Colonialism, slavery and fatherhood were among the issues at the fore of the latest evening held as part of UEA Live, the successor to the UEA Literary Festival.

This double-header event featured discussion and poetry readings from two writers and academics of Caribbean descent, Professor Shara McCallum and Dr Anthony Joseph.

In discussion with Professor Alison Donnell, head of the UEA’s School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, they gave fascinating insights into both their latest poetry collections and their own lives.

McCallum’s collection, No Ruined Stone, focuses on the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns and imagines what might have happened if he had moved out to the Caribbean to work on a slave plantation, as he had planned to do.

“The personal and the historical in this book are continuously intersecting for me; they cannot be uncoupled,” McCallum said.

Creating No Ruined Stone was not the work of a moment. Keen to produce something that was historically accurate, McCallum spent three years on research and was keen for her poetry “to do the work of a novel”.

In the book, Burns lives the last decade of his life on a plantation, continuing to write poetry and songs, which he sends back to Scotland. He has a child with his slave girlfriend, Nancy.
“I’m also playing on the idea of whether his and Nancy’s relationship is truly consensual,” McCallum said. “One of the questions you have in this book is what does love look like in this unequal power relationship.”

Burns asks the plantation owner, Patrick Douglas, if he can free Nancy and their child. Far from being able to, he is told that he cannot buy even himself off the plantation.

“By the time Burns is dying, he’s 37, he’s broken,” said McCallum. “He feels he’s a failure.”

The child of Burns and Nancy is raped as an adolescent by the plantation owner and gives birth to a daughter, Isabella, described by McCallum as a black women who appears to be white.

McCallum, who was born in Jamaica to a Venezuelan mother and an African Jamaican father, said that Isabella was an avatar of herself.

Isabella’s mother died in childbirth, so she is brought up by her grandmother, and when the pair travel to Scotland, they pretend that the grandmother is actually a slave or servant.

“I have a lot of questions about the relationships that are coming out of slavery and colonialism,” said McCallum.

McCallum said the issues around race that Isabella would have faced in the 18th century were different to those that she herself, being born well into the second half of the 20th century, has grappled with.

“There are these profound political and historical realities that are different,” she said.

Joseph’s latest book, Sonnets for Albert, is named in honour of his late father. Joseph was just one-and-a-half years old when his parents split, and Albert was not a presence in his life. Indeed Albert had “about 12 children” and “wasn’t a father to any of them”.

Albert may not have been a physical presence in his children’s lives, but he was never far from the thoughts of Joseph, who was born in Port of Spain on the island of Trinidad, but who has lived in the UK for several decades.

“The sonnet and the book are an attempt to capture what little fragment I have of him and pin him down,” Joseph said.

“I’d written about my father for years before he died. He was a muse. He was charismatic, sharply dressed, could charm anybody.

“Because he wasn’t around, I admired him even more. When he died, the way I wrote about him changed. I don’t know if I will continue to pursue his memory in poetry.”

The new book centres on the day when Albert was buried, a day that Joseph moves in and out of in the course of the book.

Joseph described the book as “an attempt to bring [his parents] back together for one final time” through his favourite form of poetry, the sonnet.

“It wrestles with the form of the sonnet and makes it more the expression of a Caribbean person,” Joseph said.

“The way we use the English language in the Caribbean is often an act of subversion. We go into the English language and mess with it. That’s what I did with the sonnet. I manipulated it and abused it.”

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