RAY FUNK
Barbara Jenkins is an inspiration to all who may think we are past our prime. After a rewarding career as a teacher, she started writing in her late '60s. At '70, Sic Transit Wagon, her collected short stories, appeared, to extensive praise, followed by her novel De Rightest Place.
Now, as she turns 80, her memoir, The Stranger Who Was Myself, has arrived.
It’s a careful reflection on a life of struggle, character and worth. She describes this memoir as an effort to “reconcile with the past.” She had written bits drawn from her childhood in her fiction, but now, thinking over her long life, she wanted to “get things off my chest.”
Focus to write came from the pandemic, when “everything came to a halt, and I had a lot of time with no distractions.”
Structure came from Derek Walcott, a beloved writer.
“I needed a trigger, a starting point,” she told Andre Bagoo during a recent Bocas Lit Fest online session.
For her, it was Walcott’s poem Love after Love, where the process is to examine, but also to confront:
…you will greet yourself
arriving at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome.
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you…
The titles of the sections of the memoir are all taken from the poem.
The result is not a gentrified vision of an idyllic childhood, but a remembrance of struggles overcome and often replaced with new challenges. It is a direct, raw, complex narrative, in which she confronts difficult moments, sometimes with regrets courageously identified, often based on her family’s social status.
It includes a vivid account of her mother, who sacrificed everything to support her four children, and of “Pappy,” her violent, often absent father, with his other women and her strange meetings with them. Her formative secondary-school struggles to get ahead in the rigid, hierarchical structure of a convent-school system are carefully drawn in this future teacher’s youth. Her sense of being an outsider, alien to privilege is lightened by the discovery of friends as she advances in school.
[caption id="attachment_979554" align="alignnone" width="676"] The cover of Barbara Jenkins' memoir, The stranger who was myself. -[/caption]
The stunning main photo on the book’s cover is of her looking wistfully aside, not long before she left Trinidad to accept a government scholarship. She left Belmont with no one to accompany her, few ideas how to proceed, or even how to get to Wales, where she would attend college and later teach. Almost by accident, she entered Aberystwyth University in Wales, chosen because it lay at the top of an alphabetical list of options.
Some of her most telling and vivid remembrances are about small revelations, which come alive in her prose: she has an eye for detail and illustration. Her description of breakfast at the women’s dorm in college brings you to the table. Chatting with her friend
