DIARY ENTRY 11

from E. O'C.
to maketodayhistory@gmail.com,
date Tue, May 6, 2008 at 7:00 PM
subject Today
mailed-by uwichill.edu.bb

hide details 7:00 PM (56 minutes ago)


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7. 20 a.m. and the welcome sound of rain – we need it, as the countryside around St Thomas is dry, dry, dry and the wind blows the trash from cane fires into every crevice. Didn’t last long, but enough to lull me back to sleep – I was up late last night reading Phillip French’s authorized biography of V.S. Nighfall (addicitive stuff, though so much that’s distasteful). An academic colleague from the US phoned – he’s visiting family in Barbados and we plan to meet up on Friday, with a possibility of him applying for a post in my Department. We talk about the US primaries and the horrendous prospect of the drawn out squabble between the Democrat candidates leading to reelection of the Rebublicans; funny how domestic policy (in the US) is so important to him, whereas international policy is crucial for us here in the Caribbean, hey, the world!



Hazy, hot sky and interminable roadworks on the drive to the University – I detour at least once to get out of long lines going nowhere. Newspaper has more bad news about the rising price of food and not much else. Campus is relatively quiet as exams are in progress and I get on with the tedious business of marking scripts and entering marks online, which is a cumbersome business for non-techno dinosaurs like myself. Hey, it’s easier for this course as student name and index number are entered on the same form so I don’t need to keep crosschecking various lists.



Have as session with a postgraduate student who’s working on Caribbean women writers and how their exile/residence abroad impacts on their fictions. Difficult terrain really, because so many have argued that the whole concept of a Caribbean diaspora means that ‘abroad’ is now an extension of the region. That said, the stylistic and linguistic registers, and the concerns voiced by those in Toronto and those based in Trindidad do tend to reflect differences. Then the usual distractions of email – a publishing project, submissions to the Journal of West Indian Literature, stupid jokes people keep sending (and one or two that aren’t so stupid), people wanting you to record your unrelentingly banal activities of the day for an art project……it eats up hours, this email, and I am not alone in obsessively checking my inbox. Of course, it’s also a useful distraction from my main job of the day, which is to work on a paper for a conference on Caribbean women’s writing that is approaching fast. I am supposed to be presenting on the notion of ethical teaching – how, if at all, the teaching of literature (specifically that of Caribbean women writers) at tertiary level, has any impact on the increasing problems we face in our societies from xenophobia, homophobia, violence, domestic violence and so on. I am arguing a kind of airy-fairy position that changing ways of thinking via exposure to alternative textual visions of what our societies can become, is a positive first step; but I doubt it will wash among either materialist or theoretically focused academics. Oh well.



Finished up sending out interview questions to a number of writers on exile/rootedness and searching for contacts for those not on my mailing list. Now I pay a few bills and about 7.20 head home. Lovely and cool and breezy at nights in St Thomas. Left over pelau and the US primaries on TV and more Naipaul biography till about 2.00 a.m.. Could be worse!