Sugar and its Legacies: A Conversation with Author Curdella Forbes

In the award-winning book, A Tall History of Sugar, Jamaican novelist Curdella Forbes conjures worlds both real and in a dimension of their own.  At the center of it all remains the novelist’s protagonist, Moshe Fisher, a man who like his biblical namesake is a foundling – in this case, in a place of sugar on the north coast somewhere of a Jamaica of the imagination but still connected to history.  Moshe is “born without skin”, meaning without discernible ethnic identity, and also at a critical historic moment in the island’s independence from colonial rule.  His journey also ends at other historic watersheds – the era of Brexit, and a nascent nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic.  His lifelong companion is Arrienne Christie, who remains his ultimate protector and also the novel’s narrator.  Against the backdrop of a wider fractured world and its historic baggage, the novel follows the duo’s remarkable bond from childhood to adulthood, from the spirit filled rural Jamaica to urban Kingston to the distant landscapes of England.  And over a lifetime magically still shared, the inward Moshe becomes a renowned artist, the assertive Arrienne a prominent activist.  Along the way, the connect between these two remains something beyond “a love story” but certainly story of love itself.

I caught up with Forbes while she was in Florida on a promotional appearance for her latest novel.  I was intrigued by her creative process in producing this spectacular tale of time and place and spaces beyond either.  As it turns out, in her daily professional life as a professor at Howard University in Washington, DC, Forbes found the process to be a journey that gained its own momentum from some deeper inner well of her own.

POTENT: How did you achieve spontaneity along with reflection, and make space for your creation within a regimented time?

Curdella Forbes (CF): I thought I couldn’t do it, because there was no way I could share head space creatively with head space academically.  But I did it, and what I found after a while at the  end of my 20 minutes and my one paragraph or one or two page pieces, I found that it gave me an enormous sense of freedom – I didn’t have a deadline to meet, I didn’t think I would to finish it anytime soon, or had to.  So that freed me up to just let the book speak to me.  And so it spoke to me.  The book and the characters encourage you,  and sometimes some surprises come out and you follow them.  For instance, I didn’t know what Arrienne would look like, she just told me what she would look like – but then after a while of course what happens is that you realize you have to craft some things more craftily.

POTENT: How did you evoke characters who are beyond the real and yet are very real?:

CF: The part of the book that exercised me the most – and I’m thinking this now but might change my mind by tomorrow – is how to represent Moshe and Arianne’s differentness in a society which already was familiar with differentness and took it for granted.  How do you represent somebody as strange in a society where – you know how it is, we’re all mad and represent ourselves as mad people – as somebody who is on the outer circle of this quote unqote madness?  Even the people who are mad are sort of pushing him away.  At the same time, he’s sort of the logical conclusion of that madness, if you can have a conclusion.  So that was what exercised me the most, Because you’re looking at a society which should, if you think about “different”, not be prejudiced against different, and certainly not in the rural areas.  Yet they are – because he’s not like anything they’ve ever seen.  And this representation of “not like anything they’d ever seen” had to be important because he really is the physical form, the embodiment of a question that has been in my head for years -you know, what if there was somebody born whose race you couldn’t tell?  What then?  People ask, is he an albino, is he a dundus?  No, he’s not an albino or a dundus – so for me that was the challenge, in how to describe him.”

POTENT: How did you uncover the rural, urban and cultural trajectories of your characters through the novel?

CF: I was familiar in a general way, and also in an intimate way having grown up in rural Jamaica and within Kingston for so long, so I can’t say there was anything that surprised me, but there were things that delighted me – where I said “okay, this works!” And on that score, if I can digress a little bit to come back to your question: it’s very important to me that this book is historically accurate.  I call it A Tall Tale but I really wanted to write a fairy tale that was so real that everybody would think it was true.  So the historical aspect of it is very important.  I did a lot of research on England, and I had been in England a lot, but the longest time I lived there was a year in the south.  But Bristol, and that network of bridges, I thought that really works – and just finding out about that place Moshe goes to, but he’s afraid of going underground because of what was told to him about his mother.  And the souvenir he finds – all these things I hadn’t known. In fact, yes I knew that Bristol was one of those ports, but those things like the picture he takes in the shop, the way the city is laid out, the fact of how the black people live in St. Pauls, and just the  way the entire city square is laid out with that memory of that history was kind of delightful.  When I say “delightful”, I mean in a macabre way because it was: okay, this really works.”

POTENT: What have been some of the most unusual or gratifiying reactions you’ve received from readers of this novel? 

CF: That is a very interesting question and I must say that most of the reviews kind of blew me out of the water because you never really expect it.  You send the book out there like that note in a bottle, and you don’t know how it’s going to be received,  You don’t  know if anyone will like it, but I didn’t expect that so many people would fall in love with it.  But for me, the most heart-warming and wonderful experience with the book happened when I read from it for the first time at the University of the West Indies (Kingston) when they had a literary week, and as the writer-in-residence I was expected to read.  Kwame Dawes, whom I love very much and have known for many years, and whose work I’ve always admired and is a friend as well, came up to me afterwards and said: “This is gold, this is gold”.  And he was actually instrumental in getting it placed.  So, his view of the book has meant more to me than any of the others just because I know his work, his art, his vision and he’s just a fabulous writer, and for him to say that was something wonderful.  I enjoyed reading the reviews – you always do – and I try not to get carried away by the publicity, but Kwame’s blurb on the back of the book is, for me, very important.”

A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes
Akashic Books.