Virtual Walk Talk Listen with Merle Collins (episode 72)

Merle Collins is an author and professor.  Between 1995 and 2021, she was a Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland.  She is now Professor Emerita.  She was born in 1950 in Aruba to Grenadian parents and taken to Grenada shortly after her birth. Her primary and high school education was in Grenada.  Later, she graduated from the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, with a General Arts degree in English, Spanish and History.  In 1980 she was awarded a Masters degree, Latin American Studies, from Georgetown University, USA.  In 1995, she was awarded a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

 

Her first collection of poetry Because the Dawn Breaks was published by Karia Press in 1985. In London she was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime and African music. In 1987, she published her first novel Angel, which follows the lives of both Angel and the Grenadian people as they struggle for independence. This was followed by a collection of short stories, Rain Darling in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, Rotten Pomerack in 1992. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995. Her critical works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World, and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in Slavery and Abolition. She has published several essays on politics and society in Grenada. In the podcast she talks about a new book/project (about Louise Langdon Norton Little- mother of Malcolm X), expected to be completed later in 2022.

 

The social media handles from her publisher Peepal Tree Press: Facebook and Twitter.

 

Merle refers to several songs in this podcast and one of them is the song Book of Rules by the Heptones. According to Merle, the lyrics must owe their existence to a poem by RL Sharpe and there are some things about RL Sharpe that remind her of the approach to the 100-mile walk.  RL Sharpe was a poet from the American South (Georgia, I believe) who died around 1951 and you can find his poem "Bag of Tools" here.

 

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