This week on the NYR Daily: Gabrielle Bellot on writing, the Caribbean, James {NAME}

On the NYR Daily this week This week’s featured writer is Gabrielle Bellot, for her review “[James {NAME}’s Harlem Through a Child’s Eyes](,” about {NAME}’s 1976 children’s book, recently rediscovered and republished last year. She calls it “a curious, hybrid-genre composition without precedent in his body of work,” and describes {NAME}’s collaboration with illustrator Yoran Cazac—who had never seen Harlem firsthand—as wild and distorted, creating a dreamlike sense of place as a backdrop for their “celebration,” in {NAME}’s words, “of the self-esteem of black children.” Previously for the NYR Daily, Bellot has written on Elizabeth Bishop and being alone, followed by an essay on being a transgender woman of color. She also writes for a range of publications, including LitHub where she’s a staff writer, on a wide array of topics including literature, history, science, film, and more. When, I wondered, had she first known that she wanted to be a writer? “I’ve been writing since I was a kid,” she told me. “I would sit for hours and just let the words out. It became more serious in my early teens, when I discovered Derek Walcott, perhaps the first writer who seemed, to my astonishment, to be describing a world I recognized. Even as some of his allusions and lines passed over my head, I couldn’t stop reading the edition of his Collected Poems that Walcott himself had, in my mum’s telling, given to her in St. Lucia decades earlier. I wrote poems about the Dominican landscape around me, from the verdant mountains and the brightly colored dinghies of the fishermen to the witchlike cackle the mabouyas, a large kind of gecko, made at night. For the first time, I felt allowed to write about my surroundings; I had, like some other writers who grew up in former colonies, imbibed the naïve, self-loathing idea that no one would want to read about somewhere like where I’d grown up. I knew then, for sure, that I wanted to write.” I was struck, in her [essay on Elizabeth Bishop](, by her distinction between aloneness and loneliness, and reminded of Rilke’s advice in Letters to A Young Poet: “love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.” I wondered what Bellot thought makes someone attune to “the art of being alone,” as she writes, versus afraid of or resistant to it? (Bishop herself, Bellot demonstrates, seems to have wavered between the two.) “I was an only child, so I had a fair bit of alone time by definition,” Bellot said. “Beyond that, we lived on the edge of a mountain, not far from a small village but somewhat separate from it all the same, so I was even more isolated still. I learnt the language of those quiet hours when no one was with me, when all I had was the sound of the mountain wind or the drone of great rains, and I came to cherish it.… I think that how we grow up, along with our natural inclinations, shapes our relationship with solitude. Some people fear it, hate it; I often relish it, if not require it.” In her [essay](, written after the leaked memo stating that the Trump administration wanted to create a legal definition of sex as “biological” and “immutable,” Bellot quotes {NAME} to describe her own feeling of betrayal: “It comes as a great surprise, around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.” I wondered what she made of {NAME}’s recent cultural resurgence. “On the one hand, it follows a general trend of reevaluating and recovering the voices of marginalized writers, even the ones, like {NAME}, who were big in their day,” Bellot said. “On the other hand, {NAME}’s volcanic condemnations of American racism are particularly tangible and relevant.” “To be sure, he was not perfect. I’ve written before about a stunningly disturbing section in Giovanni’s Room in which characters who may be trans women are described in language that echoes that of Marlow in the worst passages of Heart of Darkness, where the Other is reduced to a subhuman—if human at all—form, reduced to something ugly, risible, detestable, noxious, and while this is a narrator, not {NAME} speaking directly, it is difficult to know where the one ends and the other begins,” Bellot said. “And, as Audre Lorde pointed out, {NAME} was a man, and, for all his gorgeous sweeping empathy, he was not always fully aware of the privileges that may come with being perceived as male. But with all that said, {NAME} is the voice of our age, even more, perhaps, than his own.” I asked what it meant for Bellot to call herself a Caribbean writer. “If only I knew!” she told me. “But seriously, national and cultural identities can be difficult, particularly when you’ve lived in multiple countries, multiple worlds. You sometimes begin to feel that you don’t so much inhabit a single country as a kind of loose ‘world-ness,’ that is, a kind of hazy cosmopolitanism. In ‘Bye-Bye Babar,’ a 2005 essay, the Ghanaian-Nigerian-British writer Taiye Selasi famously defined herself, alongside a number of other African writers, as ‘Afropolitan’ rather than something more rigid, the term suggesting both her African-ness and her cosmopolitanism. I’ve come to feel similarly, even as I have much to travel before I would seriously own a variant of Selasi’s term like ‘Caripolitan,’ which I’ve used to self-describe partially in jest. Like Selasi, I’ve lived in multiple places and traveled to many more, but no one place has a total grip on me… Identity is murky—and I’m okay with that.” Bellot is currently working on her first novel—and I went ahead and asked her the worst question of all: What’s it about? “I always dread this one. Essentially, it takes place shortly after World War II in St. Francis, a fictional British Caribbean island with an uncanny resemblance to my own. One of its main characters is a teenage trans girl, Imogen, who has no language to explain what being ‘trans’ means, especially as she lives as the primary caretaker of her larger-than-life but ailing grandmother… Along the way, Imogen meets another girl, who, to her surprise, seems to understand her—but who also has a darker history behind her. Imogen must make a decision about who she is and what she wants—and who and what she is willing to leave behind in the process, all while the world around her seems more chaotic than she can imagine. It’s a love story, at its core, and a story of what it means to have, lose, and rebuild a home—but it’s also a story about race and racism, colorism, colonialism, and much more.” Consider my copy pre-ordered. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments to Matt Seaton and me at daily@nybooks.com; we do write back. Lucy McKeon Associate Editor, NYR Daily You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](