Jamaican Author: Velma Pollard

Kenya: On the Homestretch With Velma Pollard

The East African Standard (Nairobi)

INTERVIEW
January 20, 2007
Posted to the web January 19, 2007

Mike Owuor
Nairobi

Dr Velma Earle Pollard is an award-winning Jamaican writer, poet and academic. Her novel, Homestretch, is currently one of the optional literature set books for secondary school students in Kenya. Although she has retired as a lecturer from the university of West Indies, Jamaica, the 69-year-old has no plans of retiring as a writer.

What do you know about Kenya?

That it is the home of Ngugi wa Thiong'o who is a great literary voice and friend of Kamau Brathwaite, one of the most famous Caribbean writers. I also know that the landscape is very beautiful and the Maasai people are from there.

How do you suppose the Caribbean writer, Brathwaite, acquired the name "Kamau" which is clearly a Kenyan name?

It has to do with his friendship with Ngugi. Ngugi himself tells the story of the naming in World Literature Today, Autumn 1994, and in Brathwaite's collection, Barabajan Poems, he treats it as well.

What defines your home country, Jamaica?

In the tourist sense one might say Sun, Sand and Sea; others might say Reggae Music or "Jerk" Pork and "Jerk" Chicken but we who live here can think of many other features. "Jerk" is a popular method of preparing meat with certain specific spices and originally using a particular kiln-like wood fire. By the way, allow me this opportunity to correct two errors in the otherwise very well written Notes to Homestretch by Zipporah Mutea, which is a Longman publication meant to be used alongside the text. First, Jamaica has comparatively high temperatures all through the year and is never cold though the temperature might go down to 70 Fahrenheit (20 degrees centigrade) in mountainous parts during certain months.

Here are famous lines from "Nature" by the late H.D. Carberry: "We have neither Summer nor Winter/Neither Autumn nor Spring/WE have instead the days/When the gold sun shines on the lush green cane fields "

Secondly, Jamaica has two languages: Standard Jamaican English, which is the official language, and Jamaican Creole, known locally as Patwa, which is the vernacular and language of the man in the street.

Your seminal monograph, Dread Talk: The Language of the Rastafari, has been described as a "penetrating work of the socio-linguistics of Rasta culture". How influential are the Rastafari in Jamaican society?

Nobody can contradict me when I say that Rastafari has been the most influential movement in Jamaica in the 20th Century with regard to culture, music, language, food, fashion... you name it.

What are you reading at the moment?

Everything about the relationship between Scotland and Jamaica, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. I was invited to be one of four academics on a project originating in Italy, looking at the literary representation of the Scots in the Caribbean. I am looking at the Jamaican part in both Literature and History. The Scots accounted for about one third of the British people who came to Jamaica after 1655 when the English captured the island from the Spanish.

Do you have any favourite African writers?

This is a difficult question. I have read most of those whose work is available in English but I have to admit that Wole Soyinka captured my imagination long ago and has remained my favourite.

What would you consider a significant similarity between African and Caribbean writers?

I think when we write in English we share certain ways of using the language creatively. Some of the turns of phrase are not identical but similar in ways that allow us to understand each other immediately.

Let's talk about Homestretch. What prompted the writing of the novel?

I was tired of reading about all the bad things that happen in Jamaica. I was at a conference and had been listening to readings from novels in which everything was ugly and dirty and everybody was poor and hungry and I knew that although that represented somebody's reality it was not the only Jamaica. I decided to write about the Jamaica I have known.

Why the title "Homestretch", or rather, who is on a homestretch?

Homestretch is the last mile of any journey home. The title thinks of all the "returns" in the novel.

What sort of primary audience is Homestretch aimed at?

I wrote for Jamaicans who needed to know some of the better things about their country. I had to find a fictive framework in which to place it. Of course my pet peeve, migration, immediately came to mind.