Literature from where I stand,
or rather sit; no, make that
stand . . .

Probably most of us — writers here at the IWP* — have won some literary award we’re rather pleased about; were you to ask about it, we would tell you the story of our accomplishment with that strange mix of pride and dismissal, like the woman complimented on her newly bought outfit. “Oh,” she says, “this old thing?” Today, however, I want to tell you about a prize I am actually not so proud of — a triumphant win whose triumph eroded quickly, because I wished the cameras hadn’t flashed, and that my picture hadn’t appeared in the papers the next day. It is an accomplishment that does not appear in any bio note or on any of my constructed CVs. And yet, because of what it did, it was probably the noblest literary prize I’ve ever won — it paid for heat in a week when it was cold, and it provided food in a week when I was hungry.

About three years ago I had recently arrived in Manchester, England. I arrived the way most students arrive — poor, and in my case without a scholarship or grant, and as yet without the money from the sale of my car in Jamaica. Listen now to the mechanics of a miracle: in that first penniless fortnight, I saw posters put up around the city advertising its upcoming poetry festival. A £100 prize was going to be given one Wednesday night to a lucky poet who went on stage and captured the judges’ hearts. I called immediately to book a spot, but was disappointed to find out that several people already had their greedy eyes on my £100; all the official spots were gone. I could only give them my name. They would put it in a box from which they would randomly pick and call names on the night of the competition. So only if I was lucky . . .

There was yet another complication. The event started at seven. My class on Wednesdays also started at seven. I would have to rush, arrive late, and see if I was still lucky. At best, it seemed, I would get to see the Manchester poetry scene. At 8.30, I took a bus into the city centre, consulted a map, and found my way finally to the club. Things were already wrapping up. Three of the four finalists had already been chosen. The box was empty but for one name, and as I walked in they were pulling out this last name and trying desperately to pronounce it with each vowel sound: Kay? Key? Kei?

Kei Miller. My own name. My own name had waited for me. It had dodged every finger dipping into that box. It had sat at the bottom, clung to the cardboard, and waited until the body whose presence it spoke for had arrived. I went on stage and won the competition. Cameras flashed; the next morning it was all about: Kei Miller, freshly arrived from Jamaica, was the 2004 Manchester Slam Poetry Champion.

A slam poetry champion! O Christ. If an avalanche could only have buried me then. When my professor, one of Britain’s most respected critics, congratulated me with, “Well done, Kei, I read that you won some slam thing or the other,” I knew it wasn’t a real compliment — it was a realist painter saying bravo to a child’s crayon drawings. It was a concert organist smiling benevolently at some idiot who has learned to pick out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano. I wanted to explain: Please, sir. You misunderstand. I’m not a slam poet. I don’t do slam. I swear. I only did it for the money. I’m a real poet.

I am ashamed to have won that prize, and truth be told, I am also ashamed that I am ashamed.

The debate I’m trying to re-invoke here — literature from where I stand, or sit, or stand, or sit — is a new one that is quickly becoming old: a debate over the craft of poetry as it exists in rowdy performance halls versus the craft as it still exists in solitude; a fight between the poet who does his best work standing up, who finds his greatest eloquence on stage, and the poet who does his best work sitting down, who finds his greatest eloquence on the page.

A description of the successful “page” or “sit-down” poet is, perhaps: someone who has published poems in a few major journals, who has a couple of books published by a well-respected press, who knows how to hob-nob with the best of them, and is invited to give readings by the National Poetry Society of America. In all likelihood he is, like most sit-down poets, a bitch, and probably, as a day job, holds a faculty position at some stuffy five-hundred-year-old university. In other words: me.

The “stage” or “stand-up” poet, on the other hand, has probably won a couple of slams and is invited to give performances on BET. He is youngish — not yet thirty — and has funky hair. He would ideally like hip-hop and reggae, and fit into that strange demographic America has invented to describe all things non-middle-class and non-white: in other words, he would be “urban.” He is completely social — gregarious even. If he went to university at all, he didn’t finish; he dropped out at the same time the university asked him to leave, and decided then he would become a poet, ranting against the system and all kinds of oppression. In other words: me.

That these two descriptions should inhabit one body is perhaps the source of my schizophrenia, because typically I’ve learned only to embrace the first. So consider this: although I almost never need to look at a book or a printed page to recite any of my poems, I have begun to take blank sheets of paper up with me to podiums, to shuffle through and glance down occasionally at their emptiness, all to give the illusion that I am reading — to remind the audience that I am not performing, or slamming, and that literature is coming only inconveniently, at that moment, from where I stand. Really, at my essence (I’m trying to declare), I am a sit-down poet.

Knowing then my diagnosis, will you forgive my strange (albeit completely internal) reaction when a student right here in Iowa came up to me and said, “Oh my god! You’re awesome! And what I love about you is that you perform your work. It makes it so interesting!” Oh no no no no, I wanted to say. You didn’t! You didn’t just call me interesting! Hell, no! You just caught me on a bad day. You caught me on an off-morning. But see — I’m a real poet, and honey, when I’m ready, I will bore the socks right off of you. I can be your ten-hour lecture. I can be a drone. I can be that voice at the open mike who insists that every poem is different from the other, but, oh, the relentless monotone that has you slipping off to sleep every few seconds makes his sonnets sound the same as his villanelles as his haikus — makes his iambic metre sound the self-same as his anapestic skipping. Oh, child — I’m no performer. I am a poet. Get it right! And don’t you ever call me interesting again!

Isn’t it silly? Isn’t it absolutely silly the clubs we try to be a part of, and the clubs we try to be apart from? This odd way we relish the privilege of sitting at the most boring tables, negotiating carefully between the cake fork, the salad fork, and the dinner fork, pretending that the real fun isn’t happening behind us in the kitchen? Isn’t it silly this insistence that we belong to certain prestigious groups — that we be “sit-down” poets, Oxford poets, Iowa poets, published-in-the-New Yorker poets, published-by-Knopf or -Faber poets? Isn’t it silly, the way I flatly refused that performance on BET? Stupid, the way, only last week, I politely declined reading a poem on a slam stage in front of five hundred people, but relished in performing the next night to a more distinguished audience of thirty? And in refusing to be put into one box, do I not cling desperately to the inside of another? Isn’t it sad, this refusal to belong to a world that has always accepted me, that has always wanted me, and that, truth be told, I didn’t always hate? And yet now when they walk towards me with open arms, instead of just standing up and accepting the embrace, I sit down and fold my arms.

And so what, if after reading your most technically ambitious poem, they come up and tell you, Wow, you were awesome. And you feel momentarily thrilled by this compliment, until a fifteen-year-old screams a histrionic rant or a sentimental poem that rhymes love with above and then dove, and they all stand and applaud and say to her, with even more enthusiasm than they did to you, Oh my god! You rock! You’re brilliant! So what. In that place, on that night, literature is about how we stand up and give an account of who we are, and where we are in our own voices. And at another time, in another place, isn’t it enough that you know that literature is about sitting — is about more than the abundant overflow of emotions, but also its recollection in moments of tranquility?
The two things can coexist. Just as they are coexisting right now, in a strange way. Because hasn’t every road suddenly led us to that wonderful duality? If you decide that this humble offering is at all literature, then it is happening from where I stand, and from where you sit. For there you are, sitting, reading the text right along with me — and here I am, standing, giving it voice. Literature. From where you sit, from where I stand — it is happening. Or rather — it was.

Kei Miller

Being me

I describe myself as Caribbean-born. Occasionally, readers express confusion about this point. A number of people have emailed me or stopped me to ask, “What does ‘Caribbean-born’ mean?” Others are curious about why I constantly point out things about diversity in science fiction. What they may not know is what others around me know: I consider myself multiracial, even if I look “white.”

I jokingly have been called “an undercover brother.” Vin Diesel calls people like me “shadow people,” neither one race nor the other, due to circumstances and self-identity. (He also considers himself one — yet another reason for my close attention to his career.) Things came to a head recently, with a few emails challenging me to prove that I was actually multiracial and not just a “poser” who wanted the “advantages” of being hip. For some people, any attempt to identify yourself in ways they can’t control is troublesome.

One reason I’m private about my past is that I had a complicated family life, and my biological parents are radically split for reasons that are none of anyone’s business — except those I choose to share that story with. Growing up was not all fun and smiles on the beach, as people assume. But I was born in Grenada, which is one of the two Caribbean islands that shape what I think of as home. Grenada, with its spice and colourful flowers and forests and people: that is my first home. No matter how split my parents are, my paternal cousins and aunts and uncles are all Grenadian, and that is the blood that runs through my veins. I can’t deny or wish to change that — it’s simply who I am. And I’m proud to have been born there and lived there for the first nine years of my life.

People who want to know something for sure can take a look at one of the rare photographs I have of the Caribbean side of the family. My grandmother, two cousins, my mother, and me, standing on the tallest hill of Carriacou. The rest of them are all brown, and my mother and I stand out.

Yes, I’m one white-looking dude. Genetics is wild. Some seven different genes code for skin colour, and when parents get together it’s a crapshoot. In this case, my sister got a tan-looking skin tone and I got fairly white. But that doesn’t change the fact that my father is who he is. It doesn’t change the fact that I grew up playing cricket on the beach at L’Anse Aux Epines, that most of my friends until I came to Ohio were usually not white, and that I often spoke in patois when I needed it, or a British accent if I chose. It doesn’t change the fact that at school my obvious skin colour meant I was the one who was not normal. Yet, I never had any trouble maintaining I was mixed-race until I moved to the United States. My childhood was Caribbean in its nature, essence, and impact on me. Most people from the Caribbean understand where I come from. Most grant me this without my having to fight for it. All I had to do was merely state it.

So, as for my identity: I’m Caribbean, with an English mother and a Grenadian father. By blood, by birth, and by spending fifteen and half years of my life in Grenada and the US Virgin Islands, I can’t imagine calling myself anything else but.

Some have asked me — both white and black here in the US — why not “pass”? The idea of “passing” is an interesting concept that tells me more about the person who asks. Their astonishment at my not choosing to do that is often an interesting hang-up. But it’s not my hang-up.

This all has an impact on my first two Caribbean science fiction novels (and my third, Sly Mongoose, on the way). My fiction plays with a wide variety of people and genre tropes. I don’t write exclusively “Caribbean SF,” but I am a Caribbean-born science fiction/fantasy writer. And some of my stories are rich with the Caribbean.

Since sixth grade, I was drawing spaceships taking off from island harbours, rather than space-station gantries. I even used some early island settings, but a lot of my early SF aped the SF I was reading: galactic empires, etc. But somewhere in 1998, when I was in college, I decided to really focus on becoming a writer. And part of that involved deciding what I was going to write about.

I began to add pieces of Caribbean background to roughly a third of my stories. A character, a place, and certainly inspiration from island history and anecdotes. But I was nervous about it, aware of the fact that by Caribbean readers I might be thought of as stealing the exotic for my fiction, and by other readers as some sort of fraud.

Later that year, however, I sat down to write my story “The Fish Merchant”, bringing together the things I wanted to write into a short piece: one “Steppin’ Razor” badass character (Pepper), a non-Caribbean but non-Western locale (China), adventure-genre action, and a twist on a traditional SF trope (first contact with aliens).

When I finished my first piece that drew this all together, it was a heady rush: this was the sort of thing I wished I’d been able to read when I was growing up. But I kept on writing more “vanilla” SF. I didn’t want to risk screwing up another Caribbean-inspired piece of writing, and I had a growing feeling that I’d lost the Caribbean. A white-looking Caribbean multiracial expat, who grew up on a boat, both identifying with, but in many ways living on the edge of, Caribbean society — who was I to write this stuff? I had a huge impostor-syndrome issue. And I was still worried that even though I adored “The Fish Merchant”, others would not find it so interesting.

That changed when I attended the Clarion Writing Workshop. Not only did many other students enjoy the story, but I met two instructors who really encouraged me to follow my instincts. And “The Fish Merchant” became my first professionally published story.
When it came time to write my first novel, Crystal Rain, I considered all the concepts and ideas I had, and the most compelling ones drew from the same sources. I felt that Caribbean people had a place in the future, and that if humanity were to populate the stars, Caribbean people would migrate into that great diaspora, and they would have stories as well. Even so, the Caribbean’s proximity to the cultural West means that a great many of my influences are still very much recognisable to anyone.

I read genre fiction because action, high concepts, and a sense of wonder are amazing elements that separate it from anything else I encounter. I like to think, secretly and to myself, that literature is the soul of humanity, its dreams. Feverish, bizarre, reflections of its processing what has happened to us so far, and figuring out how to store that, remember it, and experience it. But the genre I work in is something different: it’s the imagination of humanity, its daydreams, its nightmares, its pleasant fantasies, its hopes, and its inventions. And I want people like me and my brethren to look into that imagination of humanity and see people like themselves looking back. My writing may not be perfect, but I am excited that it is something I’ve managed to gain a readership for.
Hi, my name is Tobias Buckell, and I am Caribbean. And I’m an SF/F writer. I’m proud of both the genre I write in, and my identity.

Tobias S. Buckell