Opal Palmer Adisa

Opal Palmer Adisa had been deadset on majoring in Mathematics when she was accepted to Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1975.

But then she saw poet Sonia Sanchez in an electrifying performance and felt the call of the written word.

“I decided I wanted to be a poet after seeing Sonia Sanchez read,” she admits. Then, having decided to make her foray into writing, Adisa began reading widely. She was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance writers, including Langston Hughes and Jamaica’s own Claude McKay. However, the defining moment for her decision came when she read Jean Toomer’s Cane, the reasons for which she documented in a widely anthologised essay entitled, “Laying in the tall grass eating Cane.”

“I read that book and was blown away,” she remarks.

Adisa, who holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies and Literature, was born in Kingston, attended Wolmer’s High School for Girls, which she left in third form in 1970. She completed high school in New York and in 1975 was accepted to Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she pursued a BA in Communications.

Writing, however, may have been in the cards for her before she realised. She recalls her quiet pride at her first published piece, a poem she wrote when she was 13 for the school magazine at Wolmer’s. It was entitled “The Sounds I love to hear” and according to her, “featured the sea extensively, which remains a deep love and place to go, meditate and be healed.”

Now Adisa is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, educator and storyteller who lives and works in California. She is the author of a newly released collection of poetry called Caribbean Passion. Her previous works include Tamarind and Mango Women (1992), winner of the American Book Award and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and her highly acclaimed debut novel It Begins With Tears (1997). She is currently professor of Graduate Fiction at California College of the Arts and has also been a visiting professor of literature at the University of California at Berkeley, a Cave Canem Fellow, Cranbrook, Michigan, and has completed many Writer-in-Residence programmes in various institutions across the US. In 2002, she was nominated to become Poet Laureate for the State of California. She is also the recipient of numerous grants and honours including Distinguished Writer by the Middle Atlantic Writers Association, and was in 1996/97 nominated International Woman of the Year by the International Biography Centre in England.

Although she lives abroad, she still has a very strong connection to her Jamaican roots.

“I am Jamaica, and Jamaica is me,” she explains of her ability to put on paper the beauty of the place of her birth even while living abroad. “Yes, there is this very specific geographic space,” she states. “But mostly it is the memory of the place that we carry. I speak Jamaican, I cook Jamaican food, the walls of my home are adorned with work by Jamaican artists. I am this place; there is no divide. I am the Blue Mountains, the defiance, the rhythm, the salt-fish and dumpling of it. Jamaica lives always inside of me; it is never distant or not where I am. Besides, I come yearly and get renewed.”

Indeed, Adisa’s work, which Alice Walker, author of The Colour Purple, has described as ‘solid, visceral important stories written with integrity and love’, is grounded in Caribbean landscapes, culture, tradition and heritage, evident even in the titles of some of her works – like “Duppy Get Her” (1987), a short story for which she received the prestigious Pushcart Prize, Bake-face and Other Guava Stories (1986) and Pina, The Many-Eyed Fruit (1985).

From her most recent work, Caribbean Dream (2003), a collection of poems, the poem “Tide Turn”, for example, is another stark reference to Adisa’s steadfast and loyal ties to her roots, as seen in the selected lines:

.the warm breath of/ the Caribbean sea/ laps my feet.

you will not hear me howl/ like hurricane winds/ strangling palm fronds/and ripping trees/ from their rooting.

Adisa, the single mother of three, in addition to writing about the beauty of her home space, is also aware of the overriding concerns that face Caribbean peoples, which she explores in her fiction and poetry. Themes that recur in her work include the vexing problem of absentee men. Women are portrayed as being the integral parts of the village with the men being gone-whether to work outside, or out at play. In this respect, her work can stand squarely with such works of her contemporaries like Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall and Maya Angelou, who are also concerned with themes of matriarchal predominance within patriarchal society.

“Women in almost all societies are the backbone, and Jamaica is no less so,” she observes. “From I was a child, I was impressed by the market women, and hagglers, and other independent women, who were feminist before the word got currency. I witnessed their strength.I love men and want to help bridge the divide and mistrust that seems to govern many. relationships… What I know (is) that those men who are abusive, who are unfaithful, are aided and abetted by women. I also know when women decide they have had enough, all of that will end because men won’t have any recourse.”

Adisa is admittedly an ardent reader-she lists Toni Morrison’s Love, Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite, Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe, and Pramoedya Ananta’s This Earth of Mankind as being four of the five books she is currently reading. The fifth, The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, she has been reading “rather slowly” since the beginning of the year. Her favourite authors include Maryse Conde, Louise Edrich, Pablo Neruda and Barbadian writer Austin Clarke, who, incidentally, will also be appearing at Calabash. (Maryse Conde was also scheduled to read but due to a recent accident has unfortunately been sidelined.)

And like fellow writers Morrison, Marshall and Angelou, Adisa is adept at writing in different forms. “I switch easily from one to the next, dancing from poetry to prose to essays,” she says. “Each genre allows me to flex and touch and come to know something else.”

Adisa’s forthcoming novel is titled The Orishas Command the Dance and will be out later this year, along with a children’s picture book, Catching Butterflies.

She is looking forward to be in the island this weekend for Calabash, at which she will be a featured writer on Sunday, May 30, between 3:00 and 5:00 pm, reading from Caribbean Passion, during the programme ‘Back A Yard’.

“There is a part of me, a large part of me, that is very sad that I left (Jamaica).I envy those (writers) who stayed, and I want to encourage others to stay, to make something happen, like this wonderful festival,” she declares.