A Running Tide: Talking with Oonya Kempadoo
Interview by Serah Acham | Via Repeating Islands
When you read Oonya Kempadoo’s description of the “snuffling and bubbling” Tobago sea, swelling his chest, stretching his arms to the mountains and scratching his white fingernails along the rocks, in Tide Running, you can feel the water lapping at your feet as it creeps on to the shore. You can smell the fresh sea water. You can hear your nanny, your bredda, cousin, tanty and neighbour in the language of the narrative. She’s talking about home, a home that she knows inside and out, from the upsides and the downsides.
Kempadoo is a true Caribbean daughter, “pan-Caribbean,” she says, and she has an extraordinary talent for describing those places in which her heart lies. She was born in the UK to Guyanese parents, grew up in Guyana and has lived in various Caribbean islands throughout her life, including Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia and Grenada.
While Guyana is her homeland, Kempadoo considers Trinidad and Tobago her second home, having lived here for nine years in which she began her career and took her first writer’s steps. Today, she lives in Grenada and has regularly visited our islands, sometimes for as long as a year here and there. She was happy to return when The UWI’s Department of Literary, Communications and Cultural Studies invited her to join its Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) programme, as the 2018 Writer-in-Residence.
Read Kempadoo’s interview via Repeating Islands.
