Reading at St George’s University

Sounding off on Creole Grenada Days 12
Published:
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Lisa Allen-Agostin

Last Wednesday I wrapped the official activities of my writing residency with a gala reading at the St George’s University campus. It was the culmination of my service activities here. I felt especially proud when Grenadian writer Cindy McKenzie took the stage to read an excerpt from her manuscript Force Ripe. Cindy had been one of five participants in my intensive workshop for writers of intermediate to advanced prose fiction. The workshop ran weekly throughout March.

Cindy came to the workshop with her work at an already advanced stage. It is a novel about a girlchild coming of age during the Revolution, and includes some extraordinary details of life in Grenada during the 70s and 80s. I am hoping it will soon find a publisher and everyone will have a chance to read it themselves. One of Cindy’s concerns is that the whole manuscript is written in Grenadian Creole. While I (of course) don’t object to it, she’s encountered some resistance from other readers. It’s a question that has come up in nearly every workshop I’ve done here over my residency: how to navigate the use of Caribbean creoles in our writing. As someone who wrote a weekly column in Trinidad Creole for some years, I have to come down on the side of using the language.