‘Dual identity gives a double lens on things’
Monique Roffey
Monique Roffey has fallen in love with Sri Lanka in just four days. “It’s very similar to Trinidad – only we don’t have tuk-tuks.”
Here to conduct two creative writing workshops and a reading hosted by the British Council and the Gratiaen Trust to mark the 75th anniversary celebrations of UK-Sri Lanka diplomatic ties and 30 years of the Gratiaen Prize, the novelist born in the Caribbean is actually heir to two cultures.
She is equally at home in the palm-fringed islands and London, having been educated in Britain with a cosmopolitan heritage of an English father and an Egypt-born mother with European and Levantine blood- rara avis types in Port of Spain, Trinidad- her father playing golf and bridge and the mother riding a green bicycle in shorts.
This dual identity says Monique is a ‘good thing’. “It gives me a double lens. I can see the metropolitan centre from a colonised base and from the metropolitan centre I can see an island state going through all its troubles and all its successes.” So she shares time between Port of Spain and London.
Apart from being a magical realist novelist with seven books under her belt (one is a memoir) Monique enjoys her job teaching creative writing at the Manchester Metropolitan University. She loves being on the staff at a ‘busy and star-studded writing school’. “Teaching emerging writers gives me much pleasure and is very rewarding.”
The workshops she conducted here at the Universities of Colombo and Peradeniya have been a success. “I’ve had a fabulous time here and the students were incredibly talented. I’ve thrown things at them and they caught the ball. I wish I could stay longer and work more with students”…
As a ‘white Creole’ Monique herself cannot pinpoint where she belongs. With two passports and two roosts “I cannot really label myself as either British or Trinidadian. I write in the English language and live in the UK. I find it hard to say that I am an entirely British writer, especially when I supported Trinidad in the 2006 World Cup and also support the West Indies cricket team.”
The Mermaid of Black Conch; Monique’s 2020 novel was to become the Costa Book of the Year, an accolade that completely ‘flabbergasted’ her. She had been resigned it would “live its life in the margins- (and have) a quiet life…” because it was “a Caribbean book” (while the Costa is for books published in Britain and Ireland bordering on Anglo-Saxon concerns).
Monique’s other books include Archipelago (Winner OCM BOCAS award for Caribbean Literature, 2013), White Woman on the Green Bicycle (an allusion to her mother), The Tryst, House of Ashes and Sun Dog.
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