COTCH: Lorraine O’Grady in Conversation with Catherine Lord in Both/And
eds. Aruna D’Souza. Brooklyn, New York: Brooklyn Museum (2021), 108-121.
Catherine Lord: When did we meet?
Lorraine O’Grady: In 1995. I had a fellowship at the Bunting and had gone to a poetry reading by one of the fellows. Afterwards, you and I fell in together as we walked back to the subway.
CL: How did we get on to Jean Rhys?
LOG: Well, I must have asked where you were from.
CL: And I said Dominica. [Laughter]
LOG: So of course, I had to mention Jean Rhys. I was shocked because you were the first person I had ever met from Dominica, white or black. And you were shocked that I’d been reading Rhys.
CL: It’s not common. I always have to explain who she is, unless I’m talking to somebody who does Caribbean studies or who knows women novelists.
LOG: But the most interesting thing wasn’t that we both knew the work or liked the work—it was the intensity of our relationship to the work.
CL: That’s what I want to talk about.
LOG: Over the years, I’ve become more curious about your intensity. I can’t say I knew of Jean Rhys’ existence before 1992. I only stumbled on her because I’d been reading the black British cultural theorists, where her name comes up a lot. But now I realize that I don’t know how you found her, or in fact much at all about your life in Dominica. Your parents were both American?
CL: My father was American and my mother is Barbadian. Her father, who was born in Montserrat, had worked his way up from bank boy to manager at the Royal Bank of Canada. He was posted to Dominica after World War II. My father, who was probably the only guy who didn’t take advantage of the GI bill and go to college in the U.S., decided that he would move instead to an extremely poor, remote island with a miniscule white population. When I was born there were 142 white people and about 50,000 blacks. Anyway, my father decided that he would make a business cutting down tropical hardwood and selling it, which was a feckless idea in an island without a road system or an airport or a harbor. He saw my mother at a party and announced he would marry her because she was Dominican, even though she was Barbadian, and that is a very different thing. People say now that the marriage was doomed from the start. ( … )