NEGRIL, Westmoreland – Paury Flowers read in measured, self-assured tones, the centre of attention in a circle of some 30 women. “My grandmother always say every shut eye ain’t sleep and every goodbye ain’t gone,” she read from musings she had only just created, a smile on her face.

The literary workshop participants had been asked to write down what the first line of their biographies would be.

“Say that again,” a woman in the circle interjects.

Flowers obliges, this time reading a little louder and a lot more clearly, projecting her voice above the crash of the waves against the rocks below the veranda of Jackies on the Reef, a spa and holistic retreat located at West End’s furthest point.

“Wise grandmother,” declared Rasheda Malcolm, as the other women in the literary circle shook their heads in agreement or smiled in affirmation of their own hard-earned wisdom.

Those women in the circle had travelled hundreds of miles from the United Kingdom and the United States to Jamaica, but for some of them their journey, figuratively, had been much further.

Linked by a passion for writing and to be the voice of many voiceless black women, they had come to Negril and to Jackies to share their musings.

The group of 30 or more women arrived in Jamaica on June 23 for the 1st annual WILDE Summer Poetry Alliance (WiSPA) held at Jackies on the Reef, West End, Negril from July 6-15.

WILDE, which stands for Women in Literature Development and Enterprise, was created by Rasheda Malcolm and others in the UK in 1999, to promote and celebrate women writing in the UK, Jamaica and the US.

Malcolm, who migrated from Jamaica to the UK when she was 7 years old, was motivated to create a support structure for women writers, after rejection of her own work.

She found she could not convince a publisher that the character in her book – a decent, black professional, dedicated family man – was believable.

“They told me flatly that was not the image of a black man,” said Malcolm as she retold the story to the Sunday Observer last Thursday.

“I thought to myself that is strange because these were the black men I knew.”

She said however that she understood the thinking, because in the UK that really was not the image of the black man.

“The media don’t promote them; people don’t know about them,” she said.

As the mother of four sons, Malcolm vowed that she would change things. She would portray black people in a positive light, especially black males, and so she persevered and soon was published in 2004, a short story called Justice, included in an anthology published by Penguin entitled Skin Deep.

The experience led Malcolm to seek out other women writers who, through enterprising means, would be able to publish their own work.

“I found that the publishers really didn’t take black women writers seriously,” she said.

“I thought if we were going to do this right, we would have to do for ourselves.”

Malcolm hooked up with Jendayi Headlam and Marcia Gordon, who both have Jamaican roots, to form WILDE.

Headlam, who migrated to England in the 1980s and holds a MBA in business and finance, is the group’s project director; and Gordon, born in the UK to Jamaican parents and a poet with a background in human resource management, is marketing director.

Eventually the women were able to raise funding to set up JustWrite in west London as the charity arm of WILDE, as a writing centre where women go to learn the basics about the craft through writing workshops.

“What we have is a colony of black women writers who come to this centre to teach and to learn,” said Malcolm.

Malcolm teamed up with Lucy Henning, a primary school teacher, who now teaches part time at the centre, and said was also able to persuade Flowers, who holds an MA in writing and is a published author, to join the group as US coordinator.

JustWrite has since published an anthology of poems and short stories done by women connected to the centre, called Her Story…My Story and is working on putting out a second.

Malcolm, Paury and others in the group also want to set up a JustWrite centre in Jamaica, an idea that began to germinate in 2003 when Flowers did a documentary with Malcolm and Jamaican poet Ama Donna.

The centre is to be established in Negril, targetting rural women.

“It will be for them, for their learning and expression,” Flowers told the Sunday Observer.

Malcolm has projected a five-year plan for the centre, but already the group has established means of assisting women writers in Jamaica though the WiSPA literary prize open to Jamaican women writers in the categories of poetry and prose.

editorial@jamaicaobserver.com