Sweetheart (Trésor in French) has been awarded the
2017 Prix Carbet des Lycéens. It’s a literary
competition, judged by French-Caribbean high school students, to highlight the
best writing by authors from the entire Caribbean region.
“I was
moved and honored that the book was chosen by students, although I’d previously
considered it a work for the over-16s,” says Alecia. “It touches on heavy themes including death
and incest which require a certain maturity.
It’s about a Jamaican artist who dies in unclear circumstances, and the
reader learns about her life from people who knew her, and who talk about her.”
Through
the different narratives, readers learn, among other things, about the life of
the artist’s Jewish grandfather. Jamaican-Jewish? “Yes, there’s a sizable community of people
whose ancestors were Jewish in Jamaica. My primary school was near one of the
oldest synagogues in the region.”
On the importance of the setting, Alecia says: “This is an essential element
of storytelling. If I didn’t tell the
truth about the setting, I would feel I were betraying readers, my country. How can you write about a place if you don’t
know the setting? It has to be
authentic. I try to put that across when teaching my students short-story
writing at WICE”
Although
she has spent chunks of time in several other countries, she seizes every
opportunity to return to the place that rules over her imagination. “Jamaica is a part of me,” she says. “It’s as
James Baldwin put it: you have to take your homeland with you, or you end up
homeless.”
For Sweetheart,
she draws both on her knowledge of this setting with her experience in painting
when writing about the life and death of an artist. “One thing people might not realize is how
physically tiring painting can be!”
Alecia
knows this from her sideline as a painter who has exhibited in Kingston, Singapore,
New York, and here in Paris. Another
activity is live readings of her work at various venues, in France and
elsewhere, where she partners with a jazz singer or guitarist for accompaniment.
One such performance on
June 7 forms part of France’s annual Semaine
de l’Amérique latine et des Caraϊbes.
Alecia
is a regular teacher of short-story writing at WICE, a vital center for English
creative writing in Paris, particularly celebrated in our Paris Writers
Workshop.
“Our
six-week short story course with Alecia was too short,’ said student, Monique
Amaudrey. “She has a soft-spoken
approach albeit one can sense her strong will to push us in the right direction. My best memory of the course was when she
struck a match and lit a candle to inspire a story. It led me down memory lane
…”
In
her teaching, Alecia draws on a lifetime of experience. She started out publishing poems in local newspapers
while in high school in Kingston. Her
first short story collection, Satellite
City, won the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. Other works include Stories from Yard, Doctor’s Orders, and When the Rain Stopped in Natland.
Alecia holds an MSc from Columbia University in New York, and taught
Communications and Creative Writing at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in
Belgium for 12 years. She continues to
write articles on cultural issues, the environment and other subjects.
Alecia believes her rather itinerant life has strengthened her writing
and her outlook. But she says that the strongest influence remains her
homeland.
Post by Elizabeth Bouché
Be sure to look out for upcoming WICE writing
and literature courses in our 2017-2018 program.
Telephone
01 45 66 75 50
01 45 66 75 50