, and I began to write.

I wrote in longhand on notepaper on a clipboard, and filed every few completed pages in a big folder. But I also went back into the forests, to Petit Tacarib, where much of the tale was written.

Somehow, I could not write at home, or in town.

When the story was written, I had it typed by a friend, who was paid a modest fee by another friend. I now had a manuscript! I began sending it off to publishers who were listed in books — online was just in infancy, and I was not there — still think I’m not! I sent off synopses and the like, and was either ignored, or given a curt no.

Everyone with whom I shared the work claimed they enjoyed and liked it, but people who print would not read it! Then, in 2005 a notice appeared in the media announcing that Derek Walcott’s Theatre Workshop was sponsoring literary prizes for Derek’s 80th birthday! There was a list of categories of works—short stories, plays, poems, children’s stories, but nothing for full length novels.

But so what? This is Trinidad! Try a thing! Friends helped in printing all the copies and making the CDs for submission.

Then we waited to see or hear what might happen? The organisers then added the category— full length novels, to cater for the several novels submitted! Everybody “try a thing!” The Writing Our World Awards ceremony was held the week before Christmas that year.

When they came to novels, my work was called for a special commendation, and I felt honoured to receive that certificate from Derek, the Nobel man himself! In a review of that initiative and evening, Kenneth Ramchand described my novel thus: “One of the strongest in this area was Peter O’Connor’s Renaissance: The Dream. This is a detailed, knowledgeable, and exciting evocation of the natural world and the art of living in the bush, and it is, at the same time an allegorical novel about reinventing our society away from extreme gender imbalance ......” I felt very proud, and hopeful that this might have been the beginnings of publication. I had the work edited (by another kind person for a peppercorn fee), which it did need, and began submitting again, with the same lack of responses. With the creation and development of the Bocas Lit Fest in 2010, the indefatigable Marina Salandy-Brown encouraged me tremendously, but only one of her contacts actually read the manuscript but said it was not their genre.

So it lies as a work waiting to be published, hopef u l ly before the world is destroyed!