Get a cup of your favourite tea, cock yuh ten and enjoy our interview with the very masterful, Curdella Forbes.
Have you ever met an author that was truly and genuinely as smart and brilliant as their work? Fortunately for us (because our book choices are goddess-tier), the writers that we’ve gotten to know since the start of 2020 have inspired us and left us gagging at how intimately their intellectual pursuits and their creative work connect. Our April book’s writer, Curdella Forbes, is no exception to this rule.
For this episode of Like A Real Book Club, we sat down with Curdella on her verandah with three cups of tea, beautiful rolling hills before us and some nice, cool breeze washing over us. At least that’s the imagery we had in our heads while we sat in our respective homes. As an academic, it came as no surprise that Curdella’s understanding of the colonial project in the Caribbean is multilayered and complex. In our conversation about this deeply intricate novel, she talks to us about why she chose to use a man with “no skin” as a point of contention for both white people and black people, who were subjects of the empire, to confront their ideas of race, worth and success. Throughout this interview, you’ll hear Curdella talk about the importance of writing in Jamaican, the seamless melding of the naturalist and spiritual world in the Jamaican psyche, writing the varied realities of Jamaican women and “our responsibility in the face of human vulnerability”. AND JUST SO MUCH MORE.