In participating in the High Schools Tour for the Kingston
Book Festival, we were asked to tell the students about our careers. My writing
career began with the Dr. Bird Readings Series for the Ministry of Education.
There were three of us writers; one of
the first tasks we had was to visit the government primary schools to get to
know our target audience, what their interests were, and so on. It did come as
a surprise to us that these children thought that all writers were either
foreigners or dead. So we were their first exposure to Jamaican writers. I shared this
story with the students on the Kingston Book Festival tour.
I hope that by now all our Jamaican children know that there are Jamaican
writers.
When we were writing
for the Dr. Bird Reading Series we had access to a wonderful library. There was
no Internet in the 1980s. In this library there was a magnificent, thick two-volume
book about outstanding Black people in
the world. I was mesmerized, astounded, but most of all, validated. The information in these books formed the
basis of some of the biographical stories in our series. I thought then, and it still applies: Do our
children know these stories? Do they know that Black people have been
scientists and inventors, as well as athletes, dancers and entertainers,
wonderful as the latter are; even as we celebrate those people, even as those
persons are more likely to catch world attention? Children need to know that we
can do all sorts of things, that they are capable of doing great things,
because there were those who came before us and did them. It’s not just
foreigners who can be scientists and inventors, or anything at all.
We know about our National Heroes! But do
we know of the many other Jamaicans who can be role models? Role models whose example can guide us as we move forward into the next fifty years of our country’s life? We
need positive role models to balance the
only too visible anti-heroes, in danger of becoming heroes for young people who
know of no others. At this time of great challenge in the world and in our own
island, children need to hear about our
achievers, so that they can take hope and realize that Jamaicans have been
trailblazers against all odds, that we have played our part in history. To name
only a few, do they know about Dr. T. P Lecky? Do they know about Dr. A.
Lockhart and Dr. M. West? Do they know about Una Marson? (My grandmother acted in one of her
plays at the Ward Theatre). Do they know, for example, that Jamaicans helped to
build the great Panama Canal?
So do you want to tell the story of our people, or even of
someone in your family who achieved great things? Imagine a child reading a
story written by a living descendant of
a great Jamaican! What an exciting story.
However, bear in mind that the word ‘biography’ is not synonymous with dull.
Biographies, stories of our people, should be interesting, worthy of the
reader’s attention. So this advice given by Latoya West Blackwood of Pelican
Publishers at the Kingston Book Festival
should come in handy.
She identified these points in relation to writing
biographies.
1.
You need to decide from whose point of view the
story is being told.
2.
Is your
report balanced? ( I think that is something you’d really have to be aware of
if the person is known to you.)
3.
If the readers don’t know you or the person
being written about, would they be interested? (I think this especially applies
if the person is in your family – for example, if I decided to write the story
of my grandmother’s life.)
4.
What is outstanding, different, unique about the
person?
5.
There should be a ‘wow factor’!
So perhaps Latoya is
the person to see? Oh by the way, you do know that even when you think you know
everything there is to know about the person you are writing about, you do need
to do research to check your facts, and to see if there is anything else to
discover.
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