Rewriting the Caribbean Female Body: A Conversation with Opal Palmer Adisa (original) (raw)

Opal Palmer Adisa is a familiar figure on the Caribbean-American literary scene with fourteen volumes of poetry and prose to her credit. She has been awarded the Caribbean-American Heritage Legacy Award (2008), the Pushcart Prize, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for Tamarind and Mango Women (1992) and the Distinguished Bay Area Woman Writer Award, amongst others. Her first novel, It Begins with Tears (1997) is included in Rick Ayers and Amy Crawford’s Great Books for High School Kids: A Teacher’s Guide to Books that Can Change Teens’ Lives (2004). Adisa was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1954 into a middle-class family where she grew up with a wide sense of family, and an awareness of the broader historical and spiritual significance of daily life, both of which inform much of her writing. At age sixteen Adisa migrated to New York where she finished her last year of high school and graduated from college. Then she moved to California, where she completed her PhD at the University of Berkeley. A distinguished professor of creative writing and literature at the California College of the Arts, Adisa is a literary critic and she has published widely about parenting, writing and poetry. Dominant themes in Adisa’s texts are family life and the search for the sacred in everyday Afro-Caribbean history; she is interested in exploring questions on sexual agency and women’s self determination. In Painting Away Regrets (2011), for instance, she uses maternity as a love force to recreate the spiritual legacy of the African diaspora and challenge received ideas on family structure. As a migrant Caribbean woman writer, mother of three and an accomplished storyteller, Adisa employs her writing to mindfully recreate a Caribbean cultural imaginary that challenges the established geographical borders and gender limitations. In a conversation we had in the summer of 2011 in Granada, Spain, Adisa, with a restless, yet still unyielding voice, unseated gender and race constrictions to reflect on the constraints that Caribbean writers encounter to reach a local readership. Adisa considers oral and bodily popular cultures, African-rooted spirituality and motherhood as the most capable institutions at promoting, in the Caribbean, self-critical and self- 204 ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 38.1 (June 2016): 203-220 • issn 0210-6124 ELISA SERNA MARTÍNEZ respecting educational and parenting systems, which may place the experiential body at the center. The topics and poems discussed can be found in her collections Until Judgement Comes (2007), I Name Me Name (2008), Caribbean Passion (2004), Traveling Women ([1989] 2004) and Eros Muse (2006) mainly.